Best Soundtracks

Best Soundtracks

EVERETT COLLECTION

Cheeky and Romantic: Robin Hood

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
The Adventures of Robin Hood: Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the greatest of Hollywood's many romantic composers—let's give a grateful nod here to Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rosza Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein—and this is Korngold at his best—excitable, cheeky, yet always romantically caring.

Citizen Kane: It's impossible to choose a single Bernard Herrmann score as his best. His was a protean talent, embracing every genre, but with a peculiar gift for illuminating psychotic behavior (Hangover Square, Psycho, Taxi Driver). Let his contribution to everyone's favorite great movie, Citizen Kane, represent everything that was wonderful about this most daring of Hollywood's musical sophisticates—his gift for blending major and minor chords (not to mention electronic music and sound effects), his skill with pastiche (the fake opera excerpts he composed for the film) and above all, his ironic spirit.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Moaning chorales, electric guitars, brass bands, the occasional twang of a Jew's Harp; Ennio Morricone, vastly expanded the movie composer's instrumental and tonal palate and this is but one of his several ear-bending, mind-expanding masterworks.

Laura: Forget, if you can, the pop song derived from David Raksin's theme. Concentrate, instead, on the plaintive, permanently haunting variations he created for the film itself. It is largely his score that lifts this otherwise limited movie beyond its genre limits. Lest we forget: this is something great scores sometimes accomplish.

On the Waterfront: Leonard Bernstein only wrote one film score, but it is a haunting masterpiece, seamlessly blending modernist tropes with the darker hues of late romantic melody, which he also loved. In a curious way this movie summarizes his tastes and strengths as a composer and as a conductor-proselytizer for Twentieth Century music.