Posted by
AJH on Sunday, March 08, 2009 10:32:21 PM
Burt Prelutsky at Big Hollywood highlighted the work of composers in a recent post (“Keeping Score at the Movies”). I am a huge film score (and soundtrack) aficionado.
“I’d like to pay tribute to the talented men who have done so much to make the great movies even greater and the not-so-great movies bearable.”
He has narrowed his personal favorites down to 25, leaving out several notables including John Williams, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, Nino Rota, William Walton, Alfred Newman, Miklos Rozsa, Victor Young, and Alex North.
In alphabetical order, then, they are: “A Place in the Sun,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “Citizen Kane,” “East of Eden,” “Force of Evil,” “Forever Amber,” “Jezebel,” “Of Mice and Men,” “On the Waterfront,” “Our Town,” “Raintree County,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “The Big Country,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Man With the Golden Arm,” “The Natural,” “The Third Man,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Untouchables,” “Things to Come,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” and “Witness.” If I added three more for good measure, they would probably be Allan Gray’s haunting “Stairway to Heaven,” John Barry’s “Somewhere in Time” and Richard Addinsell’s “Suicide Squadron,” which gave the world “The Warsaw Concerto.”
Sixteen composers turned out those 25 scores. Franz Waxman, Leonard Rosenman, Jerome Moross, Bernard Herrmann, John Green, Hugo Friedhofer, Randy Newman, Maurice Jarre, Arthur Bliss, Anton Karas, and Leonard Bernstein, each scored one of them. Aaron Copland, Ennio Morricone, and Max Steiner each scored two. David Raksin scored three, and the remarkable Elmer Bernstein scored five!
When it is done really well, a dramatic score can evoke a specific moment in a movie in much the same way that a certain scent can evoke a time, a place or a person.
So, the next time you go to the movies, and quickly discover that the critics have conned you once again, you could try shutting your eyes and listening to the music. You just might discover what you’ve been missing.
AJH