Classical Madness

Mix a little tango, a little bebop, and what do you get? Something supremely strange, and supremely effective.

Franz Waxman wrote the music for Sunset Boulevard—a soundtrack that would win Best Score at the 1951 Oscars. Waxman's music for Sunset even ranked at #16 on the American Film Institute's list of the best 25 film scores of all time. That's how you know you've got a masterpiece on your hands. It was finally re-recorded and released as an album in 2002, so you can actually buy it now—if you're inclined to relieve the Sunset Boulevard madness, that is.

Waxman scored Desmond's theme based on tango (since she'd tangoed with Rudolph Valentino, one of the first matinee idols) and based Gillis' theme on bebop, presumably because that was cool, young people's music at the time. Like Billy Wilder, Waxman was a German Jew who had to flee Nazism (he was actually beaten up by Nazi supporters before leaving Germany). He went on to score other Wilder movies too, like Stalag 17—about American POWs held by the Nazis. Plus, he worked with plenty of other famous directors, like Hitchcock for Rear Window, and James Whale for The Bride of Frankenstein.

You can check out a sample of the score here. The most characteristic feature of it is probably intensity. It really brings out the flavor of madness, and of surging passions. The combination of tango and bebop—and other elements, too, for that matter, creates a mishmash feeling that's, frankly, unsettling.

This score does not play around.