Ronald Stein

Ronald Stein never attained the stature among film composers enjoyed by figures such as Bernard Herrmann or Alfred Newman. Throughout most of his professional life he supplied music for productions whose total expenditures barely exceeded the music budgets alone of the pictures those more celebrated artists scored. Nevertheless he demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness both as composer and conductor while operating under severe financial restrictions, and he established a distinctive identity within the realm of low-budget genre pictures, especially exploitation features, science-fiction thrillers, and horror films, largely through sustained collaboration with American International Pictures and, on a smaller scale, Allied Artists. Viewers who recall Roger Corman’s Not of This Earth or Attack of the Crab Monsters, or Nathan Juran’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, often retain Stein’s contributions to the soundtracks as vividly as any visual element of those productions.

He entered the world in St. Louis on April 12, 1930. As a child he began piano studies under his mother Cecilia, a former theater pianist who had accompanied silent films. From her he absorbed both musical technique and an early enthusiasm for cinema, arriving at precisely the moment when soundtrack composition was entering its so-called Golden Age through the work of Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Between the ages of eight and seventeen he received private instruction at the Leo C. Miller studios, then enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis. While an undergraduate he created musical entertainments for fellow students, served as rehearsal pianist, and later worked as assistant conductor at the Municipal Opera Theatre. Although he planned to continue at Yale, military conscription intervened soon after he began studies there; during the ensuing year in uniform he composed and led military revues.

His goal remained the writing of motion-picture scores, yet every studio he approached discouraged him from relocating to Hollywood. Undeterred, he arrived in the city and in the summer of 1955 encountered director-producer Roger Corman, who required economical music for his modest projects. Stein demonstrated he could deliver usable scores rapidly, completing his first assignment, Apache Woman, by September of that year. Released by American International Pictures, the film achieved modest commercial results consistent with the economics of B-movie distribution, yet it proved engaging enough to earn a five-year contract that placed him squarely inside the world of low-budget genre filmmaking. He continued working as an independent contractor through the early and middle 1960s, ultimately furnishing scores for more than 140 features between 1955 and 1970. Among the science-fiction titles were The Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, and Attack of the Crab Monsters; horror entries included The Undead, The She Creature, and The Haunted Palace; and teen-oriented exploitation pictures encompassed Hot Rod Gang, Runaway Daughter, and Reform School Hellcats. Occasional departures from these categories included the western The Legend of Tom Dooley and Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. Even when the films themselves proved slight, his music frequently supplied compensating strength.

The spectral alien figure in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, for instance, might invite amusement, yet Stein’s underscoring lent the picture an unexpected scale and gravity. Comparable effectiveness marked his contributions to Attack of the Crab Monsters, Not of This Earth, and The Terror, where the music compensated for numerous technical and dramatic shortcomings. Beyond their functional role, many of these scores possessed intrinsic musical interest that revealed itself upon attentive listening. Beginning in the mid-1960s his reputation for skilled, economical work opened doors to higher-profile assignments, among them Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People and Richard Rush’s Getting Straight. Between 1973 and 1978 he served as post-production supervisor for Paragon Films and participated in television production. For most of the final decade of his life he taught music at the University of Colorado in Denver, returning briefly to film work in the mid-1980s before succumbing to pancreatic cancer in 1988. In 1995 Varese Sarabande Records issued Not of This Earth, presenting the original unmixed and unedited session recordings from seven of the horror and science-fiction pictures he scored.