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John Williams and film music since 1971

Timothy E. Scheurer
Published online: 24 Jul 2008.

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59-72, DOI: 10.1080/03007769708591655

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 John Williams and Film Music Since 1971
Timothy E. Scheurer
In 1969, two years before the first issue of Popular Music and Soci-
ety went to press, two fateful events occurred in the realm of music for
the movies. The first was Burt Bacharach's Oscar for his score for Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the other was the success of the
score for Dennis Hopper's paean to the counterculture, Easy Rider.
These two events seemed to signal something new in the area of scoring
motion pictures. In the case of Bacharach's score it seemed to be further
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confirmation that films really did not have to be underscored as they had
been since the 1930s but could be scored simply by supplying a collec-
tion of pop tunes. The presence of a single composer in Butch Cassidy
meant there would be a sort of formal consistency in the film's "sound,"
besides which the potential for hit tunes (the plural is the important point
here) was increased exponentially. Easy Rider, on the other hand, sig-
naled something quite different; heck, you could hear some producer
saying, maybe we don't even need a composer at all; first, just rummage
around in the bins of one of our subsidiary record companies for some
appropriate, mood-evoking tunes and then get some hot (semihot!?) rock
group to write something like a title tune and we're set. One could only
wonder what the other Oscar nominees thought as they observed the
awards that year. Represented in that group were some of the finest
music composers of the last two decades: Georges Delerue was nomi-
nated for Anne of the Thousand Days, Ernest Gold for The Battle of
Santa Vittoria, Jerry Fielding for The Wild Bunch; and there was a minor
composer named Johnny Williams, who was nominated for a delightful
little film called The Reivers. That this minor composer should emerge
out of this august group of nominees to become the predominant film
music composer of the last 25 years is not altogether surprising, but how
he did is.1 For how John Williams emerged to become the dominant film
music composer of the last 25 years is by not emulating either Burt
Bacharach or Easy Rider but, instead, by remaining true to the conven-
tions of the form—in fact, by emulating his other fellow nominees—
while at the same time being able to tap into the pop vein mined so
expertly by Bacharach.

59
 60 • Popular Music and Society

If 1969 looked bad for the "establishment" composer in Hollywood,

1971 must have looked absolutely apocalyptic. Michel Legrand won the
Best Original Dramatic Score award for his Summer of '42 score, beat-
ing out John Barry, Richard Rodney Bennett, Jerry Fielding, and new-
comer—and portent of things to come—Isaac Hayes for his score for
Shaft. Equally portentous was the award for Adaptation and Original
Song Score which went to John Williams for Fiddler on the Roof. The
fact that Legrand's thin albeit highly evocative score won and that Isaac
Hayes was considered a contender seemed to confirm the direction that
movie soundtracks would be taking in the future. Williams's award was
confirmation that the old guard still had some life left in them. Of
course, composers should have observed the warning signs throughout
the 1960s. The Beatles' earlier successes with A Hard Day's Night
(1964) and Help! (1965) and Simon and Garfunkel's interpolation of
songs into Dave Grusin's score for The Graduate (1967), were only the
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most prominent harbingers of rock's future as a legitimate alternative to

the conventional classical film score. Then Stanley Kubrick made life
interesting and difficult for the composer by dumping Alex North's score
for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and using his "temp track" score,
which was a pastiche of Richard Strauss, Gyorgy Ligeti, Aram Khatcha-
turian, and Johann Strauss. And indeed, the direction of film music since
that time has reflected these trends. Rock and other forms of pop music
have been an important adjunct not only to the content of many films but
also to their marketing. Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Urban Cowboy
(1980) are two notable examples of where a collection of songs substi-
tuted entirely for a diegetic soundtrack; the soundtracks, moreover, dom-
inated the larger music scene through the run of the film (and past as
well). More recently, albums such as Dazed and Confused (1993) and
Forrest Gump (1994) (not Alan Silvestri's score) brought older rock
back onto the charts; while newer films such as Clerks (1994), Tank Girl
(1995), Dangerous Minds (1996), and Philadelphia (1993) have given
artists, old and new, more exposure on the radio. It is almost symbolic
that Williams himself has had to share disc space with pop artists on the
soundtrack for Born on the Fourth of July (1989), a film set largely in
the 1960s, symbolic because the disc is emblematic of the film music
scene of the last 25 years: the new is married to the traditional.
Williams's climb to the top of his profession began in the 1970s
with his scores for The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering
Inferno (1974). Both were nominated for Academy Awards and the
theme songs won Oscars in their respective years. Although Williams
was not the composer of the themes, they helped album sales and drew
attention to his skills in writing for the "blockbuster." His breakthrough,
 John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 • 61

