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The part where the Muriel Pritchett's son clasps Macon Leary's hand after he's discovered being picked on by school kids in an alley. It's a close shot of him reaching for Macon's hand and Williams' music enters with a rising string/horn line that moves to a restatement of the Main Theme from Accidental Tourist. I always loved that moment.
Nice topic Yor.
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Yor, the moment you mention in “Once Upon a Time in America” is among my favorites. I’ll throw in another Morricone: when Jill arrives at the train station in “Once Upon a Time in the West.” That sequence –the celeste quietly chiming (like a delicate pocket watch) as Jill emerges from the train (is it a celeste?) – the sorrowful, melancholic, yet soaring music as Jill enters the station and the camera cranes up higher and higher -- with the music lifting and enveloping us in a sublime experience of another place and another time -- so beautiful it is like an out of body experience -- it never fails to move me.
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Sorry but I have to add one from Jerry too. "Hospital" from Papillon is a perfect example of sublime. Not much dialogue, just mostly music and visuals. The image of Papillon finding a grasshopper and setting it free through the bars on the window still resonates with me.
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Akhnaton's death in THE EGYPTIAN.
Tyrone Power's change of attitude when showing portrait in PRINCE OF FOXES.
Gene Tierney coming down those stairs in THE RAZOR'S EDGE.
"Ring for Freedom" from Rozsa's BEN-HUR.
Tarita paddling out to the Bounty under that sunset splendor in Kaper's MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY.
Alex North's main title of CLEOPATRA, capturing the mystery and wonder of the ancient world.
Jerome Moross's main title to THE BIG COUNTRY.
Tiomkin's chanted funeral march from LOST HORIZON
Herrmann's "The Road and Finale" from FAHRENHEIT 451 (which actually sounds better on the re-recording Herrmann conducted; in the original movie, it's divided into 2 parts.)
Bernstein's overture and main title to HAWAII.
So much of Herrmann's score to THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR; so much pungent beauty.
That tracking backward shot at the finale of LUST FOR LIFE, accompanied by Rozsa's glory.
And, of course, that moment when Clift and Taylor go out on the terrace and declare their love, from A PLACE IN THE SUN. (Now finally AVAILABLE!!!)
I could go on and on....
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Posted: |
Jul 15, 2013 - 7:50 PM
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By: |
jkirkfsm
(Member)
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Given my warm welcome to the board from such a thoughtful member on another thread today, I thought I'd get right back on the horse. This is such an interesting question, and so difficult to answer. The very nature of film music is (was) to not be heard, but to enhance the scene or emotion or character. So if you're aware of hearing it as you're watching, maybe it's not doing its job properly. Back in the 80s, I made it a point to get every Varese soundtrack lp released. I didn't see many of the movies but I heard all the music. I loved James Horner's Gorky Park soundtrack. I have no idea what movie it was actually written for, but seeing part of Gorky Park once, none of the music even remotely fit the movie. But it's a great score. I'm in a very small minority of people who loved both the score and film of Something Wicked This Way Comes. There could be a moment or two in there.
Goldsmith wrote some fine music, probably more good scores than anybody else ever, but most of that was for less than stellar projects. Look at the difference between The Wind and the Lion, score and film. Or STTMP, score and film. Actually, it could have been the long Enterprise fly-by somewhere in the first couple hours of STTMP, if you weren't hoping that someone would kill you soon.
Howard Shore springs to mind. He's written some great music and except for LOTR 2 and 3 and The Hobbit 1 - 8, he's a musical shape shifter. If terror can be sublime, the music and the scenes of the Black Riders or whoever they were, hunting the hobbits in LOTR 1 was right up, combining into one of the most sublimely terrifying moments I've experienced.
Basil Poledouris, even tho' he was criminally wasted by Hollywood, wrote some of the most beautiful and coolest scores ever, but the few movies that I've seen that he'd scored aren't anything I'd willingly sit through again.
Someone has already mentioned The Ecstasy of Gold, for sure in my top contenders.
If you were to broaden your definition of movie to include televsion movies, the you could add Billy Goldenberg. After all these years, I still remember sublime moments of terror, that he helped create in Duel and Fear No Evil. Music at least as creepy as The Exorcist, and all by a single composer. In sheer inventiveness and coolness, I think he might even top Goldsmith.
Hitchcock supposedly said that even he didn't think much of Psycho until he heard it with Bernard Herrmann's score. The first couple times I saw it, I didn't even know it had a score, that's how good Herrmann was. A few scenes in Day the Earth Stood Still that could be my contenders.
But music that you're actually aware of as you're watching the film? Not after you've listened to the soundtrack album until it's worn out? And not a manipulative musical interlude like Raindrops Falling on My Head?
The main title of The Shining. Wendy Carlos and the steady cam flying over the cliff edge, taking youir stomach with it? Hard to beat that. And impossible to relicate on TV, computer monitor, or Mephone. You had to be there.
John Barry's ski chase in OHMSS? Very close.
But, my sublime moment of movie and music, the first time I truly understood how what you're seeing on screen and what you're listening to could combine into something truly amazing, even shocking, even horrifying, was Suicide is Painless and the title sequence to MASH. The melody was beautiful. The words were awful. The mountains were beautiful, the helicopters graceful, the bodies hanging from them, the bloody bandages, were horrible. One song, once scene, summed up an entire movie and an entire decade. I never knew before then that pictures combined music could do that. Not like that.
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If I had to pick just one moment, the one moment that springs to mind first is from Best Years of Our Lives when Fredric March returns home from the war and his two kids see him first, and when his wife (Myrna Loy) calls out from the kitchen, "Who is it?" and is met with silence, she knows who it is. As they embrace the music tells us what lies ahead- and the way the two kids look at each other, you know, that scene didn't always break me up the way it does now until I got the album, must have something to do with the passage of time and, like a fine wine, the score by Il Professore Hugo Friedhofer always was excruciatingly, breathtakingly, sublime.
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EMPIRE OF THE SUN
The scene in which the young hero sees the japanese bombers which are not war machines for him but the manifestation of his dreams of flying. While repair is going on and sparks fly over his head, he leans closer, touches the metal. And the Japanese soldiers who find him do not automatically draw him back to his prison camp but stand there and salute him. And he salutes back. For a brief moment, there are no battle lines, just people respecting each other.
The way John Williams has scored this scene and Spielberg drowns out the sound just to feature the music... that, my friends, is sublime to me.
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