I played Psycho (Bernard Herrmann's score, not the movie) after sitting through a hurricane. The music absolutely reflected my experience. Very cathartic.
My favorite film scores include quite a few Herrmann scores including those already mentioned in this thread. I will add his score for Jane Eyre (1944) and The Three Worlds of Gulliver (composed right after Psycho in 1960). I could add more, but on to some favorites by other composers:
The Big Country, of course. I'm also fond of an earlier score by Jerome Moross, The Proud Rebel (an offbeat Western featuring Alan Ladd, his son David Ladd, and Olivia de Havilland).
An early Elmer Bernstein score I love is his Some Came Running. He admitted it was influenced by Herrmann, but Bernstein really put his own stamp on this.
I'm positively addicted to Dimitri Tiomkin's The Guns of Navarone, the way he weaves the theme into variations underscoring the action. Another juicy Tiomkin score is Land of the Pharaohs.
Before Jaws, a John Williams score that remains ever potent to my ears, Williams wrote a haunting sea theme for The Poseidon Adventure. Love the seafaring music of John Williams.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold can do no wrong to my ears. Whether The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I've seen many times, or a Korngold-scored picture I've never seen, I love his scores.
If Miklos Rozsa had composed nothing but Ben-Hur, he would still be on my list of the great film composers. But I'm also most impressed with what he did for The Lost Weekend.
I have more favorites, but I'd better close this post. One more comment: This is a truly great thread.
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turtletommy
16 years ago
Very good thread indeed, and maybe not too surprising how the cream seems to rise to the top- seeing how often certain composer's scores are mentioned. I'll echo the love shown for the scores of The Big Country, The Best Years of Our Lives, Ben-Hur, The Natural, The Last of the Mohicans, Lawrence of Arabia, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, The Sea Hawk, Jaws, Star Wars, Casablanca, King Kong, Gone With the Wind. In the same way the stirring recurring main theme of The Last of the Mohicans pleasures I'll add the beautiful and haunting one from Black Robe. I just watched The French Connection for the first time in quite a while and was really impressed with the score by Don Ellis which fitted the subject matter to a "T". Herrmann's Taxi Driver was outstanding also. Pixar's animated The Incredibles had a pretty jazzy score! The majority of films I own have scores I really like obviously there's something going on there!
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cwente2
16 years ago
"The majority of films I own have scores I really like obviously there's something going on there!"
Indeed. It's hard to imagine a film like "The Magnificent Seven" without Bernstein's memorable score. It's as important to the overall effect as the images on the screen. In a sense, the best of the "horse-operas" are a little like -- "grand opera". No? . . .
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turtletommy
16 years ago
In "The Magnificent Seven" case the score to me made a fairly good film more enjoyable and memorable.
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DD-931
16 years ago
I know some people, including the composer himself, considered it "junk food" music, but I'll always feel John Barry's James Bond scores in the 1960s were the most successful scores in film history as far as achieving their goals of enhancing the films they served. The James Bond theme is in my opinion the most effective theme ever used, and one of the reasons I am indifferent to all the Bond movies since is because they are missing that Barry magic.
Of course, they're also missing Connery, but that's another subject...
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mdliske
15 years ago
This is my number one film score of all time as well. It's outstanding.
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