Music by John Williams: Five favorite scores

John Williams has composed music for roughly 125 feature films, in addition to things like the Olympic theme and the theme to NBC Sunday Night Football and the NBC Nightly News. In addition to the works mentioned in this piece and the rest of his Steven Spielberg collaborations, you would also instantly recognize his themes for Harry Potter, Home Alone, Superman, and Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a gargantuan oeuvre to narrow down to five favorites, but that’s what we do here.

I love film music. I have written about it many times here on the site. Williams is by no stretch my favorite composer, but the importance of his work to film history and to my personal history with film cannot be overstated. I was not exaggerating when I said that he wrote the soundtrack to my childhood. I saw Jaws when I was 3 years old. It terrified and intrigued me. I couldn’t get enough. Home Alone is a holiday-season classic from my youth. Raiders of the Lost Ark and, to an even greater degree, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade taught me what adventure movies could be.

This music is a part of me in a very real way. It’s a part of most of us. So, how does one pick a favorite? You just go with your heart. This is what my heart says:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark – One of the things that makes Williams such a master of the craft is his work with leitmotifs, or character themes. They are the repeated phrases in the music that remind you of who this character is and what he’s about. The “Raiders March” is one of the great character themes in history – you know which one that is; it’s the music you hear in your head when you hear the name Indiana Jones – but “Marion’s Theme” is not to be slept on. One of the key elements of any adventure film is romance. “Marion’s Theme” is one of the most romantic pieces Williams has ever written, and it gives the Raiders soundtrack a depth of feeling and breadth of composition that lands this at the top of my list.

2. Home Alone – Think of how many Christmas songs there are and how much Christmas music there is. Now, try to think of how much of it is relatively new. And, I only mean newer than Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You. There’s not much. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” counts. And Williams’ main theme for Home Alone. That’s how difficult it is to enter something new into the canon of Christmas music. Sixty-plus years, and I can think of two things. The main theme to Home Alone, apart from being a Christmas staple, evokes all of the moods of the film. It’s sentimental, a little dangerous, a little mischievous. It delivers you right to this time and space.

3. Jaws – There is only one reasonable rival here: Bernard Herrmann’s “The Murder” from Psycho. You know it. The shower scene. Roughly 100 years of modern film scoring, and it comes down to these two cues for the most iconic. Here’s how you know: The parody is accomplished through the music alone. Most parody relies on story beats, characters, costumes, images – it is a visual medium, after all – but to parody or homage Jaws, you need just two notes. The same is true of Psycho. Entire film universes are contained within these cues. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, as well, how much fun so much of the rest of the non-shark Jaws music is. It’s a really jaunty adventure score. “Out to Sea” is particularly memorable. Williams says in the documentary that he thinks of Jaws as a pirate movie, and you can hear that influence in the music.

4. Catch Me If You Can – I’m sure Williams has fun every time he composes a new score, but it feels like he’s having the most fun with the jazzy, fanciful compositions he crafted for Spielberg’s cat-and-mouse story. Listen to the interplay of the instruments. It sounds like a cross-country chase, the way the instruments move back and forth and through each other. I learned from the documentary of Williams’ roots in and love for jazz. That love is infused into every note of this wonderful score.

5. Hook – This is the blatantly sentimental pick, and I presume it would be for many a millennial of a certain age. Hook is the much-maligned Spielberg film our microgeneration reclaimed. As someone who doesn’t much care for Goonies and has been told you need to see it when you’re young, I think of Hook as our Goonies. You have to see when you’re young for it to get its, well, hooks into you. 

Williams’ music hits the three key elements of the film. This is a sentimental family movie in its opening passages. Then, there is the adventure story of discovering Neverland and joining up with the Lost Boys. But, he undercuts all of this with a sense of dread and menace. In the story, the pirates are the menace, but thematically, of course, the menace is the unstoppable march of time that turns you from a child full of wonder to an adult lacking in imagination. The deft artist Williams is, he communicates all of this in 89 seconds of perfectly drawn music with the “Prologue.” Talk about delivering you to a time and a space.

On Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall, and what we lose when an icon dies

It has been a rough week, to say the least, for film fans. The loss of icons Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall in the same week has taken a definite toll. Tens of thousands of words have been written on both, and it is not my intention to add to the noise – however sincere and heartfelt that noise may be. Williams and Bacall were legends who touched countless lives in the eight decades of work between them, and they deserve every word of honorific praise bestowed on them.

All in all, it has felt like a tough year. Williams and Bacall. Ruby Dee. Bob Hoskins. Philip Seymour Hoffman. And I certainly have not named them all. By coincidence, I had only just finished my review of A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman’s stunning final lead performance, when I heard the news about Williams. Hoffman was a personal hero of mine, and I used the review as a way to honor the actor I loved and will remember.

After that, I could not immediately turn around and write on Williams. It just was not in me, so I gave it a day. The next afternoon, I sat down to write an appreciation of the critically dismissed, nostalgically revered Hook to honor Williams and belatedly Hoskins, and the news of Bacall’s death came. Williams has grabbed the lion’s share of headlines and deservedly so – a major talent, a long life well lived yet still tragically brief – but Bacall is no less than a paragon of Hollywood cinema, a throwback to the classics of yesteryear.

In that, I found a similarity. I mentioned nostalgia, which is a word that gets used a lot these days. The Internet is an ideal place to revel in the joys of our youth, and oh, in how many joys of our youth did Williams play a part? He was the Genie. He was Peter Pan. He was Mrs. Doubtfire. He was a lost boy found in Jumanji. He was so much more of course, but to my generation, who grew up with those films and many others, he represented childhood memories that will now be colored by just a little pain.

Bacall is a representative of old Hollywood, the studio system, the “They don’t make ’em like that anymore” pictures. She taught a whole other generation how to whistle. She was Bogie’s girl and so much else. But what strikes me is how the nostalgia is the same. Loss is always painful – be it marked by the years past or the loved ones passed on – but when what we lose represents something even deeper, the pain takes on new shapes and colors and levels.

I wrote after Hoffman died that the important thing to focus on and respect was the grief of a family who had lost a father, son, and loved one. That remains true of Williams and Bacall, of Hoskins and Dee, and of any others lucky enough to influence large swaths of people. Most of us did not know them personally, and the pain we feel is not the same and could never be. But the loss we feel, that is as real as it gets.

The loss of Bacall hurts because she connected us to our past, both cinematically and nostalgically. She has gone and taken a little part of history with her. The same is true of Williams, and for many, the loss feels more personal because his films were a part of our personal histories.

When I think of Jumanji, it is tied up in memories of my grandparents’ living room – of my grandmother who has been dead nearly a decade now and of my grandfather whom I am lucky enough to have still around – a place where we would sit on the floor, too close to the TV, chins resting on our palms, and stare up at the screen. My grandmother cooked and my grandfather researched the family as they obliged their grandchildren to take over the room with children’s movies.

And what are Hook and Mrs. Doubtfire about if not the love of fathers for their children, so rarely portrayed in movies with any real insight or care. Raised by a single father myself, I know what that love looks like, and as engrossing as those films are, what I take from them is the love of fathers for their children and how it might not hurt to send a little of that back the other direction.

So, yes, let us mourn the passing of Williams and Bacall and all those others. The loss of icons is great, but the loss of what they represented will be felt even as the years press on. Those memories of my grandmother’s French toast, of walking around the lake with my grandfather, of my own father who went to work every day but always came home – those memories are tinged with just a little more sadness now, but I will take the sadness as long as I can keep the memories.