however, really came when he teamed up with Steven Spielberg for Jaws
(1975). Jaws, in a sense, is a classic Williams score and one that is repre-
sentative of the compositional approach that he has maintained to the
present. Part horror film and part action-adventure film, Jaws presents a
unique challenge to the composer: one could go for the avant-garde,
atonal approach that much of the action seems to warrant, but that
approach might not work for the great shark hunt sequences that domi-
nate the last part of the film. Williams eschewed purely atonal or even
post-modern approaches to scoring the film, and he also eschewed the
purely classical late-19th-century post-romantic musical language. He
nonetheless still reached back in time and borrowed ideas that fall
between those two musical camps: instead of Schoenberg he quotes
Stravinsky for the horror, and instead of Wagner/Max Steiner or Kom-
gold he quotes Debussy for the seafaring ideas. The Great White's music
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is a page ripped right out of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, echo-
ing especially the vigorous polyrhythms of the ballet's opening, "The
Adoration of the Earth." What he achieved was a music whose firmly
grounded tonal centers wouldn't alienate most audiences, while finding a
musical idiom that captured perfectly the primordial state of which the
Great White is a part. This, mixed with music evoking Debussy's La
Mer, achieved what I think is Williams's great strength as a film music
composer and one of the reasons for his continued success: he found the
emotional core at the center of the film, a compelling admixture of
romance, mystery and terror, something primitive and noble (both on the
part of humans and fish).
From this point on one could expect a Steven Spielberg production
to feature a John Williams score. His next film, Close Encounters of the
Third Kind (1977), must have also been something of a challenge
because, on the one hand, it seemed so reminiscent of the old sci-fi films
of the 1950s replete with aliens and mystery, but on the other hand, there
was about the whole experience—the encounter—something so innocent
that, again, finding the emotional core of the film required reconciling
stylistic imperatives and idioms. Williams's score actually evokes a
couple of past filmic/music experiences that would help audiences relate
to the action and the characters. There is the evocation of the classic
1950s sci-fi film, à la Bernard Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951), in some of the sounds created by the strings and other instru-
ments as well as in the harmonies and minor dissonances in the
melodies. There is also the evocation of Gyorgy Ligeti's music, which
Kubrick used effectively in 2007, where Williams creates tonal clusters
using voices and sometimes the whole orchestra to build tension and
suspense and, to a lesser degree, terror. In short, anyone who had seen a
 62 • Popular Music and Society

science-fiction film in the last 20-odd years would recognize a host of

musical referents that would intensify the viewer's emotional reaction to
the film. This is not to say that Williams merely appropriates these mate-
rials and dumps them in the score; they are newly fashioned by him
much the same way that the composers of the golden age appropriated
the musical language of the late 19th century and the composers of the
1950s and 1960s appropriated the musical language of jazz.
Finally, there was the achievement of Star Wars (1977). I recall
being somewhat surprised to see the album creeping up the Billboard
charts, a feat that had not occurred much since Mancini's score for
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1963) enjoyed brisk sales in the early 1960s.
Bacharach's score for Butch Cassidy was the most recent success but it
was a different kind of soundtrack album because it was more like a col-
lection of tunes than actual cues or whole selections rerecorded from the
cues (i.e., Mancini's practice). I also recall wondering if this would mean
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a minor renaissance for film music and whether more scores might not be
recorded and find new audiences. One should not have been terribly sur-
prised at the success of the soundtrack; the film after all went on to
become—at least for a few years until the next Lucas or Spielberg block-
buster—the all-time box office champion. It would seem only logical that
a film enjoying such great popularity would also see substantial sales of
its soundtrack. But this is not necessarily true, for in previous decades—
at least since studios and record companies got in the habit of recording
and releasing soundtracks—not all "big" films had correspondingly vig-
orous soundtrack sales. So Star Wars indeed was different.
Listening to the score then and now, it is not hard to understand
why it would have the impact it did. First of all, it really is a throwback
to the grand style of film music composition of the 1930s à la Steiner
and Korngold. The success of the soundtrack album was doubly striking
because it was a two-record set—there was a lot of music. There would
be none of the Henry Mancini "less is better" aesthetic at work here.
More like Max Steiner, who, given the opportunity, would have scored
films much more extensively than either his directors or the studio
would allow. Look at Gone with the Wind (1939): there's an awful lot of
music there, a small portion of which is captured only on the soundtrack
album. Like Gone with the Wind, Star Wars utilizes the leitmotif school
of film composition in which each character has his/her theme, couples
have a corresponding love theme and even narrative conventions may
have a leitmotif (as in the case of battles or the entrance of the imperial
troops). The main theme bursts onto the screen and sounds like a page
ripped out of one of the great film composer's theme books. In fact, the
first five notes are almost exactly the same as the opening measures of
 John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 • 63

