Deflating Fascism in Max Steiner’s Score for The Most Dangerous Game
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.19009Keywords:
Max Steiner, music in early sound films, horror movie musicAbstract
This article examines Max Steiner’s original score for the 1932 RKO Production of The Most Dangerous Game. Steiner’s score quotes from a piece of piano music, “Russian Waltz,” which he composed for the film’s villain, Count Zaroff, to play within the film’s diegesis. His vast orchestral underscore liberally quotes the main motif of his piano work. Using a hermeneutic approach, the article argues that Steiner’s orchestral underscore reinforces the film’s anti-fascist narrative potentials by linking Count Zaroff’s motif to his enterprise of hunting human beings and specifically to the sexual satisfaction the Count draws from his gruesome fetish. The motif itself undergoes a myriad of expansions and contractions, intensifications and relaxations, charting the ups and downs of Zaroff’s fortunes. Based on archival research, hermeneutic analysis, and a close reading of both the film and its source material, the article concludes that Steiner participated in crafting an anti-fascist film at a signal moment in history.
References
Jewell, Richard, and Vernon Harbin. 1982. The RKO story. New York: Arlington House.
Knight, Eric M. 1932. Thriller yarn at Stanton has good treatment. Public Ledger—Philadelphia (September 22).
Morton, Ray. 2005. King Kong: The history of a movie icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18.
Overton, Grant M., ed. 1927. The world’s one hundred best short stories. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
Platte, Nathan. 2018. Making music in Selznick’s Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rhys, Ernest, and C.A. Dawson Scott, eds. 1929. 26 adventure stories by twenty and six authors. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
Schallert, Edwin. 1932. Man-hunt tale real thriller. Los Angeles Times (August 17).
Schatz, Thomas. 1988. The genius of the system: Hollywood filmmaking in the studio era. New York: Metropolitan.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York: Columbia University Press.
Steiner, Max. 2011. Scoring the film (1937). In Celluloid symphonies: Texts and contexts in film music history, ed. Julie Hubbert, 199-206. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.
Williams, Blanche Colton, ed. 1929. Short stories for college classes. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
