Bert Shefter was a prime member of Hollywood's second tier of film composers. Although never as celebrated or widely recognized as such stars in the field as Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, Miklos Rozsa, or Max Steiner, he was fully employed in film music, with over 70 scores to his credit amassed in a period of 25 years, from 1950 through 1975. He spent many of the prime years of his career teamed with Paul Sawtell, his longtime friend and collaborator.
Born in Russia at the turn-of-the-century, his family emigrated to America soon after. Shefter showed an early aptitude for music and trained as a concert pianist. During the early '30s, he was teamed with future renowned composer Morton Gould in a duo-piano act, and among their other works together, the two arranged and published a two-piano version of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee.
Shefter first came to movies in 1950, when he wrote the music for One Too Many (1951), an exploitation film produced by the legendary Kroger Babb and directed by Erle C. Kenton. Soon after, he was working for Robert L. Lippert's Lippert Pictures as a composer on the musical Holiday Rhythm (1950). His next few films were all within the orbit of Lippert's studio, generally low-budget films that were forgotten as soon as they'd run through their distribution cycles. In 1951, however, Shefter was hired to write the score for Joseph Losey's remake of Fritz Lang's M. The movie wasn't highly regarded critically, but it was seen and figured in serious film histories of both Lang and Losey. He spent the next half-decade writing scores principally for Lippert's productions, broken up by the occasional big-budget release such as Nunnally Johnson's brilliant, dark espionage thriller Night People (1954), made for 20th Century Fox and starring Gregory Peck and Broderick Crawford. He wrote music for every kind of mainstream genre film, from war movies to Westerns. Shefter continued to perform as a pianist when he wasn't engaged in film work, and it was during a 1957 engagement in Las Vegas that he met Paul Sawtell, a fellow composer -- the two soon discovered that both their work and their way of working were surprisingly compatible with each other. They became collaborators beginning with The Black Scorpion (1957), one of the lesser giant monster movies of the 1950s -- the story actually represented a good idea for a film, but the low budget and the poor special effects in many scenes marred the picture; no one could complain about the music, however, which was as wild and wooly as the action and showed none of the seams that the model work and animation did. Sawtell and Shefter became the composers of choice for budget-conscious producers over the next few years, by virtue of the speed with which they worked and the quality that they delivered. This was especially true in the field of science fiction -- their music for Kronos (1957), It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), The Fly (1958), and Return of the Fly (1959), in particular, was some of the most memorable within the genre during the late '50s.
At the end of the 1950s, Sawtell and Shefter began an association with producer Irwin Allen, starting with The Big Circus (1959) and continuing through Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) and The Lost World (1961). Their skills fit together so well that they could write music (and good music) almost three times faster than the norm for a single composer; Shefter proclaimed they were capable of delivering the score to a 90-minute movie in a week. Much of their music was highly memorable, such as the score they wrote for the science fiction-thriller Kronos (1957).
| Title | Year | Editors' Rating | User Rating | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
The Gatling Gun
Composer (Music Score) |
1972 | |||
|
Emiliano Zapata
Composer (Music Score) |
1970 | |||
|
The Christine Jorgensen Story
Composer (Music Score) |
1970 | |||
|
The Last Shot You Hear
Composer (Music Score) |
1969 | |||
|
The Bubble
Composer (Music Score) |
1967 | |||
|
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Composer (Music Score) |
1966 | |||
|
Motor Psycho
Composer (Music Score) |
1965 | |||
|
The Curse of the Fly
Composer (Music Score) |
1965 | |||
|
The Last Man on Earth
Composer (Music Score) |
1964 | |||
|
Cattle King
Composer (Music Score) |
1963 | |||
|
Harbor Lights
Composer (Music Score) |
1963 | |||
|
Thunder Island
Composer (Music Score) |
1963 | |||
|
Young Guns of Texas
Composer (Music Score), Songwriter |
1963 | |||
|
Jack the Giant Killer
Composer (Music Score) |
1962 | |||
|
Wild Harvest
Composer (Music Score), Songwriter |
1962 | |||
|
Five Guns to Tombstone
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
Frontier Uprising
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
Gun Fight
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
Misty
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
Pirates of Tortuga
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
Tess of the Storm Country
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
The Big Show
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
The Long Rope
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Composer (Music Score) |
1961 | |||
|
A Dog's Best Friend
Composer (Music Score) |
1960 | |||
|
The Lost World
Composer (Music Score) |
1960 | |||
|
The Music Box Kid
Composer (Music Score) |
1960 | |||
|
Three Came to Kill
Composer (Music Score) |
1960 | |||
|
A Dog of Flanders
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
Counterplot
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
The Big Circus
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
The Cosmic Man
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
The Miracle of the Hills
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
The Return of the Fly
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
The Sad Horse
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
Vice Raid
Composer (Music Score) |
1959 | |||
|
Ambush at Cimarron Pass
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
Cattle Empire
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
Hong Kong Confidential
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
It! The Terror from Beyond Space
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
Machete
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
Sierra Baron
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
The Fly
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
Villa!
Composer (Music Score) |
1958 | |||
|
Ghost Diver
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
Gun Duel in Durango
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
Hell Ship Mutiny
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
Kronos
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
Monkey on My Back
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
She Devil
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
The Black Scorpion
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
The Deerslayer
Composer (Music Score) |
1957 | |||
|
Scandal Incorporated
Composer (Music Score) |
1956 | |||
|
Scandal, Inc.
Composer (Music Score) |
1956 | |||
|
The Desperados Are in Town
Composer (Music Score) |
1956 | |||
|
Night People
Composer (Music Score) |
1954 | |||
|
Sins of Jezebel
Composer (Music Score) |
1954 | |||
|
City on a Hunt
Composer (Music Score), Songwriter |
1953 | |||
|
The Great Jesse James Raid
Composer (Music Score) |
1953 | |||
|
The Tall Texan
Composer (Music Score) |
1953 | |||
|
Danger Zone
Composer (Music Score) |
1951 | |||
|
Leave It to the Marines
Composer (Music Score) |
1951 | |||
|
M
Musical Direction/Supervision |
1951 | |||
|
Pier 23
Composer (Music Score) |
1951 | |||
|
Roaring City
Composer (Music Score) |
1951 | |||
|
Sky High
Composer (Music Score) |
1951 | |||
|
Holiday Rhythm
Composer (Music Score) |
1950 | |||
|
One Too Many
Composer (Music Score), Musical Direction/Supervision |
1950 |