Film composer, 1922-2004
Elmer Bernstein wrote some of the most influential and memorable music in the history of cinema. Bernstein got his break in Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments with a soundtrack that fully matched the epic qualities of his film. More important though for the development of film music was the score for The Man with the Golden Arm. Its raw strident sound was one of the first to make use of the rhythms of jazz.
Bernstein’s most enduring success was the score for The Magnificent Seven (1960), its cantering rhythms driven by energetic bursts of brass, bass, flute and drums. Its popularity was rivalled only by that other most eminently whistleable of themes, that of The Great Escape (1963). In all he was nominated for an Oscar 14 times but won only once, for Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967).
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— The Daily Telegraph
John Weightman
1915-2004, critic and scholar
In the last year of his life, when most people tend to succumb to comforting illusions, the critic John Weightman wrote his lucid and devastating analysis, Reading the Bible in the Run Up to Death, dismissing the text’s main character as “that unpleasant person, God”. Weightman’s comments were always based on the text he was reviewing, so the reader had the opportunity to agree or disagree with him. Thus in the case of the Bible, he showed the absurdity, the divine unscrupulousness, the moral insanity, simply by reporting on it.
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— The Guardian