Hollywood Career
During his Broadway apprenticeship Salinger first came across Johnny Green, his future MGM musical director, when they were recording motion picture overtures in the early days of sound at New York to be shown before the main features began. Salinger first came out to Hollywood in the late 1930s to work for Alfred Newman (e.g. Born to Dance and Gunga Din) and also collaborated with the famed Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett on the arrangements for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' 1938 dance picture Carefree.
Salinger is recognized as MGM's best principal orchestrator of musicals made between 1942 and 1962. He reputedly studied mathematical musical progressions under the influential theorist Joseph Schillinger, whose other students included George Gershwin, and major Broadway/Hollywood orchestrators such as Ted Royal, Edward B. Powell and Herbert W. Spencer. Salinger employed a somewhat smaller orchestra than usual, but nevertheless achieved a rich, elaborately constructed sound in his arrangements. The fact that the orchestra that Salinger used was smaller in size than the normal huge studio orchestra was practically unnoticeable, except that the quality of the orchestral sound on films that Salinger worked on seemed greatly improved, with much less distortion than was common in the days before true high fidelity.
However, in Hugh Fordin's The World of Entertainment: The Freed Unit at MGM, a 1975 book dealing with the MGM musicals, composer-conductor Adolph Deutsch, who worked with Salinger on more than one film, criticized his orchestrations for the Jerome Kern 1946 biopic Till the Clouds Roll By as being "too elaborate" for a composer like Kern (a criticism that Salinger reportedly did not take well) and recounted that he stated that he would only work with Salinger on the 1951 film version of Show Boat (music by Kern) if he "simplified" his style of orchestration. (The two did work on the film, receiving a joint Academy Award nomination for it.)
Salinger orchestrated most of the musicals that MGM is famous for; among them, in addition to the 1951 Show Boat, were Girl Crazy (the 1943 version), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (which included a memorable arrangement of The Trolley Song), Anchors Aweigh (1945), the 1947 film version of Good News, Summer Holiday (1948), the 1949 film version of On the Town, the 1950 film version of Annie Get Your Gun, Singin' in the Rain (1952), the 1953 film version of Kiss Me, Kate, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), An American in Paris (1951), The Band Wagon (1953), Gene Kelly's pioneering 1956 all-ballet film Invitation to the Dance and the original film musical Gigi (1958). His lush scoring for the ballet sequences in Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon (1954) have come to be regarded as high points of the orchestrator's art in the Golden Age of musicals.
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