8. Music for Film Noir (1941-1959), with John Leman Riley

Tipping My Fedora

Sergio is joined by film and music expert John Leman Riley to provide an overview of some of the film scores written for Film Noir in the classic 1941 to 1959 period.

The films explored in this podcast include:

• THE MALTESE FALCON (John Huston, 1941) - music by Adolph Deutsch
• THE BIG SLEEP (Howard Hawks, 1946) - music by Max Steiner
• SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950) - music by Franz Waxman
• A PLACE IN THE SUN (George Stevens, 1951) - music by Franz Waxman
• ON DANGEROUS GROUND (Nicholas Ray, 1951) - music by Bernard Herrmann
• THE BIG COMBO (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) - music by David Raksin
• ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (Robert Wise, 1959) - music by John Lewis

John’s career has embraced photography, librarianship, archiving, teaching and lecturing, academic writing and editing, as well as journalism, reviewing, exhibition catalogues, CD and DVD notes and the like. Often focusing on film and film music, classical music, and Eastern European culture, he has been published by Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh University Presses, Routledge, Greenwood, BFI, Rough Guides and others.

Highlights include Dmitri Shostakovich: a Life in Film (Tauris), Discover Film Music (Naxos) for which he curated two accompanying CDs of excerpts, Sound at the Film Society, (“The Sound of the Silents in Britain”, OUP), Keeping the Icons on the Wall: Shostakovich’s Cinema and Concert Music (“Dmitrij Šostakovič tra Musica, Letteratura e Cinema”, Leo S Olschki), Soviet Cinema: Between Art and Propaganda (Cité de la Musique, Paris, and Caja Madrid), Stalin (and Lenin) at the Movies (“Contemplating Shostakovich: Life Music and Film”, Ashgate), and Live Cinema: Silent Film, Orchestral Accompaniment and the Special Event (“Archival Film Festivals”, Edinburgh UP).

He regularly writes for and is Reviews Editor of the DSCH Journal (www.dschjournal.com) and was the English Language editor for Apparatus Journal (https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus).

In From the Woods to the Cosmos, on the Severin BluRay release of Viy, he discusses Russian and Soviet horror and sci-fi cinema.

Commissioned by the South Bank Centre, he wrote, produced and directed Shostakovich: My Life in Film, telling the story of the composer’s film career with an orchestra playing the scores to film clips. Shostakovich was played by Simon Russell-Beale in London and, at the Komische Oper, Berlin, by Ulrich Matthes (Goebbels in Der Untergang).

He writes at https://johnlemanriley.substack.com/