Movies have never looked better than they did in the 1970s, and they’ve never sounded better either. The decade’s film music contains a remarkable confluence of instruments, genres, and musical philosophies, ranging from the last masterpiece ever composed by Hollywood Golden Age holdover Bernard Herrmann (“Taxi Driver“), to the first American masterpiece composed by Ennio Morricone (“Days of Heaven“), and the absolute dominance of god-level titans like Jerry Goldsmith (too many great film scores to list in a parenthetical) and John Williams (nope).
But most exciting of all was the radical explosion of what movie music was allowed to be, as the most forward-thinking filmmakers of the era remade the shape of cinema itself through their collaborations with musicians that you’d never find in a studio executive’s rolodex: Sun Ra, Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh. From Maurice Jarre to Goblin and all points in between, here are the 25 best movie scores of the 1970s.
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25. “Ryan’s Daughter” (Maurice Jarre)
There’s never been a greater practitioner of the hammered dulcimer in movie music history than Maurice Jarre, for whom the percussive string instrument is used in “Dr. Zhivago,” “Witness,” “Dead Poets Society” and even his late masterpiece “Prancer.” For “Ryan’s Daughter,” David Lean’s epic love story between a young Irish woman (Sarah Miles) and a British officer (Christopher Jones) during the struggle for Irish independence in 1917, Jarre had one very specific order from his director: No Irish-sounding music. Some of Lean’s directions could be wild: He literally also told Jarre that the music for his romance “needed to come from here” and pointed at his groin. Okay then!
So Jarre used a Hungarian variant of the dulcimer called a cimbalom for the main theme of “Ryan’s Daughter.” He then went on to create two different versions: One where the cimbalom is the only string instrument, another where there’s a full section — the first would be played for scenes among the Irish and set on the windswept beaches of Dingle Bay to convey a little harsher, more hardscrabble of a sound. The version with the full string section was for the romantic scenes of Miles and Jones falling in love. Instruments have very specific meanings in Jarre’s work: For John Mills’ character, Michael, he used a cimbalom, a salterio, and a kamancheh, a bowed string instrument used in Iran. So yes, he took the “no Irish instruments” direction very seriously.
It also happens to be heavenly stuff. So hypnotic, so catchy, so completely the kind of music to fall in love with that one of its main melodies, “Rosy’s Theme,” became a kind of Kurt Weill-esque pop song. When given lyrics it became “It Was a Good Time” and was performed in the ‘70s by Eydie Gorme as well as by Liza Minnelli herself on her iconic “Liza with a Z” TV special. Music to fall in love by, to win a revolution by, and to score a ‘70s variety special by — only Maurice Jarre could provide that. —CB
24. “Alien” (Jerry Goldsmith)
For the first 30 seconds of the “Alien” score, you’ll be forgiven for not thinking it’s very Jerry Goldsmith. A high-pitch string theme, twinkling minor key piano notes, a doom-laden bass. It’s as if the composer watched “Star Wars” and accepted that that’s what space “sounds” like. Where it differs, however, is when the vintage Goldsmith single woodwind theme kicks in. It sounds like the corridor round the corner that Ripley can’t see, where she’ll surely be in mortal danger. And then the strings crescendo to reveal that what’s there is even scarier than we thought.
That’s basically “Alien,” and Ridley Scott and Goldsmith’s common understanding of the movie’s tone is just one of the reasons it works so well. It wasn’t Goldsmith’s first rodeo outside our orbit — he wrote music for “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” the same year — but Scott’s space is less fun and much less colorful. Goldsmith got with the program. You may not be able to hear screaming in space, but Goldsmith’s brilliant music just about gets through. —AS
23. “Drunken Master” (Chou Fu Liang)
Among the most prolific composers in the history of film (martial arts or otherwise), Chou Fu-Liang is credited with scoring more than 30 other movies the year that “Drunken Master” came out, and I’d be lying to you if I said that I’d listened to all of them. Or most of them. Or even many of them. It’s entirely possible that Chou’s score for this early Jackie Chan classic isn’t the best thing he wrote that year. Hell, it’s possible that it wasn’t even the best thing he wrote that day. But the popularity of “Drunken Master” in Hong Kong and around the world allowed the film to help define its genre in the public imagination, and Chou’s score became synonymous with it in turn. It’s easy to appreciate why on both counts. Just as Chan’s comic timing and athletic dexterity made him an instant sensation, Chou’s ability to pump muscular new life into traditional Chinese instrumentation made “Drunken Master” seem as rooted in history as it was ready to take on the world. The clanging and propulsive “8 Drunken Gods” captures all the bluster, pathos, and kineticism that allows the film’s Qing dynasty-set story to be rooted in history and irreverent all at once, and while it may not be all that different from the other movie music of its time, it epitomizes the sound of its genre’s golden age. —DE
22. “Don’t Look Now” (Pino Donaggio)
A classically trained violinist who ended up singing alongside Paul Anka and scoring a hit as a pop songwriter so massive it sold 80 million copies in “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” Pino Donaggio also had one of the most accomplished film-music scoring debuts in movie history. It’s almost startling how subtle and supple his score for “Don’t Look Now” is, perfectly fitting a horror film that’s also a Bergman-esque domestic drama.
