“If I had listened to that score,” Wallach wrote in his autobiography, “I think I would have ridden my horse differently. In the days of silent films, mood music was played on the set to enrich the actors’ feeling for a scene. That would have helped me.”
You can see a version of what Wallach is referring to in the cacophonous shooting scene that takes place early on Damien Chazelle’s underrated 2022 effort “Babylon.” And knowing Bernstein’s score, it’s easy to see what he means when he says listening to him could have helped him. I mean, listen to this idiot:
The upbeat theme somehow perfectly captures the ideal spirit of adventure that many of the best Westerns aim for, to the point that I would argue that the tune not only represents this film but could also serve as an unofficial theme song throughout the golden age of Hollywood. Westerns should never have to vote for something like this. Bernstein’s combination of chirping brass and soaring strings evokes such a specific atmosphere that you have to imagine anyone hearing him on horseback would perk up and raise their chin a little higher as soon as it hit his ears. For the characters in “The Magnificent Seven,” the act of riding a horse was commonplace, but with that underlying soundtrack, there’s a majesty and importance to every step that simply isn’t there in real life .
However, despite his qualms about riding, Wallach must have done it something right, because he was cast in five other westerns in the 1960s alone, including Sergio Leone’s classic “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. Then again, that experience almost killed him multiple timesso… cross and delight?
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