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Best Movie Soundtracks

C

chicago

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I can think of like 15 movies right off the bat that have amazing sound tracks, so it's hard to pick just one for now lol but I'll try.

I have to say Ghost World, while not being my favorite movie at all - in fact I can barely remember the cast or premise - has an amazing soundtrack of early Blues tunes. They're near impossible to find individually anywhere online, at least I haven't been able to without buying from iTunes, but it's worth it for this tune alone:

 
My favorites right now:

Jerry Goldsmith:
Patton
Star Trek TMP
Star Trek Voyager Theme

James Horner:
Wrath of Khan
Braveheart
Aliens (1986)

Lalo Schiffrin:
Mission: Impossible theme (original big band sound)
Enter The Dragon
Dirty Harry

Enrico Morrone:
Good, Bad & Ugly
The Untouchables
 
Interesting!

Soundtrack albums? American Graffiti!

Scores to films? I have to tell you: get the "Planet of the Apes" soundtrack, to the original movie, fantastic. We used to use it as pre-show music sometimes, lol.
Anything Bernard Herrmann did, definitely "Citizen Kane" and "Psycho", also "The Twilight Zone" TV series.

I just watched "White Heat" and Max Steiner's score was incredible.

PS: I LOVE SKIP JAMES!!!! "Devil Got My Woman" is one of my all time fave blues tunes, great choice! ("Hard Time Killing Floor" is also great, every single track he did in the 30s is great, they all fit on one disc too.....). I'm with you, I hardly remember the movie at all!
 
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Hair
I couldn't find the whole soundtrack, but here are some songs from the film Hair.

 
Just a few off the top of my head.










 
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Bro, "Repo Man" is one of the greatest soundtrack albums, most definitely! (and sis, "Taxi Driver" totally!)

But we cannot let one more post go by before remembering this dazzling, goose-bump inducing soundtrack: Wendy Carlos' and "A Clockwork Orange".

.....all of the stuff on You Tube is NOT the original recordings (some artists crack down on their work on You Tube and Carlos is one).....so here's the eerie opening theme attached, a synthed-out version of Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.......
 

Attachments

Ok, there's only one song in this movie, in the opening credits, but it's so good, and every time I hear this song, I can only think of this movie.

The movie? "Dog Day Afternoon"

The song?

Elton John: Amoreena
 
The Coen Brothers' films often feature fantastic scores: Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? come to mind. There's also some very appropriate licensed music in The Big Lebowski
 
Victory at Sea is not a film, exactly. It was a documentary series primarily about naval combat during WWII. It aired in half hour segments on NBC 1952-53 and was condensed into a single film in 1954. Scored by Richard Rogers (of Rogers & Hammerstein) and Robert Russell Bennett. The entire soundtrack is over two hours long but this gives a good sampling of the music. I have the series on DVD and its worth watching for the music alone.

 
This thread has some age on it, but so much wonderful music was overlooked I think it deserves a second chance.

The Godfather is on my list of the best 100 films ever made.



The Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood feature some great soundtracks.





Midnight Cowboy won Oscars in 1969 for Best Picture, Best Director (John Schlesinger) and Best Adapted Screenplay.

 
For over twenty years on this island Earth I've been a connoisseur of film scores. There is one universal truth. The very worst reviewed genre films have some of the very best scores. I'd point you to the following:

The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)
Dungeons & Dragons (2000)
The 13th Warrior (1999)
First Knight (1995)

More beloved films that I like beyond the obvious references of Star Wars, Superman, Batman (Danny Elfman completely stole the late Shirley Walker's work and called it his own), various Star Trek films, Aliens (the first sequel), and just about anything from the 1980's to the end of the 1990's before great sweeping film scores began to become less common:

The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Batman: Sub-Zero (1998)
A Knight's Tale (2001) - Not the rock soundtrack, Carter Burwell's beautiful score from the third act when everything was taken seriously.
Gladiator (2000)
Conan the Barbarian (1982)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Witch, The Lion, and Wardrobe (2005)
Braveheart (1995) - Duh!
Apollo 13 (1995)
Transformers [AKA, Bayformers] (2007)
A whole lot of Disney stuff.

I could do this all day but hopefully those highlights will suffice.

Oh, lest I forget the opening of GI Joe: The Movie (the animated one) which fans lovingly call "GI Joe: The Musical". Google it if you miss the 80's when action films were action films!

MidnightX
 
Conan the Barbarian's soundtrack was pretty damn cool. I also like the soundtracks of the Star Wars and Star Trek movies.
 
