With Passover only days away, simply remembering Elmer Bernstein leads me back through a wilderness of mediocrity that today passes for film music, to a Promised Land of cinematic milk and honey.

Over the course of an enviable career that spanned some 50 years, Bernstein composed music for dozens of movies, many of them still much-beloved, including “The Ten Commandments” (1956), “The Magnificent Seven” (1960), “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), and “The Great Escape” (1963).

In addition, he was one of the first film composers to incorporate jazz elements into his work for dramatic purposes, in movies like “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955), “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957), and “Walk on the Wild Side” (1962).

Coming out of the Swinging Sixties, when the industry clearly favored a more “popular” sound over purely orchestral scores (until John Williams changed everything), Bernstein kept right on working. Thanks to a generation of younger filmmakers who had grown up on his classics, he never lacked for opportunities. Suddenly he found himself much in demand as a comedy composer, providing the underscores for “Animal House” (1978), “The Blues Brothers” (1980), “Airplane!” (1980), “Stripes” (1981), and “Ghostbusters” (1984).

For Martin Scorsese, he composed music for “The Age of Innocence” (1993), “Bringing Out the Dead” (1999), and “The Gangs of New York” (2002), though his score for the latter was ultimately rejected. He also adapted Bernard Herrmann’s music for Scorsese’s remake of “Cape Fear” (1991).

Oh yeah, along the way, he also composed the iconic National Geographic theme – clearly by the same man who wrote “The Magnificent Seven.”

In all, Bernstein was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, but claimed the Oscar only once, fairly early on, for his work on “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (1967), of all things. His final nomination was for his very last score, for “Far from Heaven” (2002). Elmer Bernstein died on August 18, 2004 at the age of 82.

Here’s a suite from one of his best-loved scores.

Happy birthday, Elmer Bernstein.