The two main signposts of early Mexican film’s vocation for song are Santa and Allá en el rancho grande. Santa (directed by Antonio Moreno, 1931) is a clear-cut melodrama featuring the famous title song written by Agustín Lara, one of the most popular figures in Mexican culture. Allá en el rancho grande (Fernando de Fuentes, 1936) is considered the pioneer and archetype of the genre called comedia ranchera. Again, the film’s success and subsequent mythic status revolve around the title song, in this case sung by the first great idol of ranchero music, Tito Guízar. The rest, as the saying goes, is musical history.

In many subsequent comedia ranchera films, songs were basically either serenades to woo a señorita or piquant satires to lambaste the rival in turn. The songs became so emblematic that most of the complementary orchestral scores were relegated to a secondary role.

In the next couple of decades, a number of Mexican singers staked their claim to fame mainly through film, and a number of romantic troubadours (whether urban or ranch-bound) sprang from the screen as authentic, long-lasting idols, first and foremost among them Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete.

But Mexican sound film needed more than successful songs for its soundtracks; it needed symphonic scores that could impart an aura of high-culture respectability, without losing sight of popular roots. It’s no coincidence, then, that the first really important Mexican composer of film scores was none other than Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940), who by all applicable standards remains to the present day also Mexico’s most important musician. Even though Revueltas seldom quoted directly from vernacular song and music, his works (both for the concert hall and for the screen) have an unmistakable Mexican flavor owing to his formidable intuition and his personal closeness to those cultural roots.

Most remarkable among the handful of his film scores is the one he wrote for Redes (Fred Zinnemann/Emilio Gómez Muriel, 1936), which not only lent a dramatic, powerful background to this film with a clear human and social outlook but also became an indispensable staple on the concert platform. Revueltas’ piece for a child’s funeral and his ominous imitation of the fishermen’s oars are unforgettable. Less polished but nonetheless vibrant and spectacular is his music for La noche de los Mayas (Chano Urueta, 1939), a film maybe more appreciated for its music than for its cinematic values. The concert suite from La noche de los Mayas features a broad and powerful leitmotif representing the grandiose and imposing pyramids of the Mayan culture, starkly contrasted with a soft, serenade-like version of the pre-Hispanic lullaby “Kónex, kónex.” And to top it off, an exhilarating avalanche of indigenous percussion, which allows room for improvisation.

On the other hand, Manuel Esperón (1911–2011) made few contributions to concert music but instead penned no fewer than 500 film scores, including many songs written specifically for Infante and Negrete, most notably “Amorcito corazón,” sung by Infante in the 1948 film Nosotros los pobres, directed by Ismael Rodríguez, which became an instant and enduring icon of Mexican popular culture. He is also the author of Suite México 1910, a collage of Mexican traditional genres spiced with a few fleeting quotations from his own film scores; the title is a pointed reference to the year the Mexican Revolution began. Suite México 1910 includes romantic ballads, military marches, salon music, and dance airs.

No less admired than Infante and Negrete, Mario Moreno, “Cantinflas,” was not actually a singing star, but he has to this day remained Mexican film’s most endearing comedian, featured in close to 50 pictures in which he created many comic characters who are still present in the public’s imagination. Particularly hilarious among his many memorable moments is his demented spoof of Ravel’s Bolero in El bolero de Raquel (Miguel M. Delgado, 1957).

Writer, producer, actor, director, and ladies’ man with a volatile personality, Emilio “El Indio” Fernández personified a different type of idol. He made a career in Hollywood and directed dozens of films in Mexico, encompassing almost all current genres and carving for himself a tough-guy reputation. From good-natured comedia ranchera to lurid brothel melodrama, “El Indio” left no stone unturned, and his filmography yielded a musical variety as wide as the genres he approached during a prolific career almost unmatched in Mexican cinema.

And finally, a word about Luis Buñuel, considered one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Although born in Spain and with a solid presence in both his native country and in French film history, he shot many of his most important films in Mexico and is generally included in the roster of Mexican filmmakers. His compatriot and a fellow exile, composer Luis Hernández Bretón (1915–1995) worked in the Mexican film industry for almost 40 years and helped score several of Buñuel’s surrealist masterpieces.