Venetian himself, Donaggio found the perfect musical accompaniment for director Nicolas Roeg’s Venice-set tale of grieving parents lured into thinking a mysterious figure wearing a red mackintosh might be their recently deceased daughter. The only real “horror” sound he gives it is the deep double bass chords that thunder when Donald Sutherland’s John discovers his daughter drowned in a fetid pond. Otherwise, the music is deeply rooted in Venetian tradition: “Laura’s Theme” sounds like a Baroque masterwork from Luigi Boccherini, while “John’s Theme” takes the form of a light piano minuet. It’s haltingly played, like a child plucking out the notes, to emphasize John’s deep connection to his daughter. But then that same theme, in a more assured rendering, accompanies his epochal four-minute sex scene with wife Laura (Julie Christie).
You’d expect bombast and terror from this music, like Ennio Morricone provided for many of his giallo scores. But Donaggio prefers to worm his way into your brain — and into the deepest pit of fears in your stomach. This is a movie about how the worst thing you could possibly imagine happening to you… might in fact happen to you, like the dumpster scene in “Mulholland Drive” extended to feature-length. It’s to Donaggio’s immense credit that he felt it unnecessary to underscore the shock. —CB
21. “The Go-Between” (Michel Legrand)
It can be tempting to reduce a great film score down to just its defining theme — a temptation that we try our best to resist when putting together these lists. In the case of Michel Legrand’s music for “The Go-Between,” however, I can’t help but give in. Memorably re-used to great and repeated effect in Todd Haynes’ “May December,” the tense and tumbling theme that Legrand composed for Joseph Losey’s turn-of-the-century class drama contains an epic novel’s worth of tragedy into the span of just 151 seconds, as thunderous portents of low piano give way to Vivaldi-like flurries of joy before the wind section overtakes the melody with a sigh of inevitability. It’s a piece of classical music so charged with incident and emotion that it feels like a plot unto itself. And while the rest of the score that Legrand wrote for the movie is no less baroque (and in some cases even more dramatic), all of its joy and tragedy can be traced back to an opening motif so immense that it seems like the story’s characters are simply trying to keep time with the music as their lives unravel around them. —DE
20. “The Conversation” (David Shire)
When David Shire was hired by Francis Ford Coppola — his brother-in-law at the time — to write music for “The Conversation,” he thought he was getting an orchestra. Shire’s first film score would be for a Paramount production (sandwiched between the first two “Godfather” movies, no less), and the composer assumed that it would come with a brass band, strings, synthesizers, and all the other trappings he could ever want. Coppola said no. He wanted a solitary piano theme to express what the lonesome surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) wouldn’t and couldn’t. Shire later admitted his heart sank at that pitch.
Shire would later get a chance to indulge in all of that pizzazz with “Saturday Night Fever,” but his music for “The Conversation” is nevertheless one of the decade’s most effective and haunting scores, a rare piece of music which actively makes its movie better and more distinct. The minor-key piano theme with its sudden tempo changes and elliptical sound is a dizzying illustration of our protagonist’s internal angst, a perfect embodiment of the loneliness Coppola felt was his film’s fundamental idea. It was editor Walter Murch’s idea to modulate the piano as the film went on, making it sound more distorted and fuzzy as Caul’s sense of reality becomes blurrier. By the end, as conspiracy envelopes Caul’s life and his sense of self has all but vanished, Shire’s music sounds about as electronic as the score he thought he might have made. Shire later said: “More than it was written, it evolved.” Before “The Conversation”, there wasn’t film music like it. There hasn’t been since, either. —AS
19. “Live and Let Die” (George Martin)
John Barry is the Bond composer par excellence, and the creator of the entire brassy orchestral sound we think of as defining 007. But when the baton was being passed from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, Barry was himself tied up creating the music for the stage musical “Billy.” When you’ve created a franchise’s iconic sound, who would you choose to replace you? Well, Barry didn’t really have a choice, as Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli had no money left over for a dedicated film composer after they’d shelled out to get Paul McCartney to do the title song, “Live and Let Die.”
