Friday Night at the Best Movie Scores and Soundtracks Ever!

How does a great movie win your heart?  Opinions differ widely and passionately.  My first Friday Night at the Movies diary argued that a great screenplay is the essential ingredient.  But right behind the screenplay probably comes a classic soundtrack.  Music is perhaps even more essential to a movie's success than visuals, if you think about it.  Soundtracks are also our favorite parts of the movie to enjoy for themselves.  

The classic movie soundtrack is probably The Wizard of Oz, 1939's Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg classic.  Despite flying monkeys, Munchkins, sumptuous color and Toto, the movie is most beloved for its score.  The lovely, classic, varied songs are perhaps the pinnacle of the movie music art, rivaled only by Singin' in the Rain.

Citing these two movies brings up a problem:  how to differentiate a musical from a non-musical.  There's no clear line, aside perhaps from whether the movie has any real purpose aside from the music.  It's a subjective line, but I'll try to exclude musicals tonight, 'cause that's a whole nother diary altogether.

Movie scores are a lot like classical music:  much of the best work was given us by the great masters.  Sometimes, as in Serge Prokofiev's Alexsandr Nevsky the two worlds intersect.  Maybe the greatest of the movie masters was Bernard Herrmann.  In decades of work in the studio system, he gave us classics as various as Citizen Kane, Psycho and his last, Taxi Driver.  Max Steiner was his predecessor, the composer of King Kong and Gone with the Wind.  Elmer Bernstein was their peer in quality and even more versatile, though his scores like The Magnificent Seven and The Man with the Golden Arm are not as well remembered. Leonard Bernstein composed only two movie scores, but On the Waterfront and West Side Story (an exception to my musical rule) are unforgettable.  Erich Korngold had a style of his own, and his Adventures of Robin Hood is one of the most purely cinematic soundtracks ever.

A later generation of masters produced equally memorable soundtracks.  Maurice Jarre contributed Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.  Ennio Morricone is best known for his spaghetti western soundtracks like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars, though he also wrote the sountrack to The Mission.  Nino Rota was Fellini's great collaborator, but is best known for the haunting, ironic score to The Godfather.  Jerry Goldsmith has scored hundreds of movies, but his best score is probably Chinatown.  Henry Mancini has won fistfuls of Oscars for movies like The Pink Panther and Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Modern masters have even more individual styles, such as Thomas Newman's spare minimalism, best heard in American Beauty.

Moving away from the classical scores, rock and other 20th century music genres have also supplied classic soundtracks.  The first great classics in the rock genre, with apologies to Elvis fans, are the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night and Help!  Curtis Mayfield gave us one of the best rock soundtracks in the otherwise forgettable Superfly.  Simon and Garfunkel were the biggest reason The Graduate is one of the great movie classics.  And Prince moved into the ranks of rock superstars after Purple Rain.  The Harder They Come introduced the greatest of reggae to most Americans.  Jazz artists mustn't be forgotten -- my favorite jazz score is Herbie Hancock's Round Midnight with the inimitable Dexter Gordon.  Even the synthesizer music movement has contributed classic soundtracks, such as Vangelis' Blade Runner and A Clockwork Orange, by Wendy Carlos.

In recent decades composed scores have been rivaled in popularity by compilations of existing music.  Stanley Kubrick ditched an Alex North score for his own musical ideas in 2001:  A Space Odyssey, giving the Strausses -- Richard and Johann Jr. -- perhaps their greatest posthumous popularity.  Anerican Graffiti's 50's hits were the star of George Lucas' first great movie.  The music selected in Trainspotting both illuminated and made bearable that movie's gritty, unsparing story and cinematography.  And, in an improbable choice, Mark Shaiman both composed a great score and put together a great compilation of quotes in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.

I've left off many of my favorites and no doubt yours, despite the length of this list, because of the embarrassment of riches in movie music.  How many movie soundtracks have you owned, and which are your favorites? Dooley Wilson, anyone?

NOTE:  In an upcoming movie diary, Spud1 will pay tribute to the great movie theaters.  Put your thinking caps on for that one, movie fans.