Hanns Eisler Hanns Eisler (Johannes Eisler, 1898-1962) is one of the few film music composers to have a national anthem to his credit and to have been banned from at least two countries. A dedicated Marxist and close friend of Charlie Chaplin, Eisler composed East Germany's national hymn not long after after being deported from the US in 1947 as an "unfriendly witness" during the notorious House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 hearings. |
Born in Leipzig, Eisler came to Hollywood via a long and circuitous route after he had been expelled from Germany in 1933 because of his involvement with the leftist film Kühle Wampe (1932). Eisler had been a student of the famous Austrian 12-tone, "nontonal" composer Arnold Schönberg (who was himself forced out of Germany to the US in 1933). After a film and stage music career in Europe that had begun in the 1920s in Germany, Eisler composed for both Broadway and Hollywood following his arrival in the US in 1939. His US film credits include: The Forgotten Village (1941), Hangmen Also Die (1943), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), Jealousy (1945), The Spanish Main (1945), A Scandal in Paris (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947).
|
