Arnold Bax on AllMovie

Sir Arnold Bax had a short but notable career in movies. He composed the scores for only two films (both in the '40s), but they were among the better scores of their era in British cinema, rivalling the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir William Walton. Bax came from a wealthy family and enjoyed the best education one could acquire in late Victorian and Edwardian England, studying at the Royal Academy of Music in the first decade of the 20th century. A man of many parts -- composer, poet, author, editor, and mystic -- his music was post-Romantic in style, heavily influenced by the work of Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel, but with a decidedly Celtic flavor. Where Stravinsky and Debussy found inspiration from Russian and French legends, Bax's compositions were steeped in a peculiarly Gaelic exoticism, which had grown from his love of the poet William Butler Yeats. Bax's early works had titles such as "In the Fairy Hills" and "The Garden of Fand," growing out of the myths and legends of the British Isles. He found a limited audience, which concerned him little as he had more than sufficient wealth to live, and for the first 15 years of his career Bax was relatively little known, even in England. It was only in the mid-'30s, when his cause was taken up by conductor Sir Adrian Boult that he achieved some measure of popularity from his 1919 symphonic poem, Tintagel, inspired by the myths and legends of King Arthur. In his thirties and forties, he moved more toward absolute music and a more formalized framework for his music, writing seven symphonies that were similarly elusive in their appeal at the time, though recorded at least twice by the end of the 20th century. At the start of the '40s, as he neared the age of 60, the composer was anticipating his retirement. Ironically, it was at this point -- when his composing activities had, for the most part, ceased to exist -- that Bax was made Master of the King's Music (the musical equivalent of Poet Laureate) and given a knighthood. Thus, his screen career dates from this period.

During World War II, virtually the whole of the British artistic and intellectual community (apart from a smattering of true conscientious objectors) felt obliged to contribute to the Allied war effort. Bax was persuaded by conductor Muir Mathieson to write the score for the Crown Film Unit's patriotic short Malta, G.C., telling of the island of Malta and its resistance to Axis bombings during the first three years of war. The result was a happy circumstance for everyone except Bax, who didn't take well (at age 59) to the specialized requirements for soundtrack composition; he didn't respond with great enthusiasm to the images or scenes and felt detached from the material on which he was working. His music, principally a group of marches and dances, underscored the quiet heroism of the Maltese people. The rousing finale included material that the composer used again in his 1945 "Victory March" and his "Coronation March" in 1953 for the crowning of Elizabeth II, both of these pieces being "obligatory" compositions as Master of the King's Music.

In 1948, Bax scored his only dramatic film, David Lean's Oliver Twist, which today is regarded as one of the finest adaptations of a work of fiction but had a troubled post-production history, which made it difficult for audiences in America to appreciate Bax's music. Once again it was Mathieson who prevailed upon him to write the music. Bax never cared for the novel upon which the movie was based, but found inspiration from the movie itself, rising to the occasion and producing a score (nearly an hour in length) that seemed to capture not only the subtleties of the tones Lean had shot, but its ironic edges as well. Fifty years later, musicologist Graham Parlett assembled the entirety of Bax's music for the movie into a viable edition that was recorded by the BBC Philharmonic. Strangely enough, it wasn't until the '70s that most Americans got to hear Bax's full contribution to the movie. His music got caught up in a protracted struggle between producers and the American censors over the finished film's content. Lean had, apparently, created too explicit a masterpiece, true to the spirit and content of Dickens' book in every essential respect. The anti-Semitic attributes were accepted parts of 19th century English literature and culture. The novel's depiction of Fagin had proved less well-received among modern readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike (much as elements of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proved difficult to explain to readers in the second half of the 20th century), and those very elements had been brought out in high relief in Alec Guinness' 1948 portrayal of the story, making no allowances for modern sensibilities. There had been other portrayals of Fagin before; actor/director Irving Pichel had given one such portrayal (including a memorable prison scene) in Monogram's threadbare but interesting version of the story from the early '30s. But Guinness was almost too good in the role, and his makeup, complete with hooked nose, was impossible to ignore. The problem was an outgrowth of institutionalized and popular anti-Semitism which had existed in England at least as far back as Henry II and was reinforced by religious wars across the centuries. There was both upper- and lower-class anti-Semitism present in England well into the '30 and usually wasn't considered notable; it could even be found in such innocuous works as John Buchan's novel The 39 Steps -- filmed three times (once by Hitchcock) and a staple of junior high school reading lists into the '60s -- in which an ally of the hero is fixated on the idea of "Jew anarchists."

In 1948, however, the matter of anti-Semitism was too "hot," especially in the glare of Hollywood and of the various censors' new sensitivity in the wake of World War II. Thus, Oliver Twist was deemed unreleasable in the United States. Even Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures (who was never a mogul sensitive to "art" on more than a handshake basis) marveled at its content, but told Lean that he would have to reshoot some scenes before it could be released. This, however, was impossible since the movie's young star John Howard Davies had long outgrown the part. Ideally, the movie would have been released with an explanation -- that Dickens was writing of his time, for an audience that accepted certain prejudices, guilty for the same explanation that Shakespeare used with The Merchant of Venice -- but instead, the movie was held back from the American public until 1951. When it was released, 11 minutes, including the scene accompanying "Fagin's Romp," were removed. Only Bernard Herrmann's recording of the suite in the '70s held that part of Bax's music for listeners in the United States. Finally, in the middle of that decade, Janus Films released a full-length edition of the movie to television, and Oliver Twist was later shown complete in repertory and museum settings and on home video, giving American audiences their first opportunity to take in the movie and its music intact.