Mario Nascimbene

by Bruce Eder
 
Italian composer Mario Nascimbene was one of the first European composers to find a niche in Hollywood in the years after World War II. He established himself in Italian-made movies such as OK Nero, Rome, 11 O'Clock (1952), Chronicle of a Murder (1953), and Angela and the 100 Years of Love (1954), before coming to the attention of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who asked him to score his production of The Barefoot Contessa, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. This film's success led to other requests for his services from Hollywood producers, and over the next few years Nascimbene scored such movies as Alexander the Great, The Vikings, and Barabbas, and British films such as Room at the Top. His work in Hollywood-financed pictures faded somewhat in the 1960s along with the epic and costume-adventure genres, but from the middle of that decade into the early 1970s, he came to specialize to some extent in the writing of music for fantasy movies such as One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and Creatures the World Forgot. Although his involvement with Hollywood productions was limited to the 1950s and early 1960s, a good many of his scores got heard on soundtracks internationally due to the fact that the Hollywood studios -- owing to their record divisions -- felt compelled to release albums of his music.