Ten Deep 08.13.09: Top 10 Movie Scores

Posted by Owain J. Brimfield on 08.13.2009

It's another musical medley this week, so dust off the headphones again as Owain J. Brimfield takes a look at and a listen to the top ten movie scores!





Welcome to week 42 of 'Ten Deep'! It's another musical adventure this week as we turn our cultured ear to some classic movie scores, but before we do that, as always it's time for some:

Reactions and interactions

I have to say, the quality of the comments was pretty sub-par last week. Darth Mortis said it best:

"did anyone actually read the bit where he said that he only includes things that he is personally familiar with?... try reading all the bits before the list. quite educational."

Yes, no fewer than twelve (!) of you "suggested" soundtracks that I specifically mentioned that I would be excluding. Must try harder, people, and use the power of your eyesight to read the words that I write. Where's your pithy sarcasm now, El Chupa Nibre? That's right - crying alone in the basement, that's where.

Naturally enough, there were also a number of suggestions that cropped up time and again, so let's take a quick look through those:

Natural Born Killers - this was quite literally the last film to be chopped off the shortlist, as I eventually plumped for Easy Rider in the third "honorable mention" spot. I don't want to overburden what's supposed to be a top ten column with too many HMs, so I set the cap at three, but yes, this film has a quality soundtrack and could easily have made it into the column.

The Crow - I was honestly surprised with all the love for this one; it's a good compilation of alt-rock and gothic-tinged tunes (and a few nice bits of guitar soloing from Draven), but nothing that would mark it as outstanding as far as I'm concerned. Still, from the number of nominations this one gathered it obviously struck a chord [zing!] with a number of moviegoers, so we'll give it kudos for that.

Judgment Night - sorry, but this one should be purged from existence for the unholy collaboration of Slayer and Ice-T, which violates pretty much every good-taste bone in my body.

Forrest Gump - another one that just failed to make the cut for an HM, although I must admit I did forget about it during the initial shortlist compilation. Some classics here and no mistake.

Watchmen - sadly, I haven't got around to watching this yet, as it didn't get a cinematic release where I live. Looks like a potential classic soundtrack in the making judging from the comments though, so I'll be sure to check it out as soon as I can.

Purple Rain - ...yeeeeeaaah, not so much.

Some love for an apparent master of the soundtrack Wes Anderson, from Guest#7930. My dislike of Anderson has been documented in several previous columns, hence that exclusion.

Madcap Unlimited suggests that The Beta Band's 'Dry the Rain' is actually one of the band's few good songs, which, on the basis of my owning only The Three EPs of that band, I'd be tempted to agree with.

HBK mentions the disappointment of Dazed and Confused's soundtrack album missing out 'Sweet Emotion'. I don't purchase soundtrack albums myself, but that must be pretty grating.

A sweet sentiment from Antigomus suggesting that part of the reason O Brother had such a great soundtrack is that it can be enjoyed by listeners of all ages, and I'd be hard pressed to disagree.

James suggests the Power Rangers soundtrack, which I initially laughed off. On second thought though, there actually some pretty kick-ass songs on there, which just goes to show that even the shittiest film can be redeemed to some extent by its choice of soundtrack.

And a personal favorite from justwaveyourhandsintheair is the soundtrack to Tim Burton's Batman, which actually did have some pretty cool accompanying singles, although they weren't enough to kick me out of the tiny minority who didn't enjoy that film.

Moving on!

We're flipping things on their head from last week, and taking a look (or listen) at the best movie scores, as opposed to soundtracks. This means that any accompanying songs are disregarded; it's purely the merits of the film's compositional score that we're listening to. Again, we'll be disregarding musicals since they've been covered in a previous column. Note also the exclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I know the less-educated of you will complain about unless I point out for you that the film's score was made up entirely of existing classical pieces selected by Kubrick. Many composers have attained legendary status through their work in the film industry, and if a movie's soundtrack is important, than the score is arguably even more so - you can take almost any major film you can think of and strip away the score, and the film is barely half as good. Incidentally, this topic has had the largest final shortlist of any I've attempted thus far, no fewer than 23 films, so I'm betting there'll be a fair few suggestions from you guys. Anyway, let's get going, and see how many of these end up being John Williams scores.

As always, there's one golden rule: if I haven't seen it, it's not allowed on the list.

This week's golden rule notable omissions: Chariots of Fire, Doctor Zhivago, Out of Africa





Honorable mention: Once Upon a Time in the West - Ennio Morricone

Not the composer's best work, though - that comes later.

Honorable mention: Lawrence of Arabia - Maurice Jarre

Even more impressive is that Jarre's entire score was apparently composed in just six weeks.

Honorable mention: Superman - John Williams

The archetypal comic-book movie score.

10. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - Tan Dun

And so we begin our list with an entrant that surprised even myself, since I'd assumed it would be removed from the shortlist in short order, but it actually managed to outlast the rest of the competition and knock out some heavyweight contenders, meaning there'll be no shortage of omissions this week for everybody to moan about discuss in the comments section. The key to Tan Dun's epic score's surprising success lies, as far as I'm concerned at least, in managing to musically reconcile the romance of the ancient Far East, and the various love stories that permeate the film's subplots, with the mystery of the wuxia martial arts - and no doubt someone will tell me I've employed that term incorrectly - that form the backbone of the film's action sequences and drive the story's set pieces. The latter find themselves at times accompanied memorably by heavily percussive rhythms, almost tribal in nature (quite reminiscent in fact of some of Bear McCreary's work on the Battlestar Galactica TV series, or should that be the other way around), but it's the pieces following the former theme that really do Ang Lee's movie justice. The haunting and evocative cello melodies, played by world renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma (surely the most inconsiderately named musician since Mr and Mrs Beefheart stubbed out the bifter and decided to name their son 'Captain'), are the centerpiece of Dun's compositions and, if it's not too much of a mixed metaphor, help ground the film in an ethereal reality where we can happily believe that men and women can ride the skies as if wearing wire harnesses. While Crouching Tiger invariably may find itself left out of casual discussion of the premier movie scores, I feel it's my job to bring it to wider attention that the film features some of the most moving compositions to come out of the East, and deserves its own mention.

9. Back to the Future - Alan Silvestri

That's right, Alan Silvestri, and not Huey Lewis as one of my acquaintances suggested when I pop-quizzed him with the question of who composed BttF's score. Much as I would live to visit a parallel world where that did in fact happen in order to marvel at such a work, let's instead make sure we stay firmly rooted in the real world. If ever a main theme were completely synonymous with a movie's existence... well, then there'd a be a few examples on this list, but Back to the Future is essentially the standard bearer. While other films on this list may feature a more complete overall score in addition to an iconic melody, none of them really nails the latter quite to the same extent as Silvestri's masterwork. The grandeur of time travel in stark juxtaposition to the cartoonish antics of Marty McFly and Doc Brown is perfectly exemplified in the rousing theme that launched a thousand kids in their make-believe DeLoreans across the school yard, and helped make the film a pop-culture institution. The main body of the work draws almost single-handedly on the central structure, to the extent that some might consider this a one-note [zing!] composition, but when the one note is as resounding as this, frankly, sign me up. Okay, so I'm hyperbolizing to some extent here - it's not like the main theme is all there is to the score, and Silvestri successfully allows room for the incorporation of some quality tunes on the soundtrack too. However the score goes to show the merits of making sure your musical foundations are as solid as possible, as you're pretty much guaranteed to, er, build a neat poolhouse on top? I'm mixing my metaphors again here, but you get the point.

8. E.T. - John Williams

An unashamedly populist choice here, and one I'm still debating whether I should have included, but the deadline's here now and I can't think of an especially compelling argument to shunt this out of the number eight spot. Maybe it's nostalgia that's keeping this in the top ten, but that's what the magic of discussion is for. Or, on second thoughts, maybe it's not - although I'll happily acknowledge E.T. as one of the great kid-friendly movies, it was never an integral part of my childhood the way it was for a lot of people of my generation (similarly, I somehow managed to inadvertently avoid watching The Goonies till I was 22). Still, there's no denying Spielberg's ability to ensnare the hearts and minds of audiences young and old alike, with E.T. representing one of his strongest bids to date along those lines - and what would a Spielberg film be without a John Williams score [note to readers: rhetorical question]? It's one of the classic composer/director relationships - more of those to come in subsequent entries - and has served Señor Spielbergo well throughout his career. It's the main theme here that perfectly captures E.T.'s flight of fancy, embodying a childish (the good kind) and almost whimsical notion that in the movies, anything is possible, from befriending an alien to flying a bicycle across the moonlit sky. Even the danger that young Elliott will be torn apart from his extra-terrestrial buddy is treated musically with an underpinning note of optimism - Williams knows full well that we know there'll be a happy ending. In a film that relies this heavily on a child protagonist, capturing the imagination is key to ensure that the spirit is maintained, and Williams' score does that better than arguably any family film out there.

