1940s
In 1940, Newman began a 20-year career as music director with 20th Century-Fox Studios, composing over 200 film scores, nine of which won Academy Awards. He wore many hats at the studio depending on the need, acting as composer, arranger, music director and conductor for various films. However, he said that he preferred arranging and conducting over composing because the latter was lonely and demanding work. The demands of work contributed to his heavy smoking throughout his life, eventually leading to his emphysema.
He was noted for developing what came to be known as the Newman System, a means of synchronizing the performance and recording of a musical score with the film, a system which is still in use today. Newman's scores were developed around the overall mood of each film. He also tailored specific themes to accompany different characters as they appeared on screen, thereby enhancing each actor's role. The effects of this style of music created a forceful but less jarring score which connected the entire story, thereby keeping the film's theme more easily understood by viewers.
The Song of Bernadette (1943) is said to be one of Newman's loveliest scores, recorded over a four-week period with an 80-piece orchestra. Newman used three different motifs to color different issues during the film. Among them was a brass chorale to represent Mother Church, while the theme representing Bernadette used strings to support her character's warmth and tenderness. Newman's interpretation added the sound of the wind and blowing leaves to give the music an ethereal quality that augmented Bernadette's visions.
Newman's score for Wilson (1944), a biopic about president Woodrow Wilson, required he devote an unusual amount of time to research. The film was intended to be a tribute to Wilson by producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Newman spent considerable time learning personal details about Wilson and his family, such as the songs they sang and played on their piano at home, the music they liked to dance and listen to, the songs they played during political rallies or political functions during his career. As a result, the film contained some forty realistic American-themed numbers intertwined throughout the film which gave it a strong sense of timeliness.
In the 1940s, Newman scored a number of films related to World War II. Among those were A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), To the Shores of Tripoli (1942) and Twelve O'Clock High (1949), which one historian says is Newman's best dramatic opening theme for a movie. Newman also composed or music directed the score to some of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series of films, including Prelude to War (1942) and War Comes to America (1945). He created the music for The All-Star Bond Rally (1945), a documentary short film featuring Hollywood stars promoting the sales of War Bonds. The previous year he scored another documentary, The Fighting Lady (1944).
He often studied period music and assimilated it into his scores. For films such as How Green Was My Valley (1941), for example, he incorporated Welsh hymns. For How The West Was Won (1962), he took folk tunes and transformed them into orchestral/choral works of tremendous power. And for The Grapes of Wrath (1940), he brought in the folk tune favorite "Red River Valley" throughout the score. His skill at incorporating familiar traditional music into modern scores was not limited to Western themes, however. During portions of the score for Love is a Many Splendored Thing, for example, he created numbers with a distinctly Chinese sensibility, both with instruments and melodies. Generally, however, he would create his own original melody and turn it into something haunting and memorable, as he did for The Robe (1953).
In 1947, he composed the music for Captain from Castile, which included the famous "Conquest march", an impassioned score for the Spanish conquistadors. The march was adapted by the University of Southern California (USC) as the official theme song for their sports teams, the USC Trojans. Newman also orchestrated and conducted the music for a biopic about the life of American composer John Philip Sousa, Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), a film which includes numerous marches for which Sousa is best known.
The dramatic score for The Snake Pit, a 1948 film set in a lunatic asylum, was accentuated by Newman's careful use of effects to intensify the discomfort and fear portrayed by the actors, primarily its star Olivia de Havilland.