Korngold's score for King's Row (1941) [see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2]; the
rhythms are different, obviously, but there is in those opening measures
a very distinct similarity. The significance of the similarity is that
Williams's score evokes the golden age of movie-going. In those days
one sat in the theatre waiting in anticipation for the lights to go down,
the curtain to open, and the studio's triumphant fanfare to fill the dark-
ened theatre. Then the main theme would emerge out of the fanfare, sig-
naling that what was to follow would be heroic and romantic, some-
thing that would take you out of yourself and your life and transport
you to, well, someplace far, far away—maybe even a galaxy. That is
what the great themes of Korngold and Steiner did, and that is what
Williams accomplished with his Star Wars theme. And heroic it is. Like
Korngold's theme, it begins with a triplet pick-up to more quickly
propel the opening melodic leap of a perfect fifth, which is then fol-
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lowed by the stepwise descending three-note figure (Williams effec-

tively uses a triplet figure while Korngold, because he does not really
need to evoke a martial spirit, uses two eighths and a quarter, although
there is a contrapuntal triplet figure which begins on the quarter note—
see Fig. 2). In short, from the beginning the heroic note is struck, and it
is struck in a very nostalgic fashion as well; this is music which does
indeed recall the great swashbuckling films and epics of decades past,
and it does so unabashedly and without irony.2 And audiences responded
positively to it!

Fig. 1
Star Wars
"Main Theme"
John Williams
-3-

SEE

Fig.2
King's Row
"Main Title"
(Transposed from original key of B major)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Vl > > r^U

 64 • Popular Music and Society

Williams relies little upon atonality, which one could reasonably

expect from a film set in outer space, but then this is not as much about
outer space, the future, and "science" as it is about adventure and
romance. Consequently, when Williams writes for the villains, the imper-
ial forces, and characters, Williams also remains true to the conventions
of the classic score. The war music is a direct borrowing from Gustav
Hoist's The Planets, especially the opening "Mars, the Bringer of War"
section, and his music for Darth Vader relies heavily on minor key har-
monies. Finally, Williams's love themes recall the great love themes of
films past in that he usually begins with a dramatic leap in the melody
and then follows that with some type of quicker figure. For instance, both
"Han Solo and the Princess" from The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and
"Marion's Theme" from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) begin with a leap
of a sixth and each is followed by a three-note figure of some sort.
Williams alters the harmonies quickly, relying upon chromatic mediants
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or minor harmonies, which give the themes a feeling of exoticism or