So as a cheaper option, they just hired McCartney’s longtime producer and arranger with The Beatles, George Martin, to write the film’s score. And a masterpiece was born: There’s never been a fusion of classical, rock, funk, and soul in a score quite like this. If you’re wondering where the distinctly classical sound of certain Beatles’ tracks comes from — something like the all-string-section accompaniment of “Eleanor Rigby” — that’s all Martin. And on a silky, sexy groove of a track like “Bond Drops In” he outright creates a counterpoint variation to the main Bond theme, an idea straight out of classical music. Barry leaned on the brass, Martin on the strings, and the musical sexiness of Bond got that much deeper. There’s way, way more to this score than Macca’s unfortunate attempt at a Jamaican accent in the title song.
For what it’s worth, consider this: In “Goldfinger” nine years earlier, The Beatles are outright dissed. “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit,” Connery’s Bond said. “That’s just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.” And a Beatle and his legendary producer still lent their considerable talents to a Bond movie! If only more artists today could take a joke that way. —CB
18. “Klute” (Michael Small)
A melancholic love theme with a touch of the mysterious is the basis of Michael Small’s music for “Klute,” but it’s not the most interesting thing about that score. That distinction belongs to the jangly piano cues, better suited to a Hitchcock noir, which serve as a reminder that we’re very much in the “paranoia” period of Alan J. Pakula’s filmography. That’s in case Pakula’s jumpy directing and hushed performances by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland aren’t clear enough.
Small, who was not a household name in the composing world, is unlucky that his “Klute” music has since been ripped off by a million mediocre police procedurals and noir video game menus. But in its use of echoey electric guitars, and a noisy bass that place it much more in the early-70s than in the prewar years that birthed the noir genre, Small brings together a classic sound and a distinctly modern anxiety about power and control. It’s aged all too well. —AS
17. “Hurricane” (Nino Rota)
At the age of 66, the great longtime composer for Fellini, who had done as much as anyone to define the sound of the 1970s with his theme for “The Godfather,” delivered one final, staggeringly beautiful score. Jan Troell’s “Hurricane,” a remake of a 1937 John Ford movie, is just okay (and was somewhat pilloried at the time). Rota’s music for it, however, is heavenly. And transcendent — eerie, foreboding, but full of delicate beauty fitting the “paradise lost” theme of this story of an American painter (Mia Farrow) who journeys to Tahiti to be with her U.S. Navy captain father (Jason Robards) and falls in live with a Polynesian man (Dayton Ka’ne).
It’s a film sharply critical of racism and colonialism, but the challenge for its score is to avoid merely exoticism. Rota uses a number of authentic Polynesian instruments to give it some real authenticity, including thumb pianos, pahu drums, ukuleles, and steel Hawaiian guitars. Western instruments add an extra degree of dread on the score, to suggest the encroachment of the U.S. forces — Rota brings out the ominousness of an oboe like no film composer ever. And he builds his main theme around whistling, not for a caffeinated jolt of energy like Morricone would have for his spaghetti Westerns, but to add a degree of haunting introspection. This is music that makes you feel more alive and, crucially, more aware. Rota died two days before the film’s premiere. —CB
16. “The Petrified Forest” (Toru Takemitsu)
The unsparing story of a medical student whose hatred for his hospital department head assume a homicidal edge, “The Petrified Forest” is arguably the bleakest and least revered film that Masahiro Shinoda made in the 1970s (a fertile decade that saw the Japanese iconoclast direct the likes of “Demon Pond,” “Himiko,” and the incredible “Silence”), and yet the movie’s dark psychological terrain and modern setting unsurprisingly combined to inspire one of the greatest scores that Tōru Takemitsu would ever write. Among Japanese cinema’s greatest arbiters of darkness and modernity, Takemitsu found a way to sow dissonance into pretty much every score he wrote, but the deficiencies of “The Petrified Forest” — the inability of its material to guide the music — invited Takemitsu to wild out like never before. The result is a jarring, eccentric, and unfailingly rich suite of music that ranges from sawing violins and percussive water droplets to free jazz and ambient droning. Most impressively, the music feels more coherent than the movie for which it was written, as if Takemitsu understood something in the chaos of the lead character’s entropy that even Shinoda struggled to figure out. —DE
15. “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (Jerry Goldsmith)
Think about this. This is a major sci-fi franchise tentpole… that has an overture. From the moment that Jerry Goldsmith’s piano tinkles caress the opening bars of his score while stars float past the frame, anyone with a soul knows that this is not your average IP cash-in. Then those searching strings enter, and your soul takes flight to the 23rd century. In director Robert Wise’s hands, this is a yearning, spiritual quasi-symphony of a movie powered largely by Goldsmith’s enveloping score.
