Best Score
3rbrown
MI6 Top Secret - Scotland, GlaPosts: 100MI6 Agent
What film hade the best score, not the theme song during the titles I mean the tunes during the films.
Mines Are
Thunderball
The Spy Who Loved Me
A View To A Kill (Exept the beachboys)
The Living Daylights
Mines Are
Thunderball
The Spy Who Loved Me
A View To A Kill (Exept the beachboys)
The Living Daylights
Comments
John Barry wrote more of the Bond scores than anyone else and defined the musical sound of Bond, and for many his scores are the best. YOLT and OHMSS are frequently cited as his peak work.
David Arnold has been composing for 007 for the last 10 years- TND and CR are perhaps his best examples.
Monty Norman's DN has a dated charm but isn't very Bondian; George Martin's work on LALD gave a refreshingly different feel to that score; Marvin Hamlisch's TSWLM has a few good moments; Bill Conti's very 80s FYEO is either loved or hated; Michael Kamen's work on LTK was rather anonymous and lacking in character; Eric Serra's GE stunk.
Burt Bacharach's CR (67) is a superb piece of 60s music with nothing to say James Bond about it; Michel Legrand's NSNA is best avoided.
DN - Forgettable, but good listening.
FRWL - Beautiful music for the Turkish setting, but aside from that, nothing else.
GF - Sounds good in the movie, but the audio recordings that I have sound so grainy and bad.
TB - Forgettable, once again.
YOLT - Beautiful Japanese music, but becomes a bit boring after awhile.
CR - THIS IS STUFF IS AMAZING! I love it to death, if you're ever having a bad day or you just want to listen to any music, this would be the greatest. So many tracks are a fun listen.
OHMSS - The first score that we can all love! A different type of musical style with a versatile theme in Barry's OHMSS, with elements ranging from beautiful and relaxing to tense and exciting.
DAF - Another goodie with some boring music but great stuff in the bouncy Moon Buggy Ride, the suspenseful "Wint and Kidd" theme, and whatnot.
LALD - Very in tune with the 70s and very good at the same time, especially 'Tresspassers Will Be Eaten' and 'Bond in New York'.
TMWTGG - An underrated score with the unused instrumental TMWTGG, which is hilarious, the tense Hip's Trip and the beautiful In Search for Scaramanga's Island.
TSWLM - Great stuff by Hamlisch, especially in the movie, and the album lacks many of these sadly.
MR - A haunting score by Barry especially in "Centrifuge/Corrine Put Down" and the beautiful "Bond Arriving at the Pyramid/Flight into Space", two dramatic and haunting pieces!
FYEO - A bouncy, energetic score that is wholly listenable all the way through. A solid effort by Conti!
OP - A bit run-of-the-mill for Barry, but not without it's great moments like in the Chase Bond Theme, another suspenseful cue and 'That's My Little Octopussy' is a beautiful instrumental rendition of All Time High. Yo Yo Fight is also a great track.
AVTAK - A retro score by Barry with wonderful elements as the Stacey tracks, the action and electric guitar laden 'Snow Job/He's Dangerous/Golden Gate Fight' tracks. Also, the haunting 'May Day Bombs Out' is great. My favorite is the hanging over San Fran/stealing Stacey tracks.
TLD - A great sendoff for Barry, TLD has to be one of his best, with great moments scattered all about in the grand 'Koskov Escapes' and the tense 'Inflight Flight'.
LTK - Boooooooooooooooring.
GE - A fresh, innovative and avante garde score appreciated by few. All of these tracks are great, the Bond theme centric Goldeneye Overture, the fun Ladies First, the beautiful We Share The Same Passions, the haunting Whispering Statues, the sleek A Little Surprise for You, the techno-Bond Pleasant Drive and it just goes on and on!
TND - Great work by Arnold, especially in Backseat Driver and his other action cues.
TWINE - One word. Pipeline.
DAD - Arnold rehashes his work from the first too and it's nothing but techno mishmash. The only good stuff is the Pipeline-esque stuff and the Welcome to Cuba.
CR (The bad one) - Booooooooooooooooring Part 2.