longing depending on which harmonic motif he uses. For instance, in the
love theme, "Han Solo and the Princess," the opening theme statement
has a harmonic progression of C-AtyC-DtyC-C; next he restates the open-
ing measure of a leap of a sixth followed the three eighths but his har-
monic progression, instead of repeating the A^/C chord, goes to Dk-Bhn7-
Cm/FJ' and so forth. In short, he never strays very far from the language
of the late romantic composer and the classical Hollywood composer. In
the process Williams brings to this film and the others he scored in the
series an added dimension: his music confirms the mythology that films
should be bigger than life.
Since Star Wars, Williams has been the primary composer for
Lucas and Spielberg productions and, consequently, has been the bene-
ficiary of the phenomenal success of that partnership. Williams's music
is the perfect complement to these men's films, which seem to recall the
glory days of the studio system, when movies indeed were bigger than
life. And Williams's influence has been felt in the industry—look at
Jerry Goldsmith's score for Star Trek (1979) or Danny Elfman's score
for Batman (1989). Both these men and composers like James Newton
Howard, James Homer, and Bruce Broughton seem to recall the heroic,
to be unabashedly reaching out to the audience and attempting to stir
them by hearkening back to the scores of the classical Hollywood film.
Broughton's score for Silverado (1985) is as memorable and achieves
the same heroic dimension as Elmer Bernstein's score in The Magnifi-
cent Seven (1960). Similarly, Horner has embraced the classic tradition
in crafting his scores for the Star Trek series and films like Legends of
the Fall (1994) as has Howard in his scores for The Fugitive (1993),
 John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 • 65

The Prince of Tides (1991), Wyatt Earp (1994), and Dave (1993).
Although these composers are not lionized by critics, they are produc-
ing scores that seem to be meeting directors' and audiences' needs,
because they are among the busiest composers currently working in
films. Homer's soundtrack of the score for Legends of the Fall and the
accompanying sheet music for the title are widely distributed as of this
writing, a sign that sales and interest in the music are quite good. It is
difficult to know and perhaps dangerous to speculate on whether these
men would be as busy today writing for films, especially writing in this
"old-fashioned" style, if it had not been for John Williams, but without
him their type of "conservatism" might not be judged suitable anymore
especially when a filmmaker/producer can hammer together a sound-
track based on current pop tunes.
As for the rest of the industry since 1971, Leonard Rosenman,
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Michel Legrand, Lalo Schifrin, Maurice Jarre, Richard Rodney Bennett,

Dave Grusin, John Barry, and of course, (the late) Henry Mancini, Jerry
Fielding, Georges Delerue, and Alex North managed to keep their hands
in the game with varying degrees of success. Jerry Goldsmith has carved
out a comfortable niche and earned critical respectability in the process
with scores for films ranging from Chinatown (1974) to Star Trek to The
Shadow (1994) and Basic Instinct (1992). Scores like those for The
Shadow and Star Trek are the closest to Williams in spirit, but he has
done some adventurous things in The Omen (1976) and Poltergeist
(1982) and, like Williams, has been able to tap into the emotional core of
David Anspaugh's two celebrations of the underdog in sports, Hoosiers
(1987) and Rudy (1993). Another composer who has remained very
active and is probably one of the biggest influences on contemporary
film music composers is Ennio Morricone. His scores for Clint East-
wood's "spaghetti westerns" in the late 1960s were as influential to the
new western films as was Bernstein's Magnificent Seven score to the
previous generation of westerns. Morricone also enjoys a greater critical
respectability than others in his profession because he does not always
rely upon the conventional even when scoring the conventional film.
There is nothing in the literature of the western film music to match his
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), no other score makes the mood
swings like this one does as it moves by turns from the disturbingly neu-
rotic and heroic "Man with the Harmonica" to the exquisite and lyrical
"Jill's America," a melody of such aching and transcendent beauty that it
makes you wonder how the film could even broach the evil of Henry
Fonda's character. Busy on both continents, Morricone's music is cos-
mopolitan and adventuresome, mining traditional musics and unique
instrumentation and mixing them with elements of the classical Holly-
 66 • Popular Music and Society

wood score (see especially his score for The Mission [1986]) to produce
scores of beauty, intelligence and striking individuality.
And there are the young lions of the business as well, men and
women who seem to be inspired and caught simultaneously by the
demands on the film music composer today. Williams's great success is a
reminder to them that fame and fortune can be the lot of the lowly film
composer, but also that the seduction of pleasing the audience can lead
to artistic sterility and formulaic music making that ultimately serves
neither the ends of the film nor of the artist. Like most serious com-
posers these artists are not always content to fall back on the well-worn
musical gesture even though director, producer, and audience might
demand it. Composers such as Rachel Portman (The Road to Wellville
[1994], Used People [1992]), Patrick Doyle (Sense and Sensibility
[1995]), Howard Shore (Philadelphia [1993], Ed Wood [1994], Mrs.
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Doubtfire [1993], Nobody's Fool [1994]), Richard Robbins (Howards