7. The Lord of the Rings - Howard Shore

Ugh, cliché alert - the majestic twelve-hour long fantasy score made the cut. Yes, it's somewhat of a mainstream choice (albeit admittedly not as much as the previous entry), but you have to remember that sometimes popularity and quality do miraculously coincide. Sure, it doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it should, but that's why we invented cynicism and elitism. Incidentally, the Rings trilogy made it in as one selection because the score functions as a complete work - bear that in mind for later on. Now, the fact that Howard Shore managed to successfully compose around half a day's worth of solid material for LotR would have been enough to push this onto the shortlist, but the fact that said material was also in fact rather good, is what has bumped it up into the top ten. And no, I'm not suggesting that quantity trumps quality, but when today's musical artists struggle to put together a cohesive work that lasts forty or fifty minutes (sadly, the album is a dying artform these days), seeing a complete score for a mainstream work - even one that was the erstwhile preserve of the nerdy and the literate - that lasts this long while maintaining its own lofty standards is pretty damn impressive. Of course, while it's the bombast of Shore's grandiose themes that stick in the mind and prove the lynchpins of his work - after all, what's a fantasy score without imperiousness? - it's the quieter stretches providing the backdrop to elements from quiet life in Hobbiton to the encroaching danger of Shelob that bring home the all-encompassing nature of the score. Shore fashions a vivid sonic recreation of Middle Earth and its many travails, deservedly winning a few Oscars for his work in the year that Return of the King cleared up at the Academy, and it's to his credit that the music feels second nature throughout the films' endurance distance of a running time.

6. Taxi Driver - Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann, of course, also being Alfred Hitchcock's preferred musical collaborator and the man to whom pop culture is indebted for creating the shrieking string motif from Psycho, so he definitely deserves his place in this list. Taxi Driver isn't one of those films where the score leaps out at you as being worthy of praise; in fact I was initially hard pressed to recall anything notable from it, but on a second watch you come to realize that it's due to the textual complexity of Herrmann's work that the score sinks into the background, almost more of a sound effects album to life on Travis Bickle's decaying streets. Listening carefully, you can hear Bickle himself waltzing in and out of the soundtrack, a bluesy saxophone line set apart from the harsh and ominous background noises representative of the filthy masses that surround him and disenfranchise him so. It's an intellectual sonic take on Scorsese's downtrodden antihero, aiding in the creation of a suspenseful and increasingly oppressive atmosphere by which Bickle's downfall (if you wish to call it that) is charted. Plus, bonus points for the fact that one of the themes and its various reprises has the title 'Phone Call / I Realize How Much She is Like the Others / A Strange Customer / Watching Palantine on TV / You're Gonna Die in Hell / Betsy's Theme / Hitting the Girl' - Herrmann not being one for conciseness when it comes to his naming regimen, obviously. But the score itself does manage to come across as concise, a jazzy amble through the streets of Manhattan that does as much for Travis Bickle's iconoclasm as his infamous monologue and ironic epilogue.

5. Blade Runner - Vangelis

Another somewhat surprising entrant in this week's 'Ten Deep' (to me, at least), but after compiling the rankings of the list no less than twice through my usual means - which doesn't involve a hat and a blind dog, as my good friend Fenris is no doubt thinking, instead the shortlist goes into Excel and is dragged and dropped one at a time into its final order; high tech, I know - here we are. Vangelis is one of those musicians who seems oftentimes dismissed in friendly conversation, but Evangelos Papathanassiou as his mother knows him is actually an accomplished composer, responsible too for one of this week's golden rule omissions, and nowhere is this more evident than in the score for Blade Runner. Taking a tack a thousand light years away [goofy sci-fi pun GET!] from the rest of our top ten, Ridley Scott's dystopic vision of the near future is soundtracked with ambient keyboards that lend the film a dreamlike quality perfectly suited to its rain-drenched night-time cityscapes and philosophical meanderings. It would have been a disservice to the material for Vangelis to come out with a typical orchestral score, but then that's not exactly his style. While it's nothing new for the science fiction genre to adopt an idiosyncratic approach when it comes to musical accompaniment, Vangelis' work on the film is a prime example of tonal accuracy, capturing the mood of the piece through a score that reacts to the film rather than anticipating it. Much like our next selection, it's an almost minimalist approach that heightens the atmosphere through subtlety and grace, and showcases some of the best of the SF genre in terms of providing a distinctive tangent; it's really like nothing else you've heard and proves that originality is hard to come by in this day and age.

4. Requiem for a Dream - Clint Mansell

Before we discuss this one, let's sit objectively and put out of our minds that Requiem's main theme, 'Lux Aeterna', has been bastardized across a variety of media to the point that people are more likely to know it as the music from a thousand film trailers and the UK's Sky Sports News then they are to be able to place it in the compositional hands of Clint Mansell. Let's put all that aside and remember that before the theme was pounded directly into our brains by relentless TV exposure and endless remixes, it was actually used to pretty heartbreaking effect. Mansell, whose work on The Fountain also made the shortlist for this week, is another of our composer/director tandems with director Darren Aronofsky and his score for Requiem, a pulsating sonic tapestry performed by virtuoso trendy string ensemble the Kronos Quartet, is shatteringly well suited to what by rights could be one of the most depressing films ever made (hmmm, I smell a future 'Ten Deep' topic there, let me add it to my schedule...). As Jared Leto (remember when he made films, and wasn't an emo rocker of dubious credentials?) and co. descend further and further into a drug-fuelled nightmare that threatens to unbutton the woolly cardigan of their very existence, Mansell's score is insistent and edgy, driving the discomfiting atmosphere home and setting out a bleak aural soundscape that could well push the film over the edge into full-blown cinematic bipolar disorder. Yes, it's hard to disassociate the score from that apparently omnipresent theme, but stick with it and sink into the film and you'll discover a musical work of great beauty.

