Murray Cutter
Encyclopedia
Murray Cutter was a versatile Hollywood orchestrator, working mainly for filmcomposer Max Steiner
Max Steiner
Max Steiner was an Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as...

, with over 150 credits spanning the mid-thirties to early 1960s. Nevertheless, he remains relatively unknown except for the much-loved original arrangement of Over the Rainbow
Over the Rainbow
"Over the Rainbow" is a classic Academy Award-winning ballad song with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. It was written for the movie The Wizard of Oz, and was sung by Judy Garland in the movie...

, which continues to be sampled by modern filmmakers (e.g. recently Baz Lurhmann's Australia and Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant
Gus Green Van Sant, Jr. is an American director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and author. He is a two time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director for his 1997 film Good Will Hunting and his 2008 film Milk, both of which were also nominated for Best Picture, and won the...

's Milk). Similar to fellow arranger Alexander Courage
Alexander Courage
Alexander "Sandy" Mair Courage Jr. was an American orchestrator, arranger, and composer of music, primarily for television and film.-Biography:...

, Cutter's name has tended to be overshadowed by the popularity of the composers with whom he was most associated.

Cutter was unusual among orchestrators who tended to specialize, in that he was adept in all genres: musicals (New Moon
New moon
In astronomical terminology, the new moon is the lunar phase that occurs when the Moon, in its monthly orbital motion around Earth, lies between Earth and the Sun, and is therefore in conjunction with the Sun as seen from Earth...

, Kismet
Kismet
Kismet may refer to:* Fate or Destiny in Turkish and Hindi-Urdu, a predetermined course of events, from Persian qesmat, from Arabic qisma, lot, from qasama, to divide, allot...

, The Desert Song
The Desert Song
The Desert Song is an operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel. It was inspired by the 1925 uprising of the Riffs, a group of Moroccan fighters, against French colonial rule. It was also inspired by stories of Lawrence of...

); romantic drama (Waterloo Bridge
Waterloo Bridge
Waterloo Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge crossing the River Thames in London, England between Blackfriars Bridge and Hungerford Bridge. The name of the bridge is in memory of the British victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815...

, A Summer Place
A Summer Place
A Summer Place is a 1958 novel by Sloan Wilson, a follow-on to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It was adapted into a 1959 film of the same name.-Plot summary:...

); adventure (Northwest Passage
Northwest Passage
The Northwest Passage is a sea route through the Arctic Ocean, along the northern coast of North America via waterways amidst the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans...

, The Caine Mutiny
The Caine Mutiny
The Caine Mutiny is a 1952 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II and deals with, among other things, the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by the captains of ships...

); family/comedy (National Velvet
National Velvet
National Velvet is a novel by Enid Bagnold , first published in 1935.-Plot summary:"National Velvet" is the story of a 14-year-old girl named Velvet Brown, who rides her horse to victory in the Grand National steeplechase...

, Sugarfoot
Sugarfoot
Sugarfoot is the title of a TV western that aired from 1957 to 1961. The series featured Will Hutchins as fledgling frontier lawyer Tom Brewster and Jack Elam as sidekick Toothy Thompson...

); suspense (The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine...

, Key Largo
Key Largo
Key Largo is an island in the upper Florida Keys archipelago and, at long, the largest of the Keys. It is also the northernmost of the Florida Keys in Monroe County, and the northernmost of the Keys connected by U.S. Highway 1...

); epics ("Helen of Troy"); and westerns (The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Johnny Belinda and The Searchers
The Searchers (film)
The Searchers is a 1956 American Western film directed by John Ford, based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May, and set during the Texas–Indian Wars...

).

An early assignment were the vocal arrangements for the 1937 film version of Rosalie
Rosalie (film)
Rosalie is an MGM film adaptation of the 1928 stage musical of the same name. The film was released in December 1937. The film follows the story of the musical but replaces most of the Broadway score with new songs by Cole Porter...

, which ten years before had been orchestrated for Broadway by Steiner. At MGM Cutter worked for Arthur Freed
Arthur Freed
Arthur Freed was born Arthur Grossman in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a Jewish American lyricist and a Hollywood film producer.- Biography :Freed began his career as a song-plugger and pianist in Chicago...

 and Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy was an American film director, producer and sometime actor.-Early life:Born to Jewish parents in San Francisco, California, his family was financially ruined by the 1906 earthquake...

 on The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)
The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but there were uncredited contributions by others. The lyrics for the songs...

. Under the loose musical direction of Herbert Stothart
Herbert Stothart
Herbert Stothart was a song writer, arranger, conductor, and composer. He was also nominated for nine Oscars, winning Best Original Score for The Wizard of Oz.-Biography:...

 he contributed the "metallic sound" for the Tin Woodman's If I Only Had a Heart. Cutter told Oz historian Aljean Harmetz
Aljean Harmetz
Aljean Harmetz is a Hollywood journalist and film historian. She has written as a Hollywood film correspondent for The New York Times since 1981....

 for "Over the Rainbow" he made it sound as pretty as he could with lots of strings and a touch of woodwind.

After the war he collaborated most closely with Steiner during his golden period with Warner Brothers. Their work on A Summer Place
A Summer Place
A Summer Place is a 1958 novel by Sloan Wilson, a follow-on to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It was adapted into a 1959 film of the same name.-Plot summary:...

netted them a US #1 hit for the insistent theme song. Joining ASCAP in 1946, Cutter occasionally wrote original music for the screen but rarely received a credit.

His last credit, along with Steiner, was for Disney's forgettable Those Calloways
Those Calloways
Those Calloways is a 1965 American film adaption of a book by Paul Annixter. Annixter and his wife Jane were writers of books for young readers. The film was produced by Disney and directed by Norman Tokar...

in 1965. No known Broadway credits are recorded for him.

Reference

Internet Movie Database entry

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