AllMovie

Leon Klatzkin was a composer, arranger, and conductor who was very busy during the 1950s in feature films and, much more so, in television. Klatzkin's style and approach to composition are difficult to pin down, however, because at least some of the music to which his name is attached as composer was not written by him -- and some of the scoring to which he signed his name involved nothing more than assembling pre-existing music cues. He broke into writing music for the screen with a contract at Hal Roach Studios that had him writing music for both television shows and features. He was very busy at 20th Century-Fox Television during the mid-'50s, on the scoring of such series as Broken Arrow, How to Marry a Millionaire, and My Friend Flicka. His most well-known composition of the 1950s, however, was for The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves -- the opening and closing music (including what is sometimes referred to as "The Superman March") was Klatzkin's work although, as was typical of the medium in those days, he never received onscreen credit for the music. In between the occasional low-budget feature film, such as Two-Gun Lady, The Silver Star, and The Lonesome Trail, Klatzkin -- whose movie work was often credited as "Leo Klatzkin" -- wrote or assembled the music scores for early episodes in the run of the series Gunsmoke, of which he was extremely proud. His work at Hal Roach Studios also ended up placing Klatzkin as the music director on the jukebox movie Go, Johnny, Go!, starring Alan Freed and Chuck Berry, in which most of his job was to get the mix of rock & roll sounds and occasional orchestral accompaniment in the dramatic scenes not to clash. He was busy on television series such as Rawhide and The Wild, Wild West through the mid-'60s, and, near the end of his career later in the decade, moved into directing the music for some early made-for-television movies.