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The Best Music in Film

Nicholas Meyer

(Star Trek The Wrath of Khan)

S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?

"My favourite film scores usually fulfil this double function, supplying atmosphere and encapsulating the movie itself. I think of the Nino Rota scores for the films of Fellini, William Alwyn's operatic masterpiece for Carol Reed's, Odd Man Out (1947), Dimitri Tiomkin's song-driven music for Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), Paul Smith's much neglected ersatz Debussy accompaniment to the Disney/Richard Fleischer 20,000 Leagues under the Sea... No list would be complete to my way of thinking without Erich Korngold's The Sea Hawk (1940) and Robin Hood scores, as well as Miklós Rózsa's Ben-Hur (1959) and Ivanhoe (1952), also Alex North's Spartacus (1960), with its dissonant, clashing percussion, so influenced by the grand-daddy of all such film scores, Sergei Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky (1938), itself in a class by itself as is Philip Stainton's only film score, written for John Huston's noble and melancholy Moby Dick (1956). Then there's always Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kizhe, a soundtrack so wonderful it has been used in no less than four different movies! And who can forget the contribution of Simon and Garfunkel to The Graduate (1967), ushering in a whole new era of film music? Then there's John Williams' Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)... the list is endless. But if pressed, I suppose I would single out the music Sir William Walton wrote for the Laurence Olivier version of Henry V (1944). Made during World War II on what amounts to a shoe-string budget, Walton's musical contribution to one of movie's greatest films is hard to overstate. It supports the heroic and poetical aspects of the film, also its medieval character, thanks to Walton's inspired use of plainsong as well as various Chansons D'Auvergne, old folksongs from the Catalan. But Walton's music goes further: as the play progresses, its deliberately artificial beginnings give way to an increasingly "realistic" presentation, culminating in the Battle of Agincourt, where English long-bowmen inflict dreadful casualties on the armour-laden, charging French knights. What had begun as an imitation of the Tres Riche Heurs de Duc de Berri (the so-called Book of Hours) with its vivid, primary colours and two dimensional perspectives, gives way to brown fields, filled with water and blood. By the film's mid-point, the only thing which anchors the movie to its original stylised theatricality is - you guessed it - the pounding music, again lifted, or "inspired" (as the charge of the French knights itself was), from Alexander Nevsky. While the battle we are watching is more or less realistic, it is absent all sound effects, which are, instead, supplied by Walton's music. Every horse whinny, every clash of steel or flight of arrows is scored for orchestra. Then, as the film gradually works its way back in the second half from realism to theatricality again, it is the music, which keeps us company the whole way back. The greatest - and, James Agee argued - perhaps simultaneously the worst moment in the film occurs at the end when the Duke of Burgundy makes his speech about peace. As he waxes poetic about the virtues of what "hath from France too long been chased", the camera pushes past the Gothic window beside him and into a "Duc de Berri" forced perspective countryside, whose selected images illustrate the toll war has taken on the land. At the same time, Walton's arrangements of one of the Chansons D'Auvergne kicks in and the total effect is so dream-like and seductive that the audience may actually dial out what Shakespeare has the Duke of Burgundy express - which is not unimportant. But this to my way of thinking is splitting hairs. The Walton score - of which there are a half-dozen recordings - stands happily on its own as a piece of music, but at the same time recreates in the minds of those familiar with the movie, the entire exhilarating experience. (If you want your Shakespeare at the same time, there's a Chandos recording with Christopher Plummer's masterful readings from the movie version of the play's text, accompanied by Sir Neville Marriner and the orchestra if St. Martin in the Fields. It doesn't get any better.)"

S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?

"It has been noted that sound always dominates picture. The happiest child, bounding through a field of daisies, accompanied by Chopin's 'Funeral March', is doomed. Drive anywhere and study the landscape as you listen to the CD or radio station of your choice and you will see how the music colours the scenery. This fact was known well before films when plays employed incidental music to influence the audience's perception of the scene. In this sense Mendelssohn, Bizet and Grieg, writing music of A Midsummer Night's Dream, L'Arlesienne and Peer Gynt respectively, were composing the first soundtracks. Since music has the ability to drench any scene or sequence in ambience, the primary function of movie music is to aid the director and his team in evoking the desired atmosphere at any given moment - fear, love, rage, curiosity, suspense, doom... what you will. But there is a second perhaps equally important function music can play and that is to provide each film with its own, unique voice, to become the musical embodiment of the movie, so closely associated with it that mere themes (or instrumentation), are sufficient to bring the whole movie flooding back through the mind's ear. Who, for example, can ever forget The Third Man (1949) when listening to Anton Karas' haunting score, played entirely on a zither? Even though Scott Joplin's music for The Sting (1973) is an anachronism, George Roy Hill's use of it ensures that everyone who saw the film will always associate Joplin's rags with the movie and vice versa."

S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?

"Choosing amongst the scores written for my own films is a bit like selecting a favourite child. I'm glad my name isn't Sophie. I've been privileged to work with some of the most talented composers in the relatively brief history of the medium, from the grand old men of the business like Miklós Rózsa, to more recent arrivals like James Horner and Cliff Eidelman. I have a special soft spot for the Rózsa Time after Time (1979) score, which I felt did so much to provide the 19th century (symphonic) perspective for H.G. Wells as he wandered about the alien 20th. In addition, Rózsa's affinity for what may loosely be termed "fantasy" came in very handy in selling what was essentially a tall tale. Wells' whole time travel trip was made immeasurably better, more exciting and convincing by Rózsa's music. By the same token, James Horner's "nautical"-sounding score helped reconfigure Star Trek in viewers' minds as the navy in outer space, which I had explained to him, was my goal. There's a musical sequence in my unsuccessful film, Company Business (1991), for which the late Michael Kamen supplied what I regard as an especially successful accompaniment. There's to be a spy swap in the underground Berlin subway system. What might otherwise have been a mere succession of trains travelling in opposite directions, was transformed by Kamen into a terrifying pas de deux between east and west. Another particular favourite is the music the underrated John Scott wrote for The Deceivers (1988), my film of John Master's British India novel of "The Thugs". The story tells of an British officer, who, in order to break up the murderous cult, joins them, and, discovering that he is good at his deadly work, proceeds to lose his marbles. Scott's wonderful score begins very conventionally, employing western harmonics and traditional instrumentation, but the father afield Captain Savage strays from his moral base, the deeper into the heart of India he journeys, the more "native" the music becomes, taking the audience along with our hapless hero as he travels deeper and deeper into his own heart of darkness."