Destination Tokyo (1944)
(A Montage for Orchestra)

Movements
Main Title
Thinking of Home
Sea Power
Montage & Finale

Note
Franz Waxman’s score for producer Jerry Wald’s production of Destination Tokyo (1944) was the beginning of a beautiful professional and personal relationship that would last until Wald’s premature death in 1962. Steve Fisher’s original story about a U.S. submarine that is sent into Tokyo Bay during World War II was nominated for an Oscar. Delmar Daves directed his screenplay with Albert Maltz into what The New York Times hailed as one of the best pictures of the year.

Destination Tokyo is a powerful and often funny portrait of men at war. Cary Grant is the Captain of USS Copperfin and his crew includes John Garfield, Dane Clark, John Forsyth, including Warner contract players Alan Hale and Warner Anderson. Christopher Palmer’s arrangement “A Montage For Orchestra” includes for the first time the complete love theme that Waxman composed for Grant’s cinema wife Faye Emerson.

The composer has written about his score:

Eighty-five percent of Destination Tokyo is musically scored… The sounds of guns, for instance, can become very monotonous unless they are given variety and climax by music… There is an underwater shot with three torpedoes heading for a Japanese battleship. This scene was scored by striking a cymbal and then reversing the soundtrack so that the volume increased instead of decreasing. When the soundtrack ran against its own frequencies, the effect was forceful and frightening. The Radar device sound to the same picture was done by a combination of instruments with the high frequencies eliminated and not played at a steady but at a variable speed. These technical tricks were devised before the scoring of the picture.