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.

New movie review: Music by John Williams

Whether you are Gen X, millennial, or Gen Z, John Williams probably wrote the soundtrack to your childhood. If you were to list out the 10 most famous music cues in film history, Williams almost certainly wrote half or more of them. With 54 nominations and five awards, he is the second-most-nominated person in the history of the Academy, behind none other than Walt Disney himself. At 92 years old and still working, his cultural legacy is staggering, almost beyond comprehension. As such, it’s a little more than one can fit into a 106-minute movie.

Director Laurent Bouzereau’s film follows most of the conventions we have come to expect from documentaries of this type. We get a little bit of background information on Williams’ parents – his father was a jazz drummer who worked with the greats; his mother was an actress and dancer; they met on the set of a movie they were both working on. We get Williams’ introduction to performing music, a little of his time in the service, and how he got started in movies. Then, we work chronologically through the biggest movies in his career.

If you watch enough of these types of movies, you’re familiar with the beats. What helps separate out Music by John Williams comes down to two related factors: 1) the “biggest movies in his career” also happen to be many of the biggest and most important movies in the history of the art form; and 2) because of that, the talking-head interviews are a who’s who of film history over the past 50 years. Of course, the best insights come from Williams himself and his greatest collaborator, Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg changed the face of the film industry forever, multiple times, but there is an argument to be made that he does not accomplish this without Williams’ contribution. I had this debate with a colleague earlier today, and I actually came down on the side of Spielberg likely succeeding nearly as well with someone like Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) at his side. But, there is not a bone in my body that believes had that been the case that we would have five scores as iconoclastic as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, and Jurassic Park.

These films are full of images we can hear, and that is thanks to Williams. An unknown POV underwater: BUH-BUM. An adventurer running from a boulder: BUM-BUH-BUM-BUHHH. A boy and his best friend flying in front of the moon. We know what that sounds like because of Williams.

Any one of those five films would be the crowning achievement of any other composer’s career, and yet, it is possible none of them serves in that position for Williams because, of course, there is Star Wars. One of the documentary’s truly special moments comes in hearing people describe their reaction to the opening fanfare at the beginning of A New Hope. It is as though Williams discovered fire and suddenly there is light and warmth in the world.

The other major highlight of the film is listening to Kate Capshaw describe Williams playing the Schindler’s List score on the piano for her and Spielberg for the first time. The story brings a tear to her eye – and to ours.

Moments like this will be catnip for fans of film history and fans of these movies, but they also hint at the doc’s great flaw. Every interview, every conversation, every sequence is so geared toward the legacy of Williams’ accomplishments that Bouzereau treats the compositions themselves almost as fait accompli. It sure is a lot of fun to listen to famous filmmakers talk about music we all love, but it would have been more valuable to interrogate Williams’ process of creation. Why does that horn go there? What does this violin solo accomplish? What would one more note here or one fewer note there mean?

The closest we get to this is in listening to Williams talk about his famed five-note composition for the climax of Close Encounters. He shows the camera a music sheet with 20-30 different five-note combinations and points at the circled one, buried innocuously at 15 or 16. That’s the one they used. He then demonstrates the difference a single note makes in the sequence and briefly explains the emotional effect of completing a musical phrase in different ways. This is gold, and I wish the film had space for more sequences like this.

Similarly, there is a good section of the film devoted to Williams’ time as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops, a tenure that proved somewhat controversial due to the perceived illegitimacy of film music. Williams did a lot to break down that barrier, and the film rightly credits him for that specific cultural shift.

These tangible impacts are what the movie needs more of to be fully rewarding. We understand inherently the ephemeral nature of Williams’ work, so deeply rooted in nostalgia for our childhoods and the cultural artifacts we cherished then and still hold dear now. What might give this film some depth is a deeper exploration of that nostalgia. Ultimately, Music by John Williams is like a really delicious cake. It’s sweet and satisfying and you greatly enjoy it as you consume it, but it’s not as nourishing as a full meal.

See it? Yes.

31 Days of Horror Redux: Alligator and Humanoids from the Deep

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 5: Alligator, directed by Lewis Teague, and Humanoids from the Deep, directed by Barbara Peeters

There are two unwritten rules of form and taste in horror movies: You don’t kill kids, and you don’t kill dogs. Either risks alienating the audience and turning them against your film. As we know, however, the ‘80s were not exactly a bastion of form and taste. So of course, both of these creature features, both released in 1980, feature heaps of dead dogs and at least one dead kid.

In fact, the very first victim in Humanoids from the Deep is a child, and Alligator is premised on the effects of eating a mountain’s worth of furry friends. The other thing these two films have in common is the way they are so clearly cut from the Jaws cloth, though they take wildly divergent approaches to the basic idea. Alligator is much closer to Jaws in plot, while Humanoids from the Deep is much closer in structure, but the bones are there in both.

Teague’s film is about a city beset by a genetically modified alligator that stalks the sewers, an urban legend come to life. The Chief Brody of this film is Det. David Madison, played by a game Robert Forster, who has seen the creature, but because of a checkered past, no one believes him until it is too late. Michael V. Gazzo of The Godfather Part II fame plays the chief of police, and Robin Riker is the alligator expert and love interest.

The film is written by John Sayles, who may be the preeminent Jaws ripoff artist, which I say with affection. In addition to Alligator, Sayles also wrote the Roger Corman-produced 1978 Piranha, which is shamelessly, unabashedly Jaws in style