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... and "Peggy Sue Got Married" just tear me up completely -- beginning with the opening credits :>)
Thank you for mentioning Peggy Sue Got Married. This is, beginning to end, a beautiful movie and I agree with the score, particularly in the quiet passages such as Night on the Hill and Traveling to Grandpa Barney's. Even the credits are beautiful, you're quite right. The whole movie is sweetly pastoral and I think Peggy acts much the way we would in the same circumstance unlike so many time travel films. The cinematography is wonderful too but the score, like Herrmann's, has a sad thread as if to say, "you can't go back, this time is gone forever."
I know what you mean by the crying thing. I lose it every time Peggy answers the phone.
Gone With the Wind is really memorable. I liked Chocolat too.
I liked the score to the most recent Pride & Prejudice so much I downloaded it, and I'm not usually into movie scores.
Star Wars: How brilliant is this? It's a marvelous bit of program music with passages people reference frequently in popular culture. How many people have hummed the Imperial theme when speaking of Dick Cheney? The yearning strings of Luke watching the double sunset on Tatooine? The score is beautifully married to the film itself and is as much part of it as the ubermyth it has become.
Lawrence of Arabia: Maurice Jarre's masterpiece. The lit match, the sun, and that brilliant score that evokes the wet and nautical out of the arid and ponderous but still works like they were born twins. It's an intense, sweeping score but is perfectly and beautifully subtle in such scenes as the rescue of Gasim. It is said there are only three stars in the film, the desert, O'Toole, and the Jarre's magnificent score. Few disagree.
Those two definitely top my list. LoA is one of the few perfect movies ever made, and the score was a big reason.
Other faves:
The Lord of the Rings
Planet of the Apes (the original '60s film) JAWS
Blade Runner
The Dark Knight
The Last of the Mohicans ('90s version) Superman
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (totally unconventional and absolutely brilliant) The Mission. "Gabriel's Oboe" can actually move me to tears.
The king of them all is Miklos Rozsa's score for "Ben Hur."
Korngold's scores for "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "The Sea Hawk"
Rozsa again for "Ivanhoe", "Lust for Life" and "El Cid"
Bernard Herrmann's scores for "Vertigo", "North by Northwest" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (the real one, not the silly remake).
Alfred Newman's "How the West was Won", "Young Mr. Lincoln" and "Captain from Castile".
His nephew Randy's score for "The Natural"
Max Steiner's "King Kong"
Hugo Freidhoffer's "Best Years of our Lives"
Dimitri Tiomkin's "Red River"
Elmer Bernstein's "Magnificent Seven", "Some Came Running" and "The Ten Commandments".
Victor Young's "Rio Grande".
Lots of wonderful choices listed, even though I probably only know about half of them! As a fan of westerns, I agree with several of these choices. As a fan of Charleton Heston, I agree with a couple more.
As a fan of John Williams, I will add another nod for Star Wars, Jaws, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I will also add the Indiana Jones series to the list, as well as The Cowboys. The latter is one of my all time favorites. Williams also wrote the score for the Jurassic Park, Star Trek, and Superman movie series, and E.T., as well.
Another of my all-time favorite movie scores is Basil Poledouris' score for the movie Quigley Down Under.
Besides Red River, Dmitri Tiomkin also wrote the score for The Alamo, another of my favorites.
Elmer Bernstein also wrote the music for the movie True Grit (another of my favorites), in addition to those others mentioned above. He also did the scores for Ghostbusters, Animal House, and Airplane.
Besides Rio Grande, Victor Young also wrote the score for The Quiet Man, yet another of my favorites.
There are so many wonderful musical scores (particularly from the western movies), that I find it difficult to choose just a few favorites. The ones that came to mind I've already listed, but I'm sure there are a lot of others I didn't even think of.
This is a wonderful thread with a lot of great selections being offered. I'll have to look some of them up, since I don't know all of them.
Dr. Zhivago
Gone With The Wind
The Wizard of Oz
Lord of The Rings Trilogy
The Harry Potter Series
Steel Magnolias
Dragonheart
The Right Stuff
Forrest Gump
On Golden Pond
We Were Soldiers
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Best Movie Scores
