Ernest Gold, who has died aged 77, composed the Oscar-winning pseudo-Hebraic melody for Otto Preminger's film Exodus (1960), which was one of the most irritatingly hummable themes ever heard on the soundtrack of a Hollywood epic. This had as much to do with Gold's musical gifts as the fact that the theme was repeated, with subtle variations, throughout the entire 220-minute movie.
Gold's film scores often contained this repetition. The year before Exodus, Gold had written the Oscar-nominated score for Stanley Kramer's post-nuclear-war drama, On The Beach. Kramer believed that the simple but dignified melody of Waltzing Matilda would reflect the spirit of the survivors. In his score, the melody becomes the film's theme: foreboding, stirring and romantic, depending on the scene.
Gold's bombastic scores suited Kramer's well-meaning message pictures, and director and composer worked together on nine films from The Pride and The Passion (1957) to The Runner Stumbles (1979), and he would often integrate well-known tunes in his scores. For Inherit the Wind (1960) he used a vigorous rendering of the song Old Time Religion, which usefully commented on the fundamentalist issues of the 'monkey trial'. Judgment At Nuremberg (1961) featured German tunes, and Ship Of Fools (1965) had slightly-skewed Viennesey waltzes.
The latter films were meaningful to Gold, born Ernst Goldner in Vienna, descendant of a long line of musicians. He was a child prodigy and began composing at five, writing a full-length opera at the age of 13. In 1938, when the Nazis annexed Austria, Ernst had just completed his studies at the Academy of Music; he emigrated with his family to New York .
He got as far as Hollywood in 1946 and for the next decade worked as an orchestrator, conductor and contributor to numerous B-pictures. His arrangements of George Antheil's scores for four of Bogart's later films, Knock on Any Door, Tokyo Joe, In A Lonely Place, and Sirocco (1949-1951), gave him his break. When Antheil went to work for Kramer, so did Gold, and when the older composer retired, the younger succeeded him.
Apart from the Kramer pictures, Gold had to content himself by writing the music for a couple of weepies at Warners, Too Much Too Soon (1958) and The Young Philadelphians (1960), as well as for a Kirk Douglas western, The Last Sunset (1961). His last major success was Sam Peckinpah's war film Cross Of Iron (1977), in which he experimented with shock chords to match the martial subject.
It was some time before he became reconciled to working on television, for which his best score was an emotional one for Wallenberg : A Hero's Story (1985). He said the reason he hated TV 'is the rush. They wanted me to write the score of The Small Miracle (a Paul Gallico story) in nine days. I spent 18 days on Exodus on the main theme alone.' Also, regardless of how well-known a composer was, for TV they were all paid the same. 'Having spent a lifetime perfecting my art, I resented being paid the same amount for my efforts, experience and talent as many newcomers.'
Gold leaves a daughter.