Leo Erdody on AllMovie

Leo Erdody was one of the more gifted composers and musicians to work in low-budget Hollywood films of the 1940s. Of Hungarian descent (and possibly of distant noble ancestry, which would account for his occasional use of the single name "Erdody" as a screen credit), Erdody was the son of a pianist. He was born in Chicago in 1888 and studied in Berlin, where his teachers included the composer Max Bruch and legendary violinist Joseph Joachim. He worked in Europe during the early part of his career, but by the 1930s, was based in the United States. By the beginning of the '40s, he had made his way to Hollywood. A violinist, arranger, conductor, and composer, Erdody's earliest official movie credit was as an orchestrator on the Republic Pictures serial King of the Texas Rangers (1941), directed by William Witney and John English. He next turned up at Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) in 1942, working as the music director on Tumbleweed Trail, Law and Order, and Western Cyclone, fairly undistinguished Westerns in the studio's "Frontier Marshal" and "Billy the Kid" series.

As PRC became more ambitious, Erdody's opportunities improved. His work blossomed as he began working on far more interesting films, most notably Tomorrow We Live (1942), Corregidor (1943), My Son, the Hero (1943), and Girls in Chains (1943) -- all except Corregidor directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. These films marked the beginning of a productive association between the two, Erdody subsequently serving as music director on the Ulmer movies Bluebeard, Strange Illusion, and Detour. Those three are regarded as among the finest and cleverest B-movies ever made, and Detour is one of the most intensely studied low-budget films ever to come out of Hollywood. Their scores were all lively and inventive, freely intermingling Erdody's original material with quotations from the works of Mussorgsky and Brahms, among others. So intermingled are they with the action and the interior lives of the characters on the screen that the resulting soundtracks for Bluebeard and Detour are almost supporting characters in the films.

Erdody also occasionally worked on lighter fare from Ulmer, such as the musical Jive Junction. The composer was skilled in both classical and light jazz, and his song copyrights included "Only a Song," "My Dream Rose," "A Garden by the Sea," and "Señorita Chula." In between the Ulmer films, Erdody also served as the music director on such pictures as White Pongo, The Flying Serpent, and Blonde for a Day, which were decidedly less impressive as movies, though The Flying Serpent offered enough chills as a horror film to justify it being released on DVD in 1999. Erdody collaborated on the scoring of at least one Columbia Pictures Technicolor "Fox and the Crow" cartoon (A Hunting We Won't Go [1943]), and released recordings credited to the Leo Erdody Orchestra, usually consisting of light classics. In 1944, he and Ferdinand Grofe Sr. were nominated jointly for an Oscar for their work as music directors on Joseph H. Lewis' musical Minstrel Man. This proved to be the high point of Erdody's career, at least in terms of honors; though he worked in Hollywood for another four years, he was never nominated by the Academy again.

Erdody died of arteriosclerosis in 1949 at the age of 60, and was largely forgotten over the decades that followed. The film Minstrel Man and his Oscar-nominated music track have disappeared, but Ulmer's Detour, which relies heavily on Erdody's music, was included on the Library of Congress' list of the 100 most important American movies of the 20th century, and that film, Bluebeard, and Strange Illusion have all appeared in special DVD editions more than 50 years after they were made.