Program Notes

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 Coperfin 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 sound-
track 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.