End [1992], Remains of the Day [1993]), Mark Isham (A River Runs
through It [1992]), George Fenton (Dangerous Liaisons [1988], The
Fisher King [1991], The Crucible [1996]), Ry Cooder (The Long Riders
[1980]), Torn Takemitsu (Ran [1985], Rising Sun [1993]), Carter Bur-
well (Raising Arizona [1987], Rob Roy [1995], Fargo [1996]) Michael
Nyman (The Piano [1993], Carrington [1995]), and Alan Silvestri (The
Abyss [1989], Forrest Gump [1994])—all have achieved a modicum of
success running this commercial-vs.-art gauntlet and, like Morricone,
have added an impressive and at times experimental body of work to the
canon of excellent film scores.
To look over the history of the movies over the last 25 years is to
observe the gradual fading away of, or the dimming of the spotlight on,
the glory days of the studio system and the whole "culture" of Holly-
wood—and to a certain degree the culture Hollywood created in the first
five decades of the 20th century. In all things except perhaps the music.
The reason for this, I believe, lies largely with John Williams's success. I
stated earlier that Williams seemed to be able to capture the emotional
core of the film in his music. Elmer Bernstein has written about the
power of film music:

Film conspires with your imagination to remove you from your present reality
and take you on afreewheelingtrip through your unconscious. . . . What better
companion for such a medium than music? Music is, quite possibly, the one most
removed from reality. Of all the arts, music makes the most direct appeal to the
emotions. It is a non-plastic, non-intellectual communication between sound
vibration and spirit. The listener is not generally burdened with a need to ask what
it means. The listener assesses how the music made him feel. (qtd. in Burt 10)
 John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 • 67

What Williams has done in his scores is capture and articulate what the
audience sees—or better, what the audience wants to see—as the emo-
tional core of the film. He leaves aside his need to experiment, to push
the artistic envelope, and constantly looks for the musical metaphor that
will enable the audience to have that larger than life experience they
expect the movies to give them. Look at the score and, more particularly,
the main theme for Jurassic Park (1993). One might look upon the film
as a type of horror-thriller, but Williams's main title suggests something
quite different. There is an almost religious feeling in its stately long
melodic line and its sturdy dotted eighth-sixteenth rhythms. What
Williams brings out is that ultimately the film is not about running in
terror from raptors but about our desire to know, to want to experience
and find once again in our modern world a place for these noble beasts,
these larger than life animals who at one time ruled the earth and who,
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like so much else in the swirl of 20th century life, have been lost to us.
Similarly, Williams's score for Born on the Fourth of July does not
explore the dark corners of Ron Kovic's guilt about the war or even his
battle with his physical injuries but instead seems to be speaking to
something else. There is in the main theme a nobility and a strongly ele-
giac tone reminiscent of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, especially the
opening theme of the first movement. Oliver Stone, of course, had used
Barber's Adagio for Strings in his Platoon (1986), and perhaps Williams
saw in the lyricism and elegiac quality of Barber's works an aural
metaphor for what the country was looking for as it looked back on the
war from a 1990s perspective: no more guilt, no more psychotic killers,
but instead a meditation on the loss of our innocence and our ability to
survive and, ultimately, reclaim some measure of our dignity and pride
in the face of the disillusionment.
Not since Henry Mancini in the 1960s have we had a film music
composer who has enjoyed such widespread public recognition and such
success in the realm of popular music. More people probably know of
John Williams than any film composer—with the exception of Mancini
—partially because of his association with the Boston Pops and partially
because of the success of his scores.3 Even those who are not soundtrack
collectors probably can count at least one Williams score among their
possessions. Is this accidental? A stroke of fate and luck by way of his
association with Spielberg? I think not. There are those who may see
Williams as a skilled but routine craftsman, following safe paths and
ready-made musical formulae, but there is something more here. His
scores suggest that what the audience may need from the particular film
he is scoring is very important, perhaps more important than what, as a
composer and artist, he feels he may need to say musically. His scores
 68 • Popular Music and Society

speak to the power and ability of film to enlarge our vision of life, to
take us places we have never been, to feel things that maybe we think we
should not feel or that are not fashionable any more and to dream things
that some say cannot or should not be dreamed.

