Keeping Score at the Movies

by Burt Prelutsky

Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but the anonymous fellow who first came up with the notion of putting salt on popcorn, thus turning packing material into a concession stand bonanza that costs more per-pound than lox and caviar put together. 

But there are others who, more often than not, get overlooked while far too much praise is lavished on actors and directors.  I refer to the men who compose musical scores for dramatic films.  Although there have been great scores composed for mediocre movies, there has very rarely ever been a great movie that didn’t have a great score. An example of the difference a fine score can make was “Brian’s Song,” a TV movie that would have drowned in its own bathos and banalities if Michel Legrand’s music hadn’t saved it from itself. 

Understand, I’m not referring to movie musicals filled to the brim with catchy tunes, and I’m not even referring to non-musicals whose scores pretty much consist of minor variations on a nice song written for the movie.  Those would include the likes of “Picnic,” “High Noon,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Laura,” while “Casablanca” and “The Grapes of Wrath” got a lot of mileage out of old standards.  Neither would they include movies that simply utilize a pre-existing classical or semi-classical piece, such as “Brief Encounter,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Story of Three Loves” or “The Horse’s Mouth,” which owed far more to such people as Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, than to those hired to adapt their music for the screen. 

Unlike some people, I don’t subscribe to the belief that to be successful, a dramatic score should be so unobtrusive as to be virtually unnoticeable.  To me, that makes about as much sense as suggesting that the cinematography or the dialogue or the costumes and scenery, should go unnoticed.  It is the music, after all, that heightens the emotions, helps dictate the pace of the movie and, as much as any other single factor, cues our responses.  If you ever had to sit through a movie that gave short shrift to its music or was saddled with an inappropriate score, I can guarantee you will have found it very hard sledding, even if you weren’t fully conscious of what the problem was. 

So, at this time, 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. Narrowing my list down to my 25 favorite scores means some of the finest of the breed are not represented.  They include 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.


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Posted Mar 7th 2009 at 5:23 pm in Entertainment | 96 Comments