The Top Ten Soundtracks of ALL Time??? Okay, Cue Em' Up!
Apr 09 '00 (Updated Feb 13 '04)
The Bottom Line As with potato chips, it is hard to limit yourself to TEN GREAT FILM SOUNDTRACKS!
In the form of music boxes, recorded music goes back to the Eighteenth Century, which may lead us to the latest movie with a soundtrack by Smash Mouth. To pick the Top Ten Soundtracks of All Time is a daunting, I submit, an impossible task. If we limit ourselves only to musicals and motion picture scores, we must sift through tens of thousands of recordings.
From the earliest days of the Motion Picture, it was noted that playing music behind the images changed audience perception of what they thought they were seeing. Try screening the great "Odessa Steps" sequence of Eisenstein's silent BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) on your VCR to a pounding #6 "Leningrad" Symphony by Shostakovich on your CD player, and then show it again to some jazz by Wynton Marsalis. You have two very different movies, and yet, the story told by the brilliant visuals is the same.
In the 1920's, prestige silent pictures had scores composed for them, played by symphony orchestras in Western cities. Major composers contributed their talent, such as Artur Honnegger in his score for Abel Gance's NAPOLEON in 1927. (Recently, many of these scores have been recorded for the first time by modern symphony orchestras.) Within a year after 1927, synchronized music was being added to film by the use of special phonograph records. Then came sound on an optical strip. In Hollywood, Max Steiner composed and conducted the first great soundtrack, for KING KONG (1933), while he watched the moving images on a screen behind his orchestra. It became a method used in motion picture production until the introduction of magnetic tape in the 1950's.
The first commercial cast recording of an entire musical play score dates from The Cradle Will Rock (words and music by Marc Blitzstein) in the late 1930's. And indeed, choral scores in motion pictures began to appear at about this time. Singing Cowboys became a rage: John Wayne as Singing Sandy; Gene Autry and then Roy Rogers.
Motion Pictures resemble music more than any other art form.
Then, in 1941, Orson Welles cut the opening sequence of CITIZEN KANE to mood music composed by Bernard Herrmann. This was the reverse of what had become Hollywood studio practice. The next year, they planned to cut, in so far was possible, the entire production of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS to a symphony of 131 minutes composed by Herrmann. That film was mutilated, and Herrmann became the first composer to sue a Hollywood Studio (RKO) to have his name removed from a picture.
A major departure came when Tex Ritter sang "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling" behind the metronomed precision of HIGH NOON (ZINNEMANN, 1952). That song was hugely successful, selling millions of records. The event started Hollywood on its course to the present day, where soundtracks by popular musical groups of all kinds are used to insure profit, many times netting more money than the film itself.
Indeed, when I wandered on to this site, I could find few soundtracks listed by Epinions dating before 1950. Few of my colleagues had Top Ten picks from before 1970.
As I say, it is an impossible task, but here is my attempt to select the Ten Soundtracks I would take to a desert island, based on the criterion that the music should complement the film. All the following scores may be purchased, in whole or part, on CD:
10. MAGNOLIA, 1999 (Music and words by Aimee Mann and Jonn Brion). I don't like modern vocal scores for films because they generally play against the images. The music in this film, especially the poignant songs of, and sung by, Miss Mann are a welcome exception.
10a. THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, 1950 (Miklos Rozsa). For this influential John Huston "caper film," Rozsa provided the epitome of economy in scoring for Motion Pictures. The picture is 112 minutes long. It begins with a Main Title theme. Then, for over 100 minutes, there is no scored music, until the badly shot up anti-hero (Sterling Hayden) makes a run with his girl (Jean Hagen) for his Kentucky Blue Grass roots. Bam! we have the thumping kind of chase music Rozsa was known for in his Hollywood years, and it stops as suddenly as it started. A Masterful use of music.
9. CABARET, 1972 (Music and words by Fred Ebb and John Kander; Scored by Ralph Burns). This selection takes care of a modern musical and, at the same time, a film which creates a vivid picture of Weimar Germany on the Eve of Hitler, in part through the integral use of music, song and dance. Memorable songs: "Cabaret," "Wilkommen," "Mein Herr," Maybe This Time, "Money, Money," and "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."
9a. KINGS ROW, 1941 (Erich Maria Korngold). The film is a story of corruption in small town American Life which anticipates THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. In some ways a conventional studio picture, it is notable for its look at the harsh underside of early day Morning in America. It is moody and in parts moving as few films of the period are. It boasts superb performances by Claude Rains, Betty Field, Robert Cummings, Ann Sheridan, Maria Ospenskaya, Charles Coburn, Nancy Coleman, Judith Anderson, and, significantly, Ronald Reagan. Much of the film's power derives from the lush romantic and tragic beauty of Korngold's score.
8. THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, 1936 (Max Steiner). Movies were meant for action, and this film is it. Flawed as the story is historically, Errol Flynn's performance combined with Steiner's music carries the day, especially in the charge theme, which lasts over ten minutes. It begins at a canter and ends with a shot-through gallop, "Rule Britannia" entangled by the Russian Czarist Anthem, and pierced by the desperate call of bugles. This score creates an integration of classic elements in Hollywood film making seldom matched.
8a. GUNGA DIN, 1939 (Alfred Newman). Here is one of the last of the celebrations of the Empire on which the Sun never set before WW II. George Stevens called it "one of those fascist films you could make before the War." Newman's score is both stirring and absurd as it keeps everything rolling along with a theme for every mood. If we try not to come down on it too hard, it is really a plea for racial and ethnic understanding, even if Gunga Din is played by a white American and thousands of Hindus die. The film's sense of spirit and humor are hard to deny. Close listeners will detect that Bernard Herrman borrowed bits of the score for his musical jig-saw pastiche during "The News on the March" parody in CITIZEN KANE.
7. THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD, 1940 (MIKLOS ROZSA). Producer Alexander Korda wanted to knock the eye out of Hollywood so they would give facilities to his British films. He did impress Hollywood with this gorgeous Arabian Nights tale (though the War thwarted his larger ambition). Rozsa's musical themes for "the little Sailor (beggar) boy" (Sabu), the Gotama-like prince (John Justin), the beautiful princess (June Duprez), and the evil sorcerer (Conrad Veidt) are as magical today as they were then.
6. LAURA, 1944 (David Raksin). If the greed of Hollywood concerning musical scores had stopped with the soundtrack for LAURA, I would have no quarrel with the commercialization of soundtracks. Raksin, depressed that his wife was leaving him, knocked out the theme over a weekend. Twentieth Century Fox Chief Darryl F. Zanuck didn't want to use it, but once he did, he had words set to it, and the song is now a Standard. However, in the movie, only the theme is used . . . perfectly. We first hear it when a troubled detective (Dana Andrews) looks up at the portrait
of a missing model, Laura (Gene Tierney). It informs the rest of the mystery with a sense, many men have felt, of "the girl who got away."
6a. VERTIGO, 1958 (BERNARD HERRMANN). David Thompson, in his authoritative Biographical Dictionary of Film, includes only one film composer: Herrmann. Thomson and many critics regard him as the greatest film composer of the 20th Century. I might have put in CITIZEN KANE, (WELLES, 1941), PSYCHO (Hitchcock, 1960) or his last score for Martin Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER (1976). However, I think that this score is the most complete and fully realized he ever composed for a finished film. It is Black Magic.
5. BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, 1957 (Sir Malcolm Arnold). Arnold wrote a number of infectious scores, most notably for THE AFRICAN QUEEN (Huston, 1951), before turning to more accepted symphonic work, but . . . KWAI is the largest work he ever did for film, bridging a nearly two and a half hour epic. It is "The Colonel Bogey March" theme that we remember, but the rest of the score delineates with restraint the shifts of mood in this World War II epic black comedy. Arnold had a personal reason to exert himself on BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI; he was ignominiously taken prisoner during the first days of World War II.
5a. RED RIVER, 1948 (DIMITRI TIOMKIN). We need a Western Score, and none is so full of sweep and grandeur as Tiomkin's score for Howard Hawks' classic confrontation of father and son over the future. When the foremen of the great cattle drive to Abilene shout out like pistols to get the doggies moving, and the great heroic musical theme kicks in, it is one of the exhilarating, truly patriotic moments in American film. It would be less so without Tiomkin, who got it right, here.
4. SCARAMOUCHE, 1952 (Victor Young). Rather than the picking the obvious score, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD by Korngold, for my Swashbuckler entry, I take this humorous, exciting, romantic, poignant work by Victor Young at his most productive. (The next year he did the music for SHANE.) Perhaps Stewart Granger was no Flynn, but Young made him seem so. Maybe Granger would have been more a Flynn if his other films had been scored this well.
4a. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, 1970 (Miklos Rozsa). In Billy Wilder's last important, little seen, most personal film, he seems to psychoanalyze himself to the themes Rozsa used 30 years earlier in THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD. If you are a fan of Billy Wilder, and haven't seen this picture, it is a revelation. A touch of twisted sentiment is revealed in that tough old cynic.
3. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, (1952). (Words and music by Arthur Freed and Ignacio Herb Brown). Here is the classic rags to remorse story (with a happy ending) which epitomizes the Hollywood Musical, combined with an original witty, historical script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green about the Hollywood Sound Revolution, and laced with some of the best popular songs of a 30 year period. On my desert island -- the one referred to at the beginning of my list -- I want to render "Singin' in the Rain," "Broadway Melody,"I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin', "My Lucky Star," while I envisage the whole "Broadway Rhythm" sequence with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. And look for that boat on the horizon.
3a. ROUND MIDNIGHT, (1986). (Herby Hancock). This superb evocation of the roots of Modern Jazz, based on the lives of Bud Powell and Lester Young, who exiled themselves to Europe for much of their careers, starred Saxaphonist Extrordinaire Dexter Gordon in an ironic story of the sometimes deadly worship of Black American Jazz in France. Counterpointed by Hancock's stellar creations, selections, and arrangements, ROUND MIDNIGHT was designed by an Hungarian genius (Alexander Trauner) and directed by a Frenchman (Bertrand Tavernier). With the possible exception of Elmer Bernstein and Chico Hamilton's evocative work on SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957), Hancock's is the best Jazz score for a motion picture that I know of: "Round Midnight," "Chan's Song," "Una Noche con Francis," "Minuit aux Champs-Elysees."
3b. SUNSET BOULEVARD, 1950 (Franz Waxman). The dark side of Hollywood is served up by Billy Wilder, and served by the veteran Waxman, whose career went back to THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (Whale, 1935). Waxman's elegized in SUNSET BOULEVARD the most sad and electrifying expose ever made of Hollywood's price for fame. (Also in 1950, he produced the haunting score for George Stevens' A PLACE IN THE SUN). Gloria Swanson's tango to Waxman's finale has gone into the Culture.
3c. LA CONFIDENTIAL, 1997 (Jerry Goldsmith). Orson Welles, who correctly understood that what he brought to Hollywood was a new understanding for the uses of sound and music in film, moved later in his career to utilize "found" and "natural source" music. Curtis Hanson's film is in many ways an homage to Welles' 1958 TOUCH OF EVIL, in which Welles wanted most of the music to come from radios and juke boxes. (See the 1998 Restoration.) Goldsmith composed about six minutes of original music for LA CONFIDENTIAL. The rest is extentions and repetitions of those themes, and popular songs heard on radios and juke boxes during the 1950's.
2. THE RED SHOES, 1948 (Brian Easdale). Here is the sublime wedding of music to film -- and film to music -- as well as to dance, drama, romance, art, humor, and tragedy. It is a nearly perfect score, but after the collapse of The Archers Production Company in 1960, Easdale was forgotten until, just before his death in 1995, he heard his "Red Shoes Suite" performed by symphonic orchestras to critical plaudits.
1. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, 1942 (Bernard Herrmann). I am speaking of that 131 minute version for the film mentioned in the sixth paragraph. That film no longer exists. If it did, it would no doubt be the masterpiece Orson Welles intended it to be, and we would not have to apologize for what is left. As he said, "That's the sad part. It's gone . . . gone." The film may be gone, but Herrmann's score survived, and in 1990, an orchestra recorded the whole thing. It describes the long, tragic economic and social arc of American Middle Class life in the 20th Century, from sleigh rides to gridlock. It is a symphonic work in which the automobile is the villain. Since you can't see the film as shot, the next best thing is to listen to the music: The Magnificent Ambersons by Bernard Herrmann, The Australian Philharmonic Orchestra, Tony Bremmer, Conductor; Preamble PRCD 1783 Stereo.
Well, as usual in these lists, I had to fudge a little.
And so, as Orson Welles, like a man marooned on a desert island (or in a retirement home) at the end of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, was supposed to say to a screen black as night: "Ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of the story."
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For Macresarf1 reviews of some of the movies whose soundtracks are discussed here, go to the following links:
MAGNOLIA --
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-6D27-171053E5-388A5452-prod3
THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE --
http://www.epinions.com/content_45186256516
GUNGA DIN --
http://www.epinions.com/content_44456447620
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES --
http://www.epinions.com/content_10460106372
VERTIGO --
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-7EAA-CF91DAC-388256AE-bd1
ROUND MIDNIGHT --
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-7DFE-85D27C-39A706EF-prod1
THE RED SHOES --
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-6FFA-8A3D9A5-389B6CC3-prod1
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