Notes

1. Kathryn Kalinak has written: "Contemporary literature on film music

has credited John Williams, virtually single-handedly, with returning the classi-
cal film score to its position of preeminence." She goes on to add, however, that
the classical score hardly needed resuscitation, but "Williams was . . . the major
force in returning the classical score to its late-romantic roots and adapting the
symphony orchestra of Steiner and Korngold for the modern recording studio"
(188).
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2. Readers may recall that a number of the great scores of the classical
Hollywood film use interval leaps in the themes to great effect; the most notable
example is probably Max Steiner's "Tara's Theme" from Gone with the Wind,
but this is also true of Korngold's themes for Captain Blood (1935) and The Sea
Hawk (1940).
3. It will be interesting to see if Williams's reputation grows even more
prepossessing with the release of Nixon (1995), the first "Enhanced CD" ver-
sion of a film soundtrack. The disc contains a trailer from the film, background
materials on the film, and interactive interviews with Oliver Stone and
Williams. Not surprisingly, Williams' comments on the CD confirm much of
what I have said in this article, especially about what he does in a score to move
or appeal to the audience.

Works Cited

Burt, George. The Art of Film Music. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1994.
Kalinak, Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992.
 John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 • 69

25 from the Last 25

The following is a list of 25 film soundtracks that I think are worth
seeking out. Basically the criteria for selection here are, first, the works
are meaningful works by significant composers, people who have made
their mark in the industry or who appear to be influences in the future;
they represent the best of the best work of this composer, or they have
been influential in the area of film scoring. Second, these are listenable
works away from the theatre (or video as the case may be). I will admit
to there being a definite Hollywood bias here. I regret that I do not have
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more scores from more foreign films but they can be difficult to obtain
and, consequently, readers may not be able to hear the scores away from
the films.

1. The Abyss (1989) U.S. Science Fiction/Drama/Adventure. 145.

Rated PG-13. Color. Score by Alan Silvestri. Another worthy addition to
the great body of sci-fi film scores.

2. The Age of Innocence (1993) U.S. Drama/Romance. 133 mins.

Rated PG. Color. Score by Elmer Bernstein. From one of our finest film
music composers: a sumptuous musical score for a sumptuous film.

3. Aliens ("1986) U.S. Science Fiction. 137 mins. Rated R. Color.

Score by James Horner. One of the best from this very prolific composer.

4. Batman. (1989) U.S. Action/Drama. 126 mins. Rated PG-13.

Color. Score by Danny Elfman. A score that mixes good doses of humor
with a great theme to capture the heroic and dark sides of the "Dark
Knight."

5. Chinatown (1974) U.S. Mystery. 131 mins. Rated R. Color. Score

by Jerry Goldsmith. Recalls and at times surpasses the great film noir
work of people like Miklos Rosza and Roy Webb of the golden age. An
appropriately atmospheric theme and some brilliantly orchestrated musi-
cal cues make this one a must.

6. Cinema Paradiso (1988) France-Italy. Comedy/Drama. 123

mins. Rated PG. Color. Score by Ennio Morricone. One of the pleasures
 70 • Popular Music and Society

of this score is the love theme, which was not written by the master him-
self but by his son, Andrea, and it is a stunner. The remainder of the
score is full of charm and wonder, just like the film and will give hours
of pleasurable listening.

7. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) U.S. Science Fiction.

135 mins. Rated PG. Color. Score by John Williams. This is worth it just
for the "encounter theme," one of the most oddly memorable themes
ever penned in Hollywood, but it has other merits as well.

8. The Day of the Dolphin (1973) U.S. Drama. 104 mins. Rated PG.
Color. Score by Georges Delerue. Delerue deserves a spot here and this
score is as good as any to recommend. The main theme is lovely and the
whole score captures the beauty of the animals and the people who care
for them.
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9. The Godfather (1972) U.S. Crime/Drama. 175 mins. Rated R.

Color. Score by Nino Rota. One of the best of the decade by one of the
masters of the art. Memorable melodies.