In 1979, the temptation to make a “Star Wars” knockoff must have been overwhelming. Instead, “2001: A Space Odyssey” seems a far more obvious reference point for Wise’s film — a movie concerned with an artificial intelligence searching for its maker, with graceful spaceships traversing heavenly clouds in near slow motion, in the battle between human feeling and pure logic. Goldsmith’s score ranges from the bassoons and brass and claves sticks for the “Klingon Battle” theme, to soaring violins for the Enterprise in flight to the low tubas that kick off “The Meld,” the extraordinary ascension of a finale in which Kirk & Co. witness a new life form being born.
This isn’t a movie about heroes and villains. It’s a movie about discovery, one that really strives for wonder. “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” doesn’t just try to be a good movie, or even a great one, it’s trying to be a beautiful one. Goldsmith’s score takes time for all of its major themes and leitmotifs to develop. It’s not about driving the film’s action forward, but about capturing what pure sci-fi could sometimes achieve: The transcendent. How many blockbusters since have chased beauty rather than just “what’s cool”? Or what’s exciting? Or what’s awesome? Not many. But this is a movie earnest enough to end — as the Enterprise flies off toward the void and the Hollywood Studio Symphony orchestra plays music from Goldsmith so divine it seems to be of the spheres — with the onscreen text “The human adventure is just beginning.” It’s not cool. It’s beautiful. —CB
14. “A Clockwork Orange” (Wendy Carlos)
One of the most influential scores ever written, Wendy Carlos’ music for “A Clockwork Orange” is also among the scariest. Inspired by her own 1968 album “Switched-On Bach,” a wacky synth adaptation of the German composer’s greatest hits that became the unlikeliest of bestsellers, Carlos was tasked by Stanley Kubrick with adapting some 17th century English funeral music. We first hear it when Alex explains how he and his gang will be spending their evening after a couple of glasses of milk. Carlos’ signature baroque-sci-fi-horror sound was as well matched to Kubrick’s vision of a dystopian Britain as any collaboration in the director’s life.
It’s no surprise that Carlos later returned to score “The Shining”, outdoing herself with another synthy vision of pure terror. Carlos and Kubrick discovered together that the synth can be a whole new kind of scary — even more unsettling than those jabbing violins in “Psycho” or the two-note “Jaws” theme. The impersonality of the synth and its aural emptiness met its perfect match in Burgess’s book and Kubrick’s groundbreaking film. At the start of the Seventies, movies were getting the taste of a sound that would soon dominate. —AS
13. “Space Is the Place” (Sun Ra)
From the moment he materialized in American pop culture, Sun Ra looked like he was trying to find his way back to his home planet. An unapologetic afrofuturist, cosmic prankster, and jazz virtuoso all rolled into one, he was as committed to his ahead-of-their-time politics as his poetically simple mantra that life was simply a matter of “making sounds every day.” But to any casual fan, his legacy can be summed up in four simple words: “Space Is the Place.”
The phrase is many things — a movie, an album, a song — but more than anything, it’s a distillation of Ra’s belief that our consciousness was wasted on the petty disagreements of the planet we call home. His eyes were always on the stars above, and the promise of a blank slate that the surrounding galaxies offered. The realization that Earth was never going to start from scratch and erase every structural disadvantage afforded to certain minorities is enough to turn most people into bitter pessimists, but it was the source of all of Sun Ra’s endearing optimism. Earth might be doomed, but space was the place.
