The Big Whatsit

Both Empire magazine and the Observer have recently produced their own lists of best film scores, and, never one to leave any bandwagon unjumped, I have half-inched the concept for this here site. As we all know, a great soundtrack can elevate the movie to which it’s attached. Famously, Star Wars was taken far more seriously by those test-viewing it after John Williams had worked his magic over the action. Talking of Williams, is it possible to even think about Jaws without that creepy and ominous signature tune running through your head? Or how about the nightmarish use of strings by Bernard Hermann for Psycho’s shower scene? Vangelis’s score for Chariots of Fire has endured longer than the film, whilst The Sound of Music’s soundtrack album remains one of the all-time bestsellers.

The following is my humble list of ten favourites, soundtracks that have really done their part to lift a movie in a significant and enduring way. Obviously, it’s entirely subjective. Your top ten would no doubt be very different to mine, and incidentally, I’d love to hear about these. Two rules - it must be a score written specifically for the film i.e. no soundtrack made up of individual songs, like Trainspotting, and I can’t choose a composer’s work more than once, otherwise this may turn out to be a list dominated by Morricone…

10. Jean de Florette (Jean-Claude Petit)
It’s the Stella Artois music, isn’t it? Stella pinched Jean de Florette’s theme for a long-running string of commercials, each featuring scenes from a rural village, and the price punters are willing to pay for a ‘reassuringly expensive’ pint. Claude Berri’s morality tale is itself set in a forgotten corner of France during some unspecified time in the past. Petit’s score follows poor Gerard Depardieu around as he struggles to make a business of his farmland, never knowing that his new friend from the neighbouring plot is screwing him out of a steady water supply. As it becomes clear that Depardieu’s hunchback is doomed to failure, the music takes on an ever greater degree of tragedy, reflecting the dramatic irony afflicting him whilst capturing beautifully the sun and countryside simplicity of the surroundings.

9. The Ipcress File (John Barry)
Perpetually intertwined with James Bond, Barry has provided excellent and memorable scores for a number of movies. His music for Dances with Wolves, for instance, reflects the rather beautiful sadness of the dying old west. But The Ipcress File perhaps towers over all of them. The film, based on Len Deighton’s fiction, was intended to be a downbeat alternative to Bond. Whilst 007 lives in a swirling world of Bollinger and Aston Martins, Ipcress’s hero - Harry Palmer, played by Michael Caine - is first seen fixing himself a morning coffee in his unremarkable flat. It’s a scene that looks like its era, the 1960s, and in many ways, this score is the sixties, featuring a signature arrangement that is simple enough to mirror the ordinariness of Palmer’s life, yet holds sufficient glamour and mysteriousness to tease out the hidden depths of a spy’s life.

8. Spirited Away (Joe Hisaishi)
Music isn’t the first thing one thinks about when watching Ghibli Studio’s marvellous animations, but in Spirited Away - its most famous export - the score and film combine to sublime effect. What elevates Hisaishi’s work is its essential ‘Japaneseness,’ the mixing of ethnic styles and instruments with a full orchestra to give it a distinctive Eastern feel. This is witnessed best in the scene where Chihiro watches a queue of masked spirits depart a steamer on their way to the bath house. The music finest moment, however, takes place on the train journey. As Sen and her friends travel to Swampy Bottom, they share the carriage with numerous spirits, all silhouetted human forms, who get off at various stops along the way. Sen glances outside at the blackened outline of a little girl, waiting on the platform for someone who doesn’t come, and perhaps never will. It’s a lovely piece filled with melancholy for the quiet sadness of everyone on that train.

7. Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (Howard Shore)
By the third and final part of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Shores’s score covered virtually every second of the footage in what became a fairly bloated climax. In the first, the one where they had to impress us with this new world, his music is used intelligently and to best effect. Shore begins by providing a theme tune for the Shire that fits the hobbits so well, it’s almost impossible to read the early chapters of Tolkein’s book without whistling the Celtic-inspired refrains to yourself. But there’s more. Shore captures the otherworldly home of Galadriel, the heroic intentions of the Fellowship, and at its finest, the flight from Moria, as a chorus of voices is added to the orchestra to usher in the ancient evil of the mountain’s Balrog.

6. Superman: the Movie (John Williams)
Williams is synonymous with big name movies from the last thirty years. Lucas and Spielberg’s continuing requests for his services ensures that his music is attached to some of the biggest names around, and it’s impossible to deny the contribution he has made to the likes of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and countless others. But what to choose as the best? Where have those fanfares been used to their most optimal effect? I’ve gone for Superman, having watched it over Christmas for the first time since I was a child, and unlike many that have undergone a similar ritual, it still shines as a classic movie that beautifully combines comedy, high emotion and a sense of mythology. Williams gets the superhero element of the film’s eponymous character exactly right in his theme tune, one so adored that it was allowed to play over some of the longest opening credits in celluloid history. Added to that are the mysterious strains that accompany Clark Kent’s discoveries of his own power, the feisty yet adorable tune attached to Lois Lane, and wholly suitable wonder and majesty that meets the scenes set on dying Krypton.