10. The Glass Menagerie (1987). U.S. Drama. 134 mins. Rated PG.
Color. Score by Henry Mancini. You might not be able to find this one in
the record store but it is a great score. Delicate, understated and tragic—
proof that there was more to Mancini than Peter Gunn and The Pink
Panther.

11. Jean de Florette. (1986) France. Drama. 122 mins. Rated PG.
Color. Manon of the Spring (1986) France. Drama. 113 mins. Rated PG.
Color. Scores by Jean-Claude Petit. It was hard to choose between one of
Petit's scores or Phillipe Sarde's, but Jean and Manon are both available
on disc and capture beautifully the intensity of these films; there is a def-
inite Gallic sensibility at work here with bows to opera, folk music, and,
occasionally, the classical Hollywood score.

12. Local Hero (1983) U.K. Comedy. I l l mins. Rated PG. Color.
Score by Mark Knopfler. The lead guitarist of Dire Straits serves up a
score to match the magic of this little film. The main theme is haunting
and, as always, Knopfler's guitar work is a major feature here.

13. The Mission (1986) U.K. Drama. 125 mins. Rated PG. Color.
Score by Ennio Morricone. May be one of the greatest of all time. Gor-
 John Williams and Film Music Since 1971 • 71

geous themes and Morricone's typically unique and gripping melding of

traditional music with classic film music. Not to be missed.

14. Murder on the Orient Express (1974) U.K. Mystery. 127 mins.
Rated PG. Color. Score by Richard Rodney Bennett. The mystery film
probably has never received a grander treatment musically than this.

15. The Natural (1984) U.S. Sports. 134 mins. Rated PG. Color.
Score by Randy Newman. Its main theme has almost be come synony-
mous with athletic heroics; very Coplandesque and archetypally "Ameri-
can," just like the game it celebrates.

16. The Omen (1976) U.S. Horror. I l l mins. Rated R. Color. Score
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by Jerry Goldsmith. Horror probably never sounded so good.

17. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) U.S. Western. 135 mins. Rated
PG. Color. Score by Jerry Fielding. A truly unique Western movie score;
it avoids most clichés and brilliantly captures the emotional subtext of
this Clint Eastwood film.

18. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) U.S. Adventure. 115 mins. Rated
PG. Color. Score by John Williams. Once again Williams hits just the
right note in this stirring action-adventure score.

19. Schindlers List (1993). U.S. War/Drama/Historical. 195 mins.

Rated R. Color/B&W. Score by John Williams. Williams shows he is
more than just the blockbuster composer. A beautiful and sad theme that
never overpowers the drama of the film and the victims. May be his best
work and one of the best of the 1990s.

20. Silverado (1985) U.S. Western. 132 mins. Rated PG-13. Color.
Score by Bruce Broughton. A return to the days of old with a score that
oozes with heroics and western archetypes. Great fun and beautifully
orchestrated.

21. Sleuth (1972) U.S. Mystery. 138 mins. Rated PG. Color. Score
by John Addison. Addison deserves mention, and this film catches him
at his wittiest and most psychologically probing.

22. Star Wars (1977) U.S. Science Fiction. 121 mins. Rated PG.
Color. Score by John Williams. Two discs worth of music and not a note
 72 • Popular Music and Society

wasted—a great score and one of historical importance for film and
music.

23. Taxi Driver (1976) U.S. Drama. 113 mins. Rated R. Color.
Score by Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann's last complete score and, as one
might expect, a great one. No one better captured in music the lives of
those living on the edge. He also wrote the score for Obsession the same
year and that score is worth seeking out as well.

24. The Untouchables (1987) U.S. Crime. 119 mins. Rated R.

Color. Score by Ennio Morricone. Imagine how you think this film
should be scored and then listen to this. It probably will confound your
expectations and pleasurably so. Captures the film's melodramatic inter-
play of heroism and evil almost perfectly.
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25. Witness (1985) U.S. Crime. 112 mins. Rated R. Color. Score by
Maurice Jarre. Worth hearing because of the extensive use of synthesiz-
ers and because it lacks some of the orchestral eccentricity expected of
Jarre since his days scoring David Lean epics in the 1960s. "The Barn
Raising" is a classic evocation of Americana.