Adapted from a college class Ra taught in the ’60s called “The Black Man in the Cosmos,” “Space Is the Place” is an audiovisual proclamation of a sci-fi fueled ethos that’s as singular as the man who made it. Naturally, its score is too. Composed by Ra (who accompanies his Arkestra on synthesizer), the music combines the free-flowing horns of avant-garde jazz with a massive rhythm section of traditional African drums and sound effects that could have been ripped from a 1950s UFO movie to create a distinct soundscape that could only have emerged from one man. It’s complex, unclassifiable, and forward-looking despite feeling like a distinct relic of its time. In other words, it’s just like Ra himself. —CZ
12. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (Popol Vuh)
Very, very few movies evoke as much, as quickly, as Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” which is steeped in a dreamlike fever from its opening shots of Spanish conquistadors — in search of the mythical city of El Dorado — forcing their slaves down through the clouds of the Urubamba Valley as if descending into heaven. A considerable portion of the film’s ecclesiastical atmosphere can be attributed to Herzog’s mad insistence on following in the Spaniards footsteps and shooting on location at any cost. But the rest of the credit unambiguously belongs to West German Krautrockers Popol Vuh, whose choir-organ score falls across the screen like a death fog. The Eno-like ambient music sounds like a polyphony of human voices as they loop around each other and get lost; like a siren song singing Klaus Kinski’s title character to the shipwreck of his own delusion. The ethereal hum is divine and devilish in equal measure, and once you hear it there’s no turning back. —DE
11. “Jeremiah Johnson” (John Rubinstein & Tim McIntire)
One of the great exercises in Americana that also happens to be a soulful, introspective movie score, the music of “Jeremiah Johnson” by Tim McIntire and John Rubinstein came about in an extremely unusual way: The duo sent an unsolicited tape of their music to director Sydney Pollack, and he loved it so much they got the job. Both were actors, not established composers, and were also primarily known for their acting afterward as well. But they delivered a score that marries the singer-songwriter sensibility of ‘70s balladeers to the 1840s West.
In fact, you could almost look at the “Jeremiah Johnson” score as one big ballad that just happens to be broken up to score-length. McIntire himself sings throughout the movie, alternating between lyrics that provide exposition and those that add more oblique poetic insights — none of these snatches of lyrics are really standalone songs, more like fragments that add up to the telling of this spare, inward-looking story about a Mexican War deserter who becomes a mountain man. When McIntire sings “The way that you wander is the way that you choose / The day that you tarry is the day that you lose / Sunshine or thunder a man will always wonder where the fair wind blows / where the fair wind blows” it’s like James Taylor as scored by Aaron Copland.
Given the amount of unsubtitled Crow and Salish in the script, it’s not a surprise that Native American drums and flutes contribute heavily to McIntire and Rubinstein’s sonic palette. But so too does fiddle — not violin, fiddle — and piano. The crashing piano chord that opens the “Entr’Acte” spells doom ahead for Jeremiah’s growing family and after they’re all massacred, Jeremiah sits among the devastation and a quiet piano melody (“The Wake”) accompanies a long time-lapse shot of his face over several days as he processes the loss. It’s the finest acting of Robert Redford’s career, as this absolute tragedy gives to the slightest smile on his face — the memory of his time with his lost family ultimately outweighing the grievousness of their loss. But that performance wouldn’t have its power without McIntire and Rubinstein’s impressionistic musical portraiture. —CB
10. “Taxi Driver” (Bernard Herrmann)
Nowadays, Martin Scorsese’s deference to Classic Hollywood is well known. It was less obvious when he made “Taxi Driver.” One massive clue: Scorsese’s decision to enlist the services of composer Bernard Herrmann, who had written the music for “Citizen Kane”, “Vertigo” and “Psycho.” Herrmann would not live to see a finished “Taxi Driver” (he died of a heart attack just hours after he finished recording his score), and that’s even more of a shame when this work is rightly considered among his greatest achievements.
Far from just a bullet point on a CV that borders on the absurd, Herrmann’s music for “Taxi Driver” is an unforgettable clash of Hollywoods Old and New. Herrmann wasn’t deemed modern enough for Hitchcock by the time “Torn Curtain” came around, and worked less in the last decade of his life. But with Scorsese’s film the old master showed that he could meet the needs of the transgressive Movie Brats and their genre-bending, morally ambiguous movement. (It’s apt that Brian De Palma brought the two together, after Herrmann’s haunting score for “Obsession”.)
