The man on the podium was short and stocky, grizzled and growling, with a chewed cigar in one hand and an elegant conductor’s baton in the other. One contemporary newspaper described him as looking “more like a fight promoter than a musician.” Yet whenever that baton began to sway and the Paramount orchestra began to play, magic was birthed into the world, magic that sounded like this:
That’s a beautiful melody titled “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” and it was written for the movie Shane by one of Hollywood’s premier musical talents, the composer Victor Young. He was, in the words of his colleague and best friend, the equally great composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Searchers), “a very, very talented composer, excellent orchestrator, and wonderful violinist” whose seemingly endlessly inventive stream of lush melodies during a two-decade career as head of Paramount Pictures’ music department came to define Hollywood film scoring.
Born the poor son of a Chicago opera singer in 1900, a chance encounter with an old violin at the age of five (and his mother’s fateful decision to have the instrument re-stringed for him to play with) turned him into a child prodigy. When his mother died a few years later, both Victor and his sister were sent to live with their grandparents in Poland, where they attended the Imperial Conservatory in Warsaw. Both graduated with honors and played in orchestras all across Europe, but came back to America in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar economic strife in Eastern Europe (at one point a starving Victor, impounded in a German prison, played a three-hour concert for the guards on his violin in exchange for a simple bowl of soup).
Back in Chicago, highly skilled but poor, Young began playing in orchestras, then leading the orchestras of silent movie houses, then recording for radio and records. In the Thirties he migrated to Hollywood and started his own successful orchestra for a few years before giving it up in exchange for film scoring at Paramount Pictures, where for the rest of his life he would be the head of the music department. He also scored for lesser studios like Republic on the side, a workload that thankfully married Young’s skills to several of John Wayne’s best films (Sands of Iwo Jima, Rio Grande, and especially The Quiet Man among them).
At Paramount, Young became legendary for his unparalleled ability to invent memorable melodies with seeming ease. “The perfect score for a dramatic picture,” he would say, “is one which the fans do not think they’re hearing but they leave the theater whistling the theme.” For Shane, he eschewed the avant-garde styles growing popular during that era in favor of tried-and-true sentimentalism and classicism.
If you’ve got an ear for old folk tunes and ballads, you’ll hear many sprinkled between Young’s distinct themes for Shane, the Starrett family, the sodbusters, and the villains. Torrey, the doomed settler played by Elisha Cook Jr., gets “Dixie” as his theme (with the local harmonica player often teasing him with quick segues into “Marching Through Georgia” for laughs). “The Quilting Party” is sung by Marian in the beginning of the movie while she’s in the cabin as Shane approaches. Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” appears on a quiet harmonica when Marian and Joey watch Shane standing in the rain. “Good-bye Old Paint” fuels Shane and Marian’s square dancing.
All of these combine with Young’s original music — “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” Marian’s lovely submotif, the triumphant tree-stump conquering music (a style echoed again when Shane and Joe conquer the equally recalcitrant Ryker gang in Shane‘s epic bar fight) — to produce one of the all-time great scores. It’s criminal that there is no complete recording available on CD.
Young and several other composers — Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin — would regularly get together after work to unwind. “He loved to play cards,” Max Steiner later wrote in his (alas, still unpublished) autobiography. “and he never let his work interfere with this.” One night, soon after Steiner had proudly told his buddies about a great new theme he had just written for the picture Johnny Belinda, Young nonchalantly told his wife to turn on the radio. Steiner’s theme blared over the speaker, lavishly played by a full orchestra.
“I wrote that piece,” Young said when challenged. “Where do you come off to say that this is your tune?” Thinking he must have somehow unwittingly plagiarized one of Young’s own melodies, Steiner was horrified and thinking his entire score would have to be hastily rewritten until everyone burst out laughing and let him in on the joke: Young had heard Steiner playing it on a piano a few days earlier, surreptitiously copied it down, then made a grand recording of it. “It must have cost Victor $200 to $300,” Steiner recalled fondly, “but the gag was worth it to him. He thought the whole thing was hilarious.”
By all rights Victor Young should have spent several decades after Shane continuing to entertain audiences with his memorable scores, but it was not to be. Young was known as one of Hollywood’s most notorious workaholics. “He could record from nine in the morning until eight at night,” wrote Steiner, “have a bite to eat when he got home and then call the boys and ask them to come over and play cards. They would play until four in the morning, then get up at 7:30, go to the studio and start recording. This was Victor’s routine almost every day.” Not even his first heart attack slowed him down, and he kept up his blistering work pace until finally felled by a second heart attack at the age of fifty-six. An Oscar for the 1956 Best Picture winner Around the World in Eighty Days was awarded posthumously, his first win after twenty-two nominations.
“I gave up cards,” wrote Max Steiner later, “and have never touched them since. Victor passed on quite a few years ago, but without him, it just doesn’t seem right to play anymore. However, I have made my dear wife, my little mama, promise me that when they bury me in Old Forester Lawn, she would put a couple of packs of Pinochle cards, two Gin Rummy decks, two bottles of Bourbon and a box of cigars in my coffin in case I meet Victor where I’m going.”
Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane“
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
Ken Curtis sings “The Call of the Faraway Hills.” Curtis, longtime member of the John Ford Stock Company and the popular musical group The Sons of the Pioneers, sings the lyrics written to accompany the main theme for Shane.
Victor Young Collection at Brandeis University. Upon his death, Young’s wife donated his effects to Brandeis, located in Massachusetts. They have a huge collection of his records, many of them private recordings of his and others music, and it’s a shame that these haven’t been transcribed to digital media, re-mastered, and released.
Interview with Victor Young’s niece, Ms. Bobbie Fromberg. Young’s sole surviving relative tells a bit more about his personal life and legacy.
And do browse around YouTube and Amazon for Victor Young’s music, only a fraction of which is currently available.
I’ll end this week on a pair of obscure scholarly notes: The exact year of Young’s birth is open to conjecture. His entry at the IMDb says 1899. His grave states 1901. Wikipedia says 1899 in the opening paragraph of its entry on Young, then promptly contradicts itself by listing 1900 on the sidebar. My call of 1900 follows the lead of newspaper obits published at the time of his death, Paramount press releases, and this 1920 newspaper article, which describes the return of “Albert Young” from Europe (why the name change while overseas, I don’t know) and seems to insinuate he was nineteen years old as of February 18, 1920. In addition to being the most widely cited year, 1900 splits the difference between the other two possibilities, so that’s what I’m sticking with until a birth certificate appears to settle the matter once and for all.
Also, regarding Shane, there is one crucial cue in the film that wasn’t written by Young at all. Towards the end, when Shane is riding through the night into town to face Ryker and Wilson, the ominous music was taken from an old Franz Waxman score to another film. It’s effective, but if you listen carefully it’s not at all like the music heard throughout the rest of the movie, and none of the other Shane themes can be heard within it.