Music makes movies memorable
If you want a movie to win top awards, spend time on the score
Jan 19, 2009
The best film in the world can be elevated to the sublime by a good soundtrack. Conversely, a deeply average flick can seem like a masterpiece if the score is a hit. When you get right down to it though, it’s the music that makes a film memorable, for many years after it fades from our screens.
For instance, Gone With The Wind won the best picture Oscar for 1939. Now some people would argue that this is a very good film. Never having been able to bear watching it all the way through, it would be hypocritical to argue otherwise. But the soundtrack, with its swirling strings, was – and is – unforgettable. It didn’t win an award for the music though. But it was up against the Wizard of Oz. You can’t argue with that. Well, you can, of course. One’s a musical picture, the other’s a drama. Who’s to say which had the better score?
Dumbo
This dilemma was addressed in 1941 when a change in the Oscar system created two new awards; one for best musical picture and one for best dramatic picture. That year, Dumbo and All That Money Can Buy took one each.
Over the following decades great musicals, such as Anchors Aweigh, Kiss Me Kate, Annie Get Your Gun, Singin’ In The Rain, Oklahoma and many others took awards and prizes and delighted audiences. But they don’t matter because here we’re talking about proper films in which the actors don’t sing.
High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, didn’t win the Best Movie Oscar for 1952. However, it did win Best Score. Tex Ritter enjoyed a plaintive, wailing hit with the theme song and the movie remains a revered classic to this day, even though it didn’t win Best Film. That year’s top movie, The Greatest Show On Earth, was frankly boring and thankfully forgotten – but it did star Charlton Heston.
Pub singers
The Four Aces version of Love Is A Many Splendored Thing has inspired pub singers for half a century since the film won the Best Score Oscar in 1955. It was also nominated for a Best Picture prize, losing out to Marty, so it was nearly the film of the year. Have you seen it? Do you know anyone else who’s seen it? Great song though.
Bridge on The River Kwai (1957) featured the first whistle along score – later a British football terrace favourite alongside the Dambusters theme. That stirring soundtrack must have gone a long way towards influencing the Academy, especially the many fans of Tottenham Hotspur amongst them.
In the Magnificent Seven (1960) Elmer Bernstein showed what a good score can do. It didn’t win the Best Score award, losing to Exodus. Go on, whistle This Land Is Mine now. Well, OK, if you’re over 50, Jewish, and have a good memory, you probably can. The rest of us know the Magnificent Seven theme like the back of our hands. But it must have been a tough choice for the Oscar panel.
In 1962 Lawrence of Arabia took every prize for being brilliant in every way. The Maurice Jarre score helped. Since then many others have tried. Some have failed.
Top turkey
Doctor Zhivago, a prize turkey, took the top music award in 1965 for a score so good it eclipsed the fact that 60 per cent of the audience were asleep or comatose with boredom by the end of reel 1. It remains popular as a cure for insomnia to this day. Unsurprisingly, it did not win Best Picture that year, losing out to some forgotten old thing called The Sound of Music. Ring any bells?
Around this time, Ennio Morricone, made his entrance in spaghetti westerns, but was so far ahead of his time that he overshot the whole Oscar audience.
Born Free’s (1966) title song became a big big hit in the Swinging Sixties, echoing the success of previous winners High Noon and Love is a Many Splendored thing. And it was good for Matt Monroe’s career.
Terrible film
Love Story – an absurdly simplistic TV movie plot enlivened by a good song and a great tagline (love means never having to say you’re sorry) – managed to take the 1970 music prize, but couldn’t hide the fact that it was a terrible film.
The Sting, in 1973, made ragtime pianist Scott Joplin a household name almost overnight. (Take warning all you wannabee celebrities, glory is fleeting, and Joplin had been dead 55 years before his first brush with the big time.) It romped home with best music and best picture awards.
Jaws, in 1975, took things in a whole new direction, one which had been pointed at by the inimitable Morricone in the 1960s. Da da. Da da. Da da. Da da. God! They don’t write them like that anymore. Shame. And while it deservedly won the Best Music Oscar for sheer audacity, it was in competition with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for best picture. And lost.
Bloody marvellous
Vangelis showed the world what could be achieved with a Casio organ when he took the Oscar for 1981’s Chariots of Fire. By Jingo! That’s the way to do it boys. Jolly good. Best Music, Best Picture. Bloody marvellous really.
In 1997 Titanic’s endless dirge of a theme song (My Love Will Go On) captured the hearts of a generation of morons for what felt like a month in a dentist’s chair, but was actually much, much longer. Astoundingly, the Oscar judges failed to notice this and gave the picture every award it conceivably could.
There’s been nothing much worth noting since then, so we’re about due for a movie with a big score very soon now. Listen out for the 2009 crop.
And if you’ve got your eye on a top Oscar, remember to make the music count. It could also keep you in royalties from misty-eyed DVD buyers for decades as time dims the memory of how awful your film actually was but the toe-tapping soundtrack lives on.
