Total Time: 63:37 - Chelsea Rialto Studios

studio regular, wrote the arrangement of “Night
Was So Dark,” the Russian café piece that
features balalaikas, domra and cimbalom; Fox
vocal coach Charles Henderson was credited
with the vocal arrangement for the Russian
singers. Herb Taylor also contributed a handful
of arrangements of source music, some used,
some not.
The lavish Chicago party that begins the
film features several standards, including “April
Showers,” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and
“Missouri Waltz,” all arranged by Newman’s
regular orchestrator Edward Powell; and “I’ll
See You in My Dreams,” arranged by Herbert
Spencer.
It even fell to the music department to
arrange for a piano coach for Clifton Webb,
who as Templeton was to be seen playing
Chopin; this was done, department notes
indicate, on March 22 in “Mr. Newman’s
bungalow.” (There is no such scene in the final
cut, although Chopin’s “Polonaise” is heard
playing in the Paris rooming house where Larry
Darrell lives.) Alfred’s brothers Lionel and
Emil were peripherally involved, too,
conducting source cues for playback during the
shooting process.
These were relatively easy tasks to assign
and accomplish. The more critical work of
creating the original dramatic score was left to
Newman and Powell, and this was probably
done in August 1946 as recording occupied
much of September.
Evaluating the script, the rough cut and the
performances, as he always did, Newman
decided to write two main themes: one for
Larry’s relentless search for the meaning of life,
which the composer called “The Pursuit of
Knowledge,” and another for the complex
relationship of Larry and Isabel, which
Newman titled “Seduction.”
In an experiment that would rarely be
repeated at Fox, Zanuck asked Newman to
compose the score for Larry and Isabel’s Paris
love scene before shooting, so that it could be
played back on the set while Tyrone Power and
Gene Tierney were playing their parts.
Sixty years later, it is impossible to know for
certain why this unusual request was made. But
one possible reason involves the gamble that
Zanuck knew he was taking with The Razor’s
Edge – an expensive movie based on a novel
that, because it was essentially about ideas,
religion and philosophy, many thought was
unfilmable and might not attract a wide
audience – and a giant promotional opportunity
being offered by Life magazine in advance of
the film’s release.
Life was the nation’s most popular weekly,
reportedly read by one of every three
Americans in that era. Editors proposed to
“explain the enormously complicated process
of making such a movie” by selecting a single
sequence and having a photographer capture on
film all of the many crafts it took to bring one
scene to life. The scene chosen was the Power-
Tierney kiss, and the results were printed on
nine consecutive pages of the August 12, 1946
issue. Included was a shot of Newman
conducting the Fox orchestra and a second
photograph of two pages of the conductor’s
score for the scene.
The movie would not actually be scored
until September. But Fox cooperated fully with
Life’s photographer and reporters and, in order
to include the process of music, something had
to be written and recorded for playback on the
set. This may also explain why “Seduction” is
effectively a more sophisticated version of a
theme Newman had written a decade earlier for
the Samuel Goldwyn film These Three. Either
Newman felt that it was a good theme, long
forgotten, that might work for Larry and Isabel;
or that it was a temporary solution to an
immediate problem that could always be
replaced later, but wasn’t – perhaps, again,
because Goulding and
Zanuck fell in love with it
(as often happens in films
today with “temp tracks,”
temporary music placed in
the film during early postproduction,
usually prior
to the composer’s
involvement).
A close look at the
score as reproduced in the
tiny photograph in Life
reveals that it was, indeed,
the “Seduction” music
used in the final film,
meaning that the music
(probably with minor tweaks) remained in the
score months after the magazine photo-op.
Regardless of the origins of the love theme,
it turned out to be just right for the film, its
yearning nature giving voice to the desire felt
by both Larry and Isabel, one that was never to
be consummated.
The theme for Larry’s quest, “The Pursuit of
Knowledge,” must have been far more difficult
for Newman – attempting to define in music the
search for answers to the whys and wherefores
of man’s existence, the same questions that
have been asked by so many for thousands of
years. There is something mysterious and
questioning but also an undeniable nobility to
this theme, just as there is something noble and
pure about Larry, especially after his visit to the
Himalayas and the answers he finds there.