Music of the movies

Sky Arts have assembled their normal team of Neil Norman, Ian Nathan, Steven Armstrong and Dr Bonnie Greer to cast their expertise on the subject of film scores.

These can define a movie.

Take for example Bernard Herman’s score of Psycho or rather take it away from the famous stabbing scene in the shower and the horror element is significantly reduced.

Herman and Eric Korngold fled the Nazis and brought their considerable skills to Hollywood, as did Austrian directors like Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.

Romantic movies relied on the string chords supplied by these musicians.

By the 1950s and 1960s Elmer Bernstein was creating those brilliant catchy melodies for The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape.  

John Barry’s 007 opening theme is as integral to James Bond as is Sean Connery.

By the 1970s John Williams was composing Star Wars.

I once met a musician who wrote film scores.

He was Junior Campbell of the Marmalade pop group and he composed the score for Thomas the Tank Engine.

I was interested to know the extent he worked with the director.

I guess hands on directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick would be quite insistent on the type of score.

In Campbell’s case he would see the film and then he would compose the score.

The Sky Arts team provided not just an interesting dimension but a cinematic journey by decade taking in such modern classics as The Godfather and  One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Finally and differently I must pay tribute to the great Jean Paul Belmondo who passed away recently aged 88.

Despite his broken nose, earned by an early career as a boxer, Belmondo was a classically-trained actor who studied at Le Conservatoire, the French equivalent of RADA.

He made his name in Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless as a small-time thief on the run, but my favourite new wave role of his was in Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos (hard hat, or slang for informer).

He never went to Hollywood and disliked arty movies. He had great screen presence