But even as the movie unspools, music lends a bit of its own too. Then let me throw "˜The Wizard of Oz' at you, a movie that entered the musical consciousness of a lot of people, as time went by. You have to be a Martian not to have heard about either of those two. You just have to watch "˜Sound of Music' or "˜Saturday Night Fever' to understand what I am talking about.
All that’s missing is a hot rod.Sometimes it's the music that makes the movies. Like nearly all the collections on this list, the American Graffiti LP instantly brings back nearly everything fans love about the film. The album version was cleverly constructed too, using legendary DJ Wolfman Jack’s voice as a bridge between propulsive pop that never quits. The music also struck a nostalgic chord in the audience, which would keep reverberating throughout the decade, affecting the kind of stories Hollywood would tell and the kind of tunes they’d set them to. The use of these real old songs by Fats Domino, the Platters, Chuck Berry, and the like - instead of the cheaper simulations the studio wanted - lent a docu-realism to Lucas’s impressionistic portrait of restless teens. The soundtrack was a costly extravagance that Universal Pictures initially balked at - but it turned out to be one key to the movie’s stunning success. Because of his rep, expectations were low for what turned out to be Lucas’s breakthrough film: an elliptical ensemble piece, set in small-town California in 1962, scored to an unceasing stream of early rock and doo-wop hits. But just about every modern musical genre is represented, from hip-hop to grunge to avant-garde classical.īefore his whole life and career became all about Star Wars, George Lucas was known around Hollywood as a nerdy cinephile with artsy, experimental inclinations - more of a Kenneth Anger than a Steven Spielberg, in other words. To cover as much ground as possible, I limited filmmakers known for their great soundtracks (like Spike Lee and Sofia Coppola) to one entry each. Instead, what you’ll mostly find below are song-driven soundtracks that had significant cultural impact, in various ways: by becoming best sellers by introducing (or reintroducing) songs to heavy radio rotation by summarizing entire musical subgenres or by helping to create singular cinematic moments. I’m also skipping conventional original instrumental scores … even when they’re unconventional, like Miles Davis’s soundtrack to Elevator to the Gallows, or Anton Karas’s inescapable The Third Man zither, or the Brazilian bossa nova of Black Orpheus. (Sorry, Disney sorry, MGM sorry, Grease.). Once, and, yes, A Star Is Born), though in order to avoid making this list too unwieldy, I’m excluding straight-up musicals. I’m also allowing movies that feature diegetic musical performances (like Purple Rain. It’s hard to skip over Shaft or Superfly, even though they were created by single artists, exclusively for those projects. For this list, I leaned almost exclusively on the Scorpio Rising model: films scored from a variety of musical sources, many of them preexisting. With A Star Is Born out this week, we decided it was time to determine the 40 best movie soundtracks of all time. The intersection of alluring images and catchy songs remains a reliable money-maker. A big part of the marketing has been focused on the music, with videos of performances by Cooper and his co-star Lady Gaga quickly going viral, well before the film’s release. Director/star Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is the latest updating of a story that’s been a cinematic perennial since the 1930s and it’s already a hit at the box office. When Scorsese’s generation took over Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, they carried Anger in their hearts and minds.Ĭut to 2018, and if early projections hold, one of the year’s most popular albums is going to be a soundtrack. A staple of art-house cinemas and university film programs, Scorpio Rising influenced the way that aspiring directors like Martin Scorsese would come to think about the juxtaposition of moving pictures and popular music. Back in 1963, the underground artist and puckish provocateur debuted his movie Scorpio Rising, a 30-minute barrage of erotic imagery and American iconography, scored to unlicensed rock and R&B songs by the likes of Elvis Presley and Ray Charles. This post has been updated to account for the release of A Star Is Born. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Home Video, Gramercy Pictures and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.