John Williams and film music since 1971

选自《Popular Music and Society》，1997春季号

In 1969, two years before the first issue of Popular Music and Society 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 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 collection 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, signaled 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 nominated 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 conventions 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.

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, beating out John Barry, Richard Rodney Bennett, Jerry Fielding, and newcomer - 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 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 Khatchaturian, 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 substituted entirely for a diegetic soundtrack; the soundtracks, moreover, dominated 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, 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 representative 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 dominate 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 Komgold he quotes Debussy for the seafaring ideas. The Great White's music is a page ripped right out of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, echoing 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, a la Bernard Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), in some of the sounds created by the strings and other instruments 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 2001, 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 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 materials 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 collection 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 a minor renaissance for film music and whether more scores might not be recorded and find new audiences. One should not have been terribly surprised 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 blockbuster - 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 vigorous 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 a 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 Korngold's score for King's Row (1941) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1 AND 2 OMITTED]; 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 darkened theatre. Then the main theme would emerge out of the fanfare, signaling that what was to follow would be heroic and romantic, something 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 followed by the stepwise descending three-note figure (Williams effectively 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 - [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]). 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!

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 imperial forces, and characters, Williams also remains true to the conventions of the classic score. The war music is a direct borrowing from Gustav Holst's The Planets, especially the opening "Mars, the Bringer of War" section, and his music for Darth Vader relies heavily on minor key harmonies. 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 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-A[flat]/C-D[flat]/C-C; next he restates the opening measure of a leap of a sixth followed the three eighths but his harmonic progression, instead of repeating the A[flat]/C chord, goes to D[flat]-B[flat]m7-Cm/E[flat] 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 beneficiary 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 Brace 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 Magnificent Seven (1960). Similarly, Homer 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), The Prince of Tides (1991), Wyatt Earp (1994), and Dave (1993). Although these composers are not lionized by critics, they are producing 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 soundtrack based on current pop tunes.

As for the rest of the industry since 1971, Leonard Rosenman, Michel Legrand, Lalo Schifrin, Maurice Jarre, Richard Rodney Bennett, Dave Ginsin, John Barry, and of course, (the late) Henry Mancini, Jerry Fielding, Georges Deleme, 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 Eastwood'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 neurotic 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 cosmopolitan and adventuresome, mining traditional musics and unique instrumentation and mixing them with elements of the classical Hollywood 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 composers 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. 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]), Toru Takemitsu (Ran [1985], Rising Sun [1993]), Carter Burwell (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 Hollywood - 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 a freewheeling trip 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 Butt 10)

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 emotional 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, 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 comers 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 elegiac 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 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 classical 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).

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" version 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.

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 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. Colon 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 Homer. One of the best from this very prolific composer.

4. Batman. (1989) U.S. Action/Drama. 126 mins. Rated PG-13. Colon 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 musical cues make this one a must.

6. Cinema Paradiso (1988) France-Italy. Comedy/Drama. 123 mins. Rated PG. Colon Score by Ennio Morricone. One of the pleasures of this score is the love theme, which was not written by the master himself 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. Colon Score by Georges Delerue. Deleme 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.

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. Colon 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. Colon Manon of the Spring (1986) France. Drama. 113 mins. Rated PG. Colon 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 definite Gallic sensibility at work here with bows to opera, folk music, and, occasionally, the classical Hollywood score.

12. Local Hero (1983) U.K. Comedy. 111 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. Colon Score by Ennio Morricone. May be one of the greatest of all time. Gorgeous 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 synonymous with athletic heroics; very Coplandesque and archetypally "American," just like the game it celebrates.

16. The Omen (1976) U.S. Horror. 111 mins. Rated R. Color. Score 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 cliches 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. Schindler's 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 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 prob