Leith Stevens on AllMovie

Leith Stevens was never as well known among film aficionados as his contemporaries Alfred Newman or Bernard Herrmann, but he was among the first wave of successful American-born film composers and carved out a special place for himself in two particular genres. Born in Mount Moriah, MO, in 1909, he was raised in Kansas City and revealed himself early on to be child prodigy, starting formal piano lessons at age five and giving his first public concert at age seven. By age 11 he was working as a professional accompanist and that same year he earned his first music scholarship. By the time he was 16, Stevens was conducting orchestras there, including concert performances, operatic productions, and ballet. In 1927, at age 19, he earned a Juilliard Foundation Fellowship, which brought him to New York City, and two years later he joined CBS radio as a vocal arranger. Soon after that, he began appearing on the air as a conductor as well as composing music for many of the network's radio shows. The programs for which he wrote and conducted included Fred Allen's radio show, at a time when Allen was among the top-rated on-air personalities in the country. He also led the band on the CBS-aired Saturday Night Swing Club broadcasts each week, which also led to Stevens' cutting records as their leader, for Vocalion. In 1939, Stevens made the jump to Hollywood, when he was brought out to the West Coast to do the music for the Edward G. Robinson program Big Town. He continued to work from the west during the early '40s, which led to his involvement with the William Dieterle-directed music showcase film Syncopation (1942), to which he contributed several pieces, including the American Rhapsody, which went on to become a popular concert work. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Stevens joined the Office of War Information, serving as director of the service's radio shows in the southwest Pacific. He was later promoted to director of operations for the entire Southwest Pacific area. Following the end of the war, he returned to Hollywood and resumed his association with CBS, as well as returning to the world of film; some of his "stock music," which had entered film score libraries, turned up in Frank Capra's independently produced It's a Wonderful Life (1946) (the film on which the producer/director parted company over creative disputes with Dimitri Tiomkin), but he was slightly more actively involved in The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap (1947), starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (for whose radio show he had once served as music director), for which he wrote additional music cues. Much more important was Stevens' first official postwar screen credit, for John Cromwell's Night Song (1948), an independently produced film starring Dana Andrews as a pianist/composer who is blinded in an accident; a major release at the time, also starring Merle Oberon, Ethel Barrymore, and Hoagy Carmichael, Night Song was a movie steeped in highly distinctive music in virtually every scene, and it put Stevens thoroughly in his element, mixing classical and jazz. This was a natural stretch for him, as it was no stretch at all; for most of the 1930s as a radio conductor, he had moved freely between those two worlds, in his conducting and arranging as well as his compositions, and he was among the first wave of post-Gershwin musical figures in the film capital to comfortably mix the two idioms. He was uncredited for his contribution to the Universal drama All My Sons (1948), starring Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster, and also contributed additional cues and some stock music to a handful of Abbott & Costello films from the same studio. Stevens' work is all over Universal releases of this period, ranging from Ma & Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule programmers to Anthony Mann's savage western Winchester '73. In 1950, however, he blazed a new genre trail when he was engaged to write the score for the George Pal-produced science fiction drama Destination Moon. A solid action/adventure story of its time, as well as a good science fiction yarn, the movie was shot in color and featured a first-rate script and amazingly high production values for an independent film in a genre that few filmmakers understood or appreciated. And Stevens' music was among the highlights, an expressive and inventive score in a distinctly classical mode, utilizing rich orchestral timbres in strategic places to enhance the striking visuals. The movie was a success, and Stevens' music was so effective that it ended up being "libraried" and reused in numerous lesser productions over the next 15 years, including The Phantom Planet and other science fiction vehicles, and programmed into European-produced movies, as well. He became something of a genre specialist after this, and solidified his reputation when Pal, by then working at Paramount, commissioned him to write the music for When Worlds Collide (1951), and, two years later, War of the Worlds (1953). In between those three movies, each of which has come to be regarded as a classic of the genre, he wrote music for numerous other films, including westerns and comedies, but it was yet another subgenre -- the crime film -- that brought Stevens some of the most extensive public attention of the decade. It started with Stanley Kramer and his production of The Wild One (1954). It was once said by Elmer Bernstein, a younger contemporary of Stevens', that "movies use jazz when someone steals a car" -- change that to "wreck a town" and you have the story of The Wild One and its score, featuring Shorty Rogers & His Band. The movie -- which starred Marlon Brando -- was based on a true story, about two motorcycle gangs that overrun a small northern California town, and it appalled establishment critics and the self-appointed moral guardians running around in those years, with its depiction of violence, riot, and debauchery. The music was released as a 10" soundtrack LP on Decca, one of the earlier jazz-based film scores to get a commercial issue. And that movie brought down the wrath of conservative critics of the period on all concerned, as well, including Stevens. His score for Don Siegel's Private Hell 36 (1954) was also jazz-based, and equally distinctive, although it never got remotely the same exposure as The Wild One. Both of those films, and other that he scored such as Crashout (1954) and The Garment Jungle (1957), put Stevens on the cutting edge of film composition, his bebop-influenced music rivaling the jazz innovations of better-known figures such as Elmer Bernstein and Henry Mancini. He received his first Academy Award nomination in 1956 for the title theme to the Doris Day thriller Julie and was nominated in 1959 for The Five Pennies, and again in 1963 for A New Kind of Love. By the mid-'60s, however, as film production slackened, Stevens increasingly turned to television work, including episodes of Lost in Space, Mission: Impossible, and Mannix. His recording career peaked during the early stereo era, with records that exploited the booming interest in jazz and high fidelity sound: Jazz Themes for Cops and Robbers and Exploring the Unknown. He was still busy well into his sixties, and at the end of the 1960s had become the head of the music department at Paramount's television division. His death was the culmination of a family tragedy. On July 23, 1970, Stevens' wife was killed in an auto accident near Palm Springs, a fact of which he was notified by the authorities; he made a few calls, notifying friends and family, and suffered a fatal heart attack at his desk.