Archives for October 2019

Bing Crosby sings a medley of “Pennies from Heaven,” “The Second Time Around,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” on The Bob Hope Chrysler Special, originally telecast by NBC on November 16, 1966:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

One of my Twitter followers asked over the weekend if I’d post a list of my favorite film scores. This is, needless to say, an impossible task, but I did spend a few minutes drawing up the following roster.

I hasten to point out that my little list isn’t comprehensive in any way and doesn’t pretend to be: all I’ve done is name one hundred film scores that I like and find memorable. Had I made it a month later, or earlier, I’m sure the contents would have been somewhat different (though not drastically so!). You’ll see that I have a bias toward old-fashioned “symphonic” scores, but I think you might also be surprised by some of the non-symphonic scores that made my list.

Here goes:

• Michael Andrews Me and You and Everyone We Know

• Georges Auric Roman Holiday

• John Barry The Lion in Winter

• George Bassman Ride the High Country

• Elmer Bernstein The Grifters, The Magnificent Seven, The Man With the Golden Arm, To Kill a Mockingbird

• Leonard Bernstein On the Waterfront

• Carter Burwell Blood Simple, Fargo, No Country for Old Men

• Gary Chang A Shock to the System

• Ry Cooder Paris, Texas

• Aaron Copland The Heiress, Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Red Pony

• Georges Delerue A Man for All Seasons, Shoot the Piano Player

• Adolph Deutsch High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Ramrod

• Jerry Fielding The Wild Bunch

• Hugo Friedhofer The Best Years of Our Lives, One-Eyed Jacks

• Jerry Goldsmith Chinatown, In Harm’s Way, Lonely Are the Brave, Patton, The Sand Pebbles

• Jonny Greenwood There Will Be Blood

• Dave Grusin The Fabulous Baker Boys

• James Newton Howard The Fugitive

• Bernard Herrmann Cape Fear, Fahrenheit 451, Garden of Evil, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, On Dangerous Ground, North by Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo, “Walking Distance” (an episode of The Twilight Zone)

• Maurice Jarre Lawrence of Arabia, Witness

• Rolfe Kent About Schmidt, Election

• Erich Wolfgang Korngold The Adventures of Robin Hood, Kings Row, The Sea Wolf

• Henry Mancini Wait Until Dark

• Cliff Martinez The Limey

• Ennio Morricone Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in the West, Ripley’s Game, The Untouchables

• Jerome Moross The Big Country

• Alfred Newman Captain from Castile

• Thomas Newman The Shawshank Redemption

• Alex North The Misfits, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• André Previn Bad Day at Black Rock, Elmer Gantry

• David Raksin The Bad and the Beautiful, Laura

• Nino Rota La Dolce Vita

• Miklós Rózsa Ben-Hur, Brute Force, Double Indemnity, The Killers, Lust for Life, Madame Bovary, The Naked City

• Lalo Schifrin Cool Hand Luke

• David Shire, Farewell, My Lovely, The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three

• Michael Small Klute, Marathon Man

• Max Steiner The Fountainhead, The Searchers

• Dimitri Tiomkin Duel in the Sun, High Noon, Strangers on a Train

• Henry Vars Seven Men From Now

• Ralph Vaughan Williams Scott of the Antarctic

• William Walton Hamlet, Henry V

• Franz Waxman Night and the City, Objective: Burma, A Place in the Sun, Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard

• Roy Webb Cat People, Crossfire, The Enchanted Cottage, I Walked with a Zombie

• John Williams Catch Me if You Can, Star Wars

• Victor Young, Shane

*  *  *

Miklós Rózsa conducts the final cue from his score for Jules Dassin’s The Naked City:

Bernard Herrmann conducts a suite from his score for François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451:

Jerry Goldsmith conducts a suite from his score for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The trumpet solos are by Uan Rasey:

Excerpts from Carter Burwell’s score for Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple:

“Reality does not discuss, it simply is.”

Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere (trans. Peter Kussi)