3. Raiders of the Lost Ark - John Williams

The John Williams love-in continues, doubtless drawing the ire of many, and while on the surface including Raiders this high up in the list may seem an odd choice, pandering as it does to probably the only movie composer a casual filmgoer could name off the top of their head, I stand by my choice. Of course, it would be a pretty lousy idea for me to write this column if I didn't stand by my choices, but you know what I mean. Anyhow, I trust you've all seen the Indiana Jones films, and maybe like me you've even managed to avoid seeing much of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to avoid disappointment, so there's no need to ram home the beauty of Indy's main theme, a boisterous and swaggering march that could awaken the thrill of adventure in even the most stoic couch potato, or at the very least cause them to catch a re-run of that Family Guy episode where they spoof Raiders. However the score as a whole is pretty much the archetype for an action-adventure film, drawing out all the elements of the movie from the suspense and danger of the action sequences, the explorative excitement of Indy's globetrotting exploits, the romance of the subplot with Marion and the cartoonish asides that mark the film out as in a different league from po-faced adventurethons such as National Treasure and the like. I hesitate to use the word "romp" since it reminds me entirely too much of the unique gait of an old friend of mine after a night on the sauce, but that's what the movie is, and Williams' score captures the effortless exuberance that's become the hallmark of the Indiana Jones franchise, to the extent that the two will be forever interlinked.

2. Star Wars - John Williams

Yeah, you all knew this one was coming, I wouldn't be a good movie geek if I didn't unfailingly praise Star Wars at every opportunity. I'm cheating a little and putting the whole original trilogy in this slot rather than just A New Hope, since some of the series' more memorable themes don't emerge until The Empire Strikes Back. Taken as a whole John Williams' score for the Star Wars movies is neatly comparable with Howard Shore's earlier Lord of the Rings work - admittedly only half as long, but brimming with a plethora of musical cues and themes that have embedded themselves into the public consciousness. For example, anyone who wants to convey the notion that someone or something is evil simply has to hum a few notes of the 'Imperial March' and you instantly get the reference; similarly, the fanfare of the main theme is so inherent to the movies that I always feel a little disappointed when I watch a 20th Century Fox flick and it doesn't blare out before the opening credits have begun. Of course, we can't deny that the movies' sheer success must have had a hand in helping Williams' score into the subconsciousness of everyone who's ever seen them, and I'm not one to praise on ubiquity alone. Still, even if we disregard the popularity quotient, there are more classic musical works on the soundtrack to this trilogy then there were in an entire 1977-1983's worth of pop albums [controversial? I hope so]. The fact remains that Williams' work here is pretty much the benchmark for all movie compositions, and there can't be many people either in the industry or simply watching the movies who haven't been influenced by this one to some degree or another. So why didn't it make the number one slot then?

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Ennio Morricone

Because this one just pips it, that's why. Yes, you thought I'd forgotten Morricone, arguably the most critically lauded of all movie composers, and primary exponent of that composer/director working relationship I keep harping on about, thanks to his work on the films of Sergio Leone. While Once Upon a Time in the West only made an honorable mention and the rest of the Dollars trilogy scored nary a reference (except right there), Morricone's score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is about as close to flawless as movie composition gets. The main theme (you know the one - ooeeooeeoo.... waah waah waaaaah) is as universally recognizable as anything else on this list, perhaps even more so, and the simple touch of having the melody played by three similar yet distinct instruments to represent each of the three protagonists is a stroke of genius. The brooding Civil War folk ballad 'The Story of a Soldier' adds heart, but the real power game comes at the film's climax, with 'The Ecstasy of Gold' being perhaps the most spine-tingling climactic pieces in all of cinema. It's a work to rival anything coming out of the 20th century, and even forty years on is almost incomparable. Hmm, hyperbole much? Even the actual soundtrack album featuring the film's score works brilliantly as a standalone work, something that can't be said for every film we've looked at this week. This one deserves a video, methinks:



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And finally�

Feeling aggrieved or elated at this week's ten picks? Then let me know! The magic of the interweb allows you to post your comments right here on this very page, and if they're especially insightful (or idiotic), I may even respond in the next column. Be sure to tune in next week for another edition of 'Ten Deep', but until then - keep watching the skies.