I'm a complete Film Score nerd I'm surprised I haven't found this thread sooner! A lot of great scores that I love already mentioned (Patton, Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Lawrence of Arabia) Here are some favorites of mine in no particular order:

Bernard Herrmann is arguably my favorite so we'll start with Vertigo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObbHRxvpLJ4

Erich Wolfgang Korngold is another favorite and as much as I love his score for Robin Hood I think The Sea Hawk just edges it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-RPzAbW7No

Miklos Rozsa is also a favorite (Ben-Hur, Spellbound, of course) but The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is the one I turn to the most:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-84aza4Ag

I can't post without mentioning John Barry. Walkabout is one of the most haunting scores for me and I am obsessed with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IkiWL-JZTA

The Maestro himself Ennio Morricone conducting his music from Cinema Paradiso:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSkyoyyvnAY

Hope you guys enjoy!
 
I could gush about Ennio Morricone all day! One of my favourite ever composers. I was lucky enough to see him play live recently. 😀





One of the reasons I love Polanski's Chinatown is Jerry Goldsmith's masterpiece soundtrack, which he completed in just a week!



Henry Mancini had such a brilliant mind for touching melodies and harmonies.



Blade Runner...the quintessential sci-fi soundtrack. Vangelis you genius!!



And Bernard Herrmann. Taxi Driver has already been mentioned. But among his many Hitchcock collaborations, Psycho stands out in its simplicity. Hitch asked for a jazz soundtrack. :laughhard: Herrmann instead used the small budget for a string orchestra, rather than his usual full symphonic arrangements. Strings gave the soundtrack more variety in tone, dynamics and effects. And you can hear it in the opening theme, just how simple strings can produce horror vibes.

 
I envy your being able to see Morricone LIVE!!! That is a thing I doubt very much I will ever be able to do. I missed seeing Jerry Goldsmith live in the late 1990's when he did a guest appearance with the symphony in Denver -- which I will regret to my dying day. I have seen John Williams live.

Yeah, the whole Hitchcock asking for a Jazz oriented score was because of pressure from the studio. Henry Mancini -- another favorite as you point out, and a vastly underrated composer capable of much greater versatility than he is given credit for -- was the darling of the moment so executives wanted everything to have that kind of swing to it whether it warranted it or not (mainly they wanted a score with a song in it so they would have a hit record like "Moon River" to sell -- rather like "Que Sera, Sera" from "The Man Who Knew Too Much" -- look for Bernard Herrmann's cameo as he conducts the "Storm Cloud Cantata"). He made the same request with the score for "Marnie" and Herrmann did what he did best and ignored the request. When "Marnie" tanked at the box office Hitchcock was under even more pressure from the studio to produce a financial hit so he asked for a Jazz score again for his next movie "Torn Curtain" and also, as he had done with "Psycho", particularly requested that Herrmann NOT write any music for the murder scene. Hitchcock had been wanting to experiment with a cinema verite' approach to a murder for a long time and had intended to do that with "Psycho" but Herrmann's shrieking strings quite rightly prevailed. Again Herrmann did what he did best, ignored Hitch's requests (because it had always worked before), and it all came to a head during the scoring sessions for "Torn Curtain" when Hitchcock showed up asked what was going on, why didn't you write what I asked you to, and the remaining scoring sessions got called off and Herrmann was ultimately fired to be replaced by John Addison (whose score for "Torn Curtain" is quite good I think). The portions of Herrmann's unused score that were recorded were, thankfully, preserved and included in the supplemental material on the DVD and eventually a Hitchcock themed CD (there is also a recording of the complete unused score).

Coincidentally, since you bring up "Chinatown" -- another favorite of mine -- Goldsmith wrote that score in a week because he had too. He was called in to replace a score by Phillip Lambro which was rejected at the last minute. I've heard Lambro's rejected score and, oddly, I don't find it to be vastly different from the score that Jerry Goldsmith provided. Goldsmith's score is a bit more sparse and slightly more melodic but still contains a great deal of the jazzy dissonance that Lambro's score consists of.

Yikes, that was more than I had intended to write but I kind of live and breathe movie music.

Of the current generation of composers Michael Giacchino is my favorite. Very mixed feelings about the movie but I love his music for "Jupiter Ascending":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v52OSusi5CA&list=PLWqtJDY9bJgonK32vxZSsu51K-XsAbXUH&index=8

Cheers 🙂
 
I'm glad to see some new posters here, I have some new music to explore. 🙂

Two classic soundtracks. Granted, the Fantasia soundtrack is not original music but who could have paired it with animation like Disney did?



 
The two that come to mind for me.. are Grease. and Saturday Night Fever.

Both of those movies had excellent music.
 
Mine are: Goodfellas, Natural Born Killers, Cape Fear, Wayne's World, The Lost Boys, A Nightmare on Elm St 1-4, Saturday Night Fever, The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, Labyrinth, A Clockwork Orange, The Last House On The Left, The House On The Edge Of The Park, The Exorcist, Mask (w/ Eric Stoltz).

T.V Shows- The Sopranos, Queer As Folk, The L Word, Sons Of Anarchy
 
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