Scorsese said Herrmann’s music was the “psychological basis” of “Taxi Driver”, a moody and sometimes loud expression of things not said. But it’s also a beautiful piece of music in its own right. That opening drumroll before the main theme kicks in is a blunt statement of foreshadowing, perfect for a movie which you just know is going to end in a bright-red bloodbath. And the saxophone theme that follows, as romantic as any in movie history, is an appropriately twisted expression of Travis Bickle’s love for Betsy – a romance for the ages. Or is it. The theme flutters to a dreamlike climax — or a nightmarish one, depending on which version of events you’re willing to believe. —AS
9. “Shaft” (Isaac Hayes)
Isaac Hayes became the first Black composer to win an Oscar when he took the Best Original Song prize at the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony for “Theme from ‘Shaft.’” He was also the first Black winner of any non-acting Oscar category with that award, which is pretty extraordinary to consider, given that the Academy Awards were already into their fifth decade at the time.
If Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going on?” album was the “Sergeant Pepper’s” of soul, Hayes’ “Shaft” score, released just two months after, is the symphony of soul, a long-form, largely instrumental wall of sound and attitude. Hayes’ arrangements are machine-tooled to immersive perfection. There’s the iconic title track with Hayes’ own low recitations — is it singing or spoken-word poetry? — giving way to a full orchestra’s brassy five-note bombast, as much a declaration of Black excellence as Black power, and a kind of mission statement for the whole blaxploitation film movement it helped to kick off.
Electric piano and a lush string section define “Bump’s Lament,” and there’s conga drums and flute on “Walk from Regio’s” — not to mention that Hayes himself played vibraphone on “Ellie’s Love Theme.” This is a rich sonic palette, as much mood and mystery as swagger. —CB
8. “Halloween” (John Carpenter)
It took John Carpenter three days to change the sound of scary movies — and he’d just finished changing the way they looked and felt, too. The director’s music for “Halloween,” his signature film and one that has spawned a 13-film franchise (so far), is another score which deceives by its simplicity and, like Michael Myers, returns when you least expect it. (Or if you’re watching the more recent ones, when you most.)
Carpenter wrote the score on a keyboard after he was told by test audiences that his movie wasn’t scary. Problem solved. A sort of successor to the high-pitched strings in “Psycho”, Carpenter’s staccato notes at the right side of the piano are an immediate tone setter. The bold use of the synth as a sort of ticking clock before an outbreak of violence shaped the sound of the genre – and helped put the knife in the traditional big band sound. If you weren’t scared of the dark before “Halloween,” you probably were afterwards. —AS
7. “Days of Heaven” (Ennio Morricone)
Ennio Morricone was already one of the most famous — or at least most influential — film composers in the world by the time Terrence Malick tapped him to score “Days of Heaven” in 1978 (the director’s second choice after guitarist Leo Kottke declined the gig in favor of a contributing role), but the music he composed for this bucolic American masterpiece earned Morricone Hollywood’s attention in addition to his first Oscar nomination, and confirmed his status as a generational artist rather than just an overqualified genre noodler. Alas, this would be the only time that Morricone and Malick would team up together (in large part because the director didn’t make another movie until 1998), and by all accounts it wasn’t the smoothest of collaborations, as Malick’s specific but searching process conflicted with Morricone’s more intuitive approach.
But Malick needn’t have worried: Morricone understood the story he was trying to tell in his bones. From the pastoral opening notes of the film’s main theme (which alludes to, but is not to be confused for Camille Saint-Saën’s “Carnival of the Animals”), his wind instruments bend and wave like the wheat fields that surround the Texas farm where most of the action takes place; the melody see-saws between worry and hope, tragedy and splendor, making everything feel larger than life and truer to it at the same time. The twinkling piano that runs through the score’s later pieces lends a tender precision to Malick’s sweeping emotionality, anchoring the drama in raw human feeling while allowing this small portrait of forgotten lives to feel as immense as the biggest spaghetti westerns that Morricone would ever score. —DE
6. “Jaws” (John Williams)
“Jaws” feels like one of the most incredible breakout moments for a composer in movie history, but here’s the thing: John Williams was already an extremely established industry veteran — with dozens of credits to his name going back to the 1950s — before delivering the two-note ostinato heard ‘round the world. In fact, he was already an Oscar winner, having won Best Scoring Adaptation (a now-retired category) for his arrangements for “Fiddler on the Roof.”
