Atticus Finch may have been a model father, but he was also one of cinema’s most memorable attorneys. This week on “Picture Perfect,” a generous suite from Elmer Bernstein’s score for “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962) will cap an hour of music from movies about lawyers, judges, and courtrooms.
Ernest Gold, a composer best known for his Academy Award-winning work on “Exodus,” wrote the music for several courtroom dramas. We’ll begin with the theme to “The Young Philadelphians” (1959), a film starring Paul Newman as an ambitious young lawyer whose rise is complicated by various ethical and emotion hurdles.
That will be followed, without break, by the theme to “Inherit the Wind” (1960), the big screen adaptation of a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, inspired by the events of the Scopes Monkey Trial. The film features Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, as fictionalized versions of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively, Gene Kelly as an H.L. Mencken-like newspaper reporter, and Dick York, of “Bewitched” fame, as the small-town school teacher who introduces his students to the concept of evolution.
Louis Calhern was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his turn as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Magnificent Yankee” (1950). Calhern had created the role of Holmes in the original Broadway production.” Emmet Lavery’s script was adapted from the historical novel, “Mr. Justice Holmes,” by Francis Biddle. The score is by Philadelphia-born David Raksin, best known for his music for “Laura.”
As a collaborator of Virgil Thomson, Orson Welles, Marc Blitzstein, and David O. Selznick, among others, and as founding director of the drama department at Juilliard, John Houseman could already look back on a lifetime’s worth of achievements, when he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, at the age of 71, for his performance in “The Paper Chase” (1973). Houseman plays the formidable Professor Kingsfield, Timothy Bottoms a first-year student in one of his classes at Harvard Law, and Lindsay Wagner, Bottoms’ love interest – who happens to be Kingsfield’s daughter. The music is by John Williams, written two years before “Jaws” and four years before “Star Wars.” Williams has a more varied resume than many would suspect.
Finally, just in time for Father’s Day, Gregory Peck assumes one of his most memorable roles, as defense attorney Atticus Finch, in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” based on Harper Lee’s beautiful coming-of-age novel. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1962. Elmer Bernstein wrote the music, one of his most moving scores.
We’ll be laying down the law (with a nod to Dad for Father’s Day) this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