5. Blade Runner (Vangelis)
The darling of Film Studies classes is fortunate enough to hold hands with Vangelis’s finest work. His synthesisers have been used to excellent effect elsewhere. Both the scores for Chariots of Fire and Alexander are instantly identifiable, and either has its high points. But it’s here, where he, Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford all combined to produce their best stuff that you get the real pay-off. Blade Runner is set in a near future, and it’s entirely appropriate for the elegant, space age Vangelis soundtrack to go with those shots of beautiful, dark cityscapes, Rutger Hauer talking about the things he’s seen, and the heartbreakingly delicate music that is used when Sean Young appears as the lovely android, Rachel. Quite simply, a piece of majesty, and it’s criminal that we could only buy the soundtrack so recently.

4. North by Northwest (Bernard Hermann)
Hermann’s talents were called on to provide scores for three of Hitchcock’s best films - Vertigo, Psycho, and this - and in each case, he had to produce something individual for completely different features. The ’shower scene’ strings from Psycho represent the most famous of these, though personally I prefer the music box madness of Vertigo, complete with Spirograph images filling the screen. Even more, I think the soundtrack for North by Northwest ticks every box. One of the Master’s most accessible and relentlessly exciting films, Hermann’s title track provides a suitable sense of urgency, as lines cut across the screen, only to dissolve into the window frames of a glass-fronted tower block. There’s a real undercurrent of menace in the music, a sense that nobody is who they appear to be, whilst at the fore the frantic pace covers Cary Grant’s flight in a way that’s thrillingly sublime.

3. The Fearless Vampire Killers (Christopher Komeda)
What do you prefer? Those old Hammer soundtracks, where the composers simply filled the score with the wrong notes to provide music that was off-kilter and disorientating? Or this, with its authentic Eastern European sound and sense of being actually quite scary? Roman Polanski’s vampire comedy might not be to everybody’s taste, especially those raised on a diet of Christopher Lee and Francis Ford Coppola’s terrible take on Dracula, but it plays exactly like a tale set in some remote Balkan hinterland. The film has a genuine sense of place, and so does the soundtrack, which is all howling choruses and local instruments. Polish-born Komeda transports us to the serf village that’s in constant terror of its nearby vampire castle with a score that is gothic in nature, and fulfils the environment that Polanski was aiming for with a suitable ethnic air.

2. The Third Man (Anton Karas)
In a moviemaking story that has become the stuff of legend, The Third Man’s director, Carol Reed, spotted Karas on a visit to Vienna before production began and instantly fell in love with his zither playing. Signed up to provide the score almost instantly, Karas earned worldwide fame for his unique and unusual work that fits the film like a glove. Roaming the bombed out streets and night time alleys of post-war Vienna, Karas’s zither provides a distinctive soundtrack, which is both beautiful and filled with an unnamed menace. It carries a sinister air, as Holly Martins becomes more embroiled in the Viennese underworld, a shady racket of black market goods, fake passports and the mysterious death of his best friend, who turns out to be not all he seems. The music was so effective that the film’s credits appear over the shot of a zither’s strings being plucked to the classic signature tune.

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Ennio Morricone)
A predictable choice, I fear, as regular readers of the site already know what I think of the movie, and its unbeatable score. I covered this in a separate blog about Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, and can find nothing better to say than to quote my own words from that link:

“It’s perhaps the most perfect accompaniment to what’s happening on the screen. Apart from the celebrated title track and the cemetery scene, you could pick any of his incidental pieces as a favourite. I have three. The first happens early, as Stevens’ young son watches Angel Eyes approaching. The music is both light and foreboding. Trouble’s clearly on the horizon. Tarantino pinched this brief piece to mark the first appearance of Bill in Kill Bill Volume 2, and he wasn’t wrong to do so. The second is more dolesome, and plays as Angel Eyes comes across a ruined fort of dead or dying soldiers. As the music begins to fade, we hear battle trumpets dying quietly in the background. And finally, the torture scene. Tuco is being punched to pieces by Angel Eyes’ henchman whilst in a prisoner-of-war camp. Outside, to mask the commotion, a loose band of captured Confederates are made to play a sad tune that is filled with regret, whilst Blondie is informed this happens every time someone is being tortured.”