But when, recently widowed at just 43 years old, Williams took the baton to conduct the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra at the 20th Century Fox lot, he delivered a score that all but kicked off the very idea of the summer blockbuster. And it’s much more than just those alternating E-F and F-F Sharp notes. The bouncy “Out to Sea” and “Great Chase” themes are as much a “call to adventure” in sonic form as anything in his later “Star Wars” score. Then there’s the whistle cue when Quint is standing on the bow, oddly beatific in the midst of extraordinary peril. And the rising discordant horror movie strings in the background of “Quint’s Tale” adding just the right bit of atonal dread to accompany the nearly musical quality of Robert Shaw’s monologue delivery for lines like “sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.” The flute and clarinet-driven “End Titles” melody provides just the right catharsis at the end for a movie so generous it actually shows our heroes making it all the way to shore until they can stand up at the end.
This is a full bounty of a score. Yet of course that two-note shark motif gets all the attention and made all the impact. How many other times can you recognize a piece of music from just two notes? Miles Davis’s “So What” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” sure. Not a ton of others. Williams’ cellos pounding those notes over and over, with tuba over them, created a true character for the shark: Relentless, implacable, all-devouring. Much like the newly created summer blockbuster culture itself. —CB
5. “Chinatown” (Jerry Goldsmith)
In the fourth episode of “The Studio,” Jerry Goldsmith’s “Love Theme from Chinatown (End Title)” subs in as the sound of a “classic Hollywood ending” that’s playing as studio head Matt (Rogen) walks into the sunset thinking of dysfunction and disillusion. Goldsmith’s theme is used with more than a wink, and seemingly a lot of love, but its legend status is entirely accidental. Goldsmith wrote the entire score of “Chinatown” in ten days after producer Robert Evans turned down a more unconventional soundtrack from the relative unknown Phillip Lambro. Goldsmith was the ultimate safe pair of hands, a remarkably prolific industry fixture who had scored 36 films, TV shows, and specials between 1970 and 1974 alone. Polanski’s legendary film isn’t a traditional noir (Robert Towne’s script deconstructed the genre and threw acid on a city he had come to resent) but its producer wisely decided that it had to sound like one.
A portrait of melancholy, the score’s lone trumpet was a perfect accompaniment to Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a man otherwise alone in trying to fight the tide of corruption and injustice. But its twinkling piano is reminiscent of LA’s dreamlike charm. Like harp music reminds us of the past, Goldsmith’s high notes summon the “innocent” era of Hollywood’s early days to which Polanski transports us — and then dismantles before our eyes. After the immortal final line, Goldsmith’s swelling music is interrupted by sirens and yells of “Get off the street!” It’s exactly the contrast Polanski had wanted. —AS
4. “Suspiria” (Goblin)
While “Suspiria” is an elite giallo whichever way you slice it, Dario Argento’s classic isn’t so much better than “Blood and Black Lace,” “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,” or the incredibly titled “Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key” that it would seem to demand its axiomatic status as the greatest example of its subgenre. But this balletic horror show has a secret weapon that puts it a cut above the rest: One of the most sinister and propulsive scores ever written for a movie.
A skilled musician known for taking a hands-on approach to the scores in his films, Argento had previously collaborated with Goblin on 1975’s “Deep Red,” but the script he offered the Italian prog rockers for “Suspiria” — the story of an American girl abroad who dances her way into the clutches of an evil coven — inspired a greater degree of dark magic than the band would ever achieve elsewhere, either in film music or with their own work. Their eponymous theme sets the tone with a churning brew of twinkling synths and ritualistic percussion, both of which are eventually subsumed into the supernatural (represented by the theremin) before a crash of guitar boils everything together into chaos.
But while the opening track perfectly embodies the film’s sublime collision between modern naiveté and ancient bloodlust, Goblin’s score is so undeniable because of how inescapable it becomes throughout the rest of the movie, like an evil music box that bleeds into the heroine’s nightmares. Tracks like the antic “Markos” and the hazy “Black Forest” layer a sonic dreamscape as rich and colorful as the one Argento staged on camera, the image and soundtrack harmonizing to create a movie so much richer than the sum of its parts. —DE
3. “The Godfather” (Nino Rota)
Nino Rota’s music for “The Godfather” includes three or four motifs that could be the basis for entire other scores. In that light, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Rota self-plagiarized the main theme from his own music for “Fortunella,” a late-’50s Italian comedy written by Fellini. (Rota’s Oscar nomination for “The Godfather” was withdrawn, forcing him to wait for the sequel to claim his prize.) The “Fortunella” version of Rota’s music sounds like something from “Oliver!”: bouncy, over-produced, evoking adolescence. Coppola’s assignment for Rota was “authentic Italian.” Rota scored the definitive postwar Italian movie, “La Dolce Vita”, so who better to do it? Needless to say, Coppola got what he wanted. “The Godfather” version of those same notes is bitter, reflective, anti-nostalgic, like Vito Corleone looking back on his youth and not being happy with it. Coppola had to persuade producer Robert Evans to accept the score. Thank God he did. The less appreciated part of the score is Rota’s waltz, but it’s at least as accomplished a piece of music. Its almost schmaltzy final notes are a brilliant companion to Coppola’s unforgettable ending. The door is closed but the show goes on. —AS
2. “Sorcerer” (Tangerine Dream)
Ridiculous as it seems that William Friedkin refused to think of “Sorcerer” as a remake of “The Wages of Fear” when it is very clearly — and also legally — a remake of “The Wages of Fear,” the roiling score that he commissioned Tangerine Dream to write for it is so self-possessed that it only takes a few queasy synth notes to understand how Friedkin saw his movie as something that existed on its own terms. Indeed, the decision to hire the krautrock band for their first Hollywood film score was so forward-thinking in and of itself that it makes “Sorcerer” almost impossible to watch with an eye on the rear-view mirror; the music they gave Friedkin does more to evoke the American cinema of the 1980s than it does a French classic from 1953.