No real stars as huge as Guízar, Infante, and Negrete have surfaced in Mexican movies in recent decades, with the probable exception of a couple of ranchero singers and a handful of balladeers. Nonetheless, Mexican film is still singing through the voices of a few (mainly artificially created and promoted) pop and rock stars. But that is another story altogether. —Juan Arturo Brennan

The Golden Age of Hollywood

The Hollywood portion of the program appropriately starts with composer John Williams’ 1987 arrangement of “Hooray for Hollywood,” the Richard A. Whiting-Johnny Mercer song (from 1937’s Hollywood Hotel directed by Busby Berkeley) that has become an unofficial anthem for Tinseltown.

From that lighthearted opening, we are plunged into a classic Hollywood genre—film noir—and the music of Hungarian-born Miklós Rózsa (1907–1995) for Double Indemnity (1944), director Billy Wilder’s saga of a seductress (Barbara Stanwyck) and the insurance agent (Fred MacMurray) who falls for and then commits murder for her. The composer creates a dark mood and, with his dirge-like theme, suggests that death row is the inevitable final destination for the guilty party. Rózsa would later win Oscars for Spellbound, A Double Life, and Ben-Hur.

George Gershwin (1898–1937) wrote several songs for American movies before his untimely death. But the greatest Gershwin project to reach the screen was undoubtedly An American in Paris, the MGM movie, directed by Vincente Minnelli, that took its title from the composer’s 1928 tone poem. Star Gene Kelly choreographed and, with co-star Leslie Caron, danced a lengthy ballet based on the Gershwin work as the finale of the film. The 1951 movie won six Oscars including Best Picture, plus an honorary one for Kelly “for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.”

Bette Davis spent most of the 1930s and 1940s at Warner Bros., where Vienna-born Max Steiner (1888–1971) was also under contract, scoring no fewer than 19 of her films, including Jezebel, Dark Victory, and The Letter. But it was Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) that won Steiner one of his three Academy Awards, creating a memorable romantic theme for Davis and Paul Henreid as initially unhappy traveling companions who find love together. The film’s popularity led to a lyric being added to Steiner’s melody, becoming a hit song under the title “It Can’t Be Wrong.” Steiner’s other classic film scores include Gone with the Wind, the original King Kong, and A Summer Place.

Two of the composers on the program are having centenary celebrations this year: Maurice Jarre (1924–2009) and Leonard Rosenman (1924–2008). Jarre won three Oscars, all for films by English director David Lean. Their success with Lawrence of Arabia led Lean to enlist the French composer to write a lavish, balalaika-flavored score for Dr. Zhivago (1965), Lean’s epic film adaptation of the Boris Pasternak novel about a Moscow physician and poet caught up in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Omar Sharif was Zhivago, Julie Christie his lover, Lara, in the film. “Lara’s Theme” became so popular that its vocal version, “Somewhere, My Love,” received a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year in 1967.

New York-born concert composer Rosenman came to score films because he was a friend of actor James Dean, and director Elia Kazan encouraged him to join them during the filming of East of Eden (1955) in California. Rosenman would score it, along with Dean’s next film, Rebel Without a Cause. In doing so, he helped shift film music toward a more progressive path, embracing atonality, dissonance, and serialism in the 1960s and ’70s, and would later win Oscars for Barry Lyndon and Bound for Glory.

Max Steiner’s career at Warner Bros. continued throughout the 1950s and half of the 1960s, but perhaps no Steiner film is more revered than Casablanca (1942), the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman-Paul Henreid wartime classic. Steiner brilliantly interwove the Herman Hupfeld song “As Time Goes By,” the French national anthem “La Marseillaise,” and his own original music into a dramatically effective tapestry that continues to resonate with movie fans everywhere. —Jon Burlingame

AT A GLANCE

The dawn of the Golden Age of both Hollywood and Mexican films goes hand in hand with the emergence of sound films. The silent era produced its share of masterpieces, but a truly immersive art form was born once movie studios were able to synchronize eye-popping visuals with alluring audio. It’s no surprise that some of the most talented composers of the time gravitated toward this new medium. In Mexico, it attracted the country’s most famed musicians, figures such as Silvestre Revueltas and Manuel Esperón, while other filmmakers brilliantly employed sound effects to further their vision, from surrealist dreamscapes to comedic set pieces.

In Hollywood, European-born émigrés such as Max Steiner and Miklós Rózsa as well as homegrown talents like Richard A. Whiting and George Gershwin were absorbed into the studio system, ensuring that movies left impressions on the mind’s eye and ear. This program, curated by legendary composer John Williams and conducted by LA Phil Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, takes us on a cinematic journey through the classic scores that remain with us.