As I said above, opinions vary. I'd never class the TB score as forgettable; "superb" would be the word I would choose. Lush cocktail music ("Cafe Martinique"), pounding action themes ("Underwater Mayhem"), the blending of source and orchestral music ("Death Of Fiona") and the masterly use of leitmotifs all indicate one of the masters of film music working at his 60s zenith. Barry's score is built around the main theme ("Thunderball", sung over the main titles by Tom Jones), "Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" (there were two vocal recordings, available on the 30th Anniversary 2CD set, sung by Dionne Warwick and Shirley Bassey but not used in the movie itself), "007", and of course the "James Bond Theme". These and others intertwine through the score establishing mood and character as well as underlining action- particularly important in this particular film since so much of the action takes place underwater with obviously no dialogue- building to a shattering climax.
AVTAK is not a bad score; it certainly knocks spots off TMWTGG and is more varied than OP, but it's not in the same league as TB, YOLT, OHMSS or DAF. By the time of AVTAK (1985, after more than twenty years) John Barry had passed the orchestration duties on to Nic Raine, although naturally the composition is all his own, and his themes are less varied than in those films.
Upcoming on this site is an exhaustively detailed guide to the Bond scores; ALL of them, official and unofficial, track by track. That will help you in your question when it is available. As a taster, I'll just mention that the albums for DN and TSWLM largely do not feature the recordings used in the films; the 2003 remasters of most of the series are the editions to purchase (although the original CD of LALD has its interests); and that Derek Watkins is perhaps the unsung hero of the entire series- musically speaking, of course.
Of course you have- David Arnold's been pinching bits of it for years!
Er, riiiiight... Good luck with that; let me know how it goes; hope it all works out for you...:s
Well maybe I overreacted a bit there, but don't you like Pipeline?
The actual melody is a good one, although it's too often buried under electronic chaos. Arnold clearly likes it enough to re-use it (eg "Antonov" in DAD and "Stairwell Fight" in CR), so I guess we'll be hearing more from "Pipeline" in the future. It'll never replace the Theme or "007", though.
Barbel, I've read somewhere that Arnold tried paying "homage" to GE in his scores due to the fact that Serra didn't use any of it in his. Are there any moments that ring a bell of Tina Turner's GE to you?
I'm with my feline friend here. I've never seen that suggestion, never heard any aural evidence of it, and think it very unlikely.
LALD and TSWLM are both pretty good non-Barry scores IMO.
[skips the 80s]
TND and CR are pretty good Arnold scores, especially CR, he has some very nice stuff in there for Vesper IMO.
While the musical score is essential to a film, the reverse isn't necessarily so. Film music has a life of its own outside of providing the movie with a soundtrack; in the best cases it isn't dependent on the visuals for its impact (in much the same way that a pop song nowadays requires a video- often costing more than the recording itself- to prop up the ghostwritten synthesised self-obsessed ramblings of the current flavour of the month. Hm, bit off topic there 8-).) but is capable of being enjoyed on its own merits.
To create this, a very particular type of talent is required in order to ensure that the music both matches and complements the onscreen action while at the same time delivering and developing musically in as interesting and involving a fashion as possible.
One common way of proceeding is to time the arrangement and composition exactly to the onscreen action- for example, note how the orchestral hits in "Bond Below Disco Volante" coincide with Largo's throwing of grenades close to Bond's underwater position. John Barry is on record as calling this approach "Mickey Mouse-ing", in that the movement of characters in cartoons is often slavishly followed by the music.
The alternative approach is more melody-driven; the music is appropriate to the mood of a scene and does not follow the action literally. This is often found in romantic scenes (many examples- try "Try"), less so in action ones (although it does happen- eg "007" in any of its incarnations).
The challenge therefore for a film composer is to produce lasting and enjoyable music while emphasising a film's good points and compensating for its bad ones. Few would dispute that much of OHMSS's emotional impact is due to John Barry's towering work with both action and romantic themes.
This has been a long-winded way of saying that good music can come from a bad film (and vice versa). Majority opinion has MR as a pretty poor Bond film, yet the score is excellent; conversely, the majority seem to rate GE very highly despite Eric Serra's feeble efforts.
Above, I was of course using my own opinions re the music but not my own opinions of the films- eg, I don't think GE is as great as some people seem to think it is but I accept that it's frequently rated highly. MR I can hardly watch these days (and it's low on most totem poles) but I play the music often.
I do think Barry did an excellent job capturing the feel of certain films--and expanding on it even. YOLT is saturated with the lushness of the themes he created for that film, MR as well. And DAF the soundtrack is so superior to DAF the film, makes me pine for a film that matches it, lol.
{[] Well said!