Relocating Henri-Georges Clouzot’s high-tension masterpiece to the sweltering nether regions of a Central American jungle, “Sorcerer” tells the story of four outcasts who are hired to drive volatile truckloads of “sweating” dynamite across wooden bridges so rickety you’d be scared just to walk across them. The genius of Tangerine Dream’s ominous synth accompaniment — written before seeing the film, and then used to influence the rhythm of its editing — is that it emphasizes the febrile hellishness of the situation rather than its explosive suspense. There are exceptions to that rule (the nervous breakdown of “Rain Forest” comes to mind), but for the most part the music work to articulate the idea that steering a truck full of nitroglycerine isn’t as scary as being trapped in the kind of circumstances that inspired the film’s characters to get behind the wheel in the first place. The synth waves bear down on each scene like the walls of a house closing in, until the movie’s threat of sudden death almost feels like a promise of sweet relief. The music is cool as hell, but every cue makes you sweat in your seat all the same. —DE
1. “Star Wars” (John Williams)
Classical snobs love to point out that there seem to be as many influences on Williams’ “Star Wars” score as stars in the sky: Korngold, Copland, Holst, Dvořák, and Wagner just to name a few. Some — looking at you, Sirius XM “Symphony Hall” host Preston Trombley — all but allege theft. Yet the creation of the “Star Wars” score is much like the creation of Facebook: If any of those other composers had created the “Star Wars” score, they would have created the “Star Wars” score. Moreover, none of them created a melody somehow so lushly orchestral yet Top 40-ready that a disco remix of it went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Something that could suit the London Symphony Orchestra and Studio 54.
Beyond the iconic main theme, there’s innovation all over the “Star Wars” score: The extraordinary repeated triple-beat as the Imperial Star Destroyer enters the frame like a leviathan in an opening shot that does more to establish scale than any other opening shot in movie history; the use of steel drums for a jazzy riff on “The Charleston” to create the famous “Mos Eisley Cantina” theme; the bassoon-driven “Darth Vader theme” (no composer of movie music has known what to do with bassoons better than Williams); the stuttery “Imperial Motif” (so good the “Imperial March” from “The Empire Strikes Back” is almost redundant); the thundering bass drums that resound shortly after Grand Moff Tarkin barks “Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?”; the four-note “Death Star” motif that captures the inherent pulp of “Star Wars” better than any other leitmotif and shows that this franchise exists much closer to ‘50s sci-fi than any franchise since. And then with “The Throne Room” somehow it out-Rockys the “Rocky” theme.
But if there’s a true Williams signature it’s his affinity for introducing a musical theme with minimal orchestration and then instantly repeating it with a full 110-piece orchestra chiming in, as heard on “Imperial Cruiser Pursuit.” It’s instant crescendo, the orchestral equivalent of turning the amp up to 11. And there’s almost nothing like it in movie music before Williams. —CB
IndieWire’s ‘70s Week is presented by Bleecker Street’s “RELAY.” Riz Ahmed plays a world class “fixer” who specializes in brokering lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten their ruin. IndieWire calls “RELAY” “sharp, fun, and smartly entertaining from its first scene to its final twist, ‘RELAY’ is a modern paranoid thriller that harkens back to the genre’s ’70s heyday.” From director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”) and also starring Lily James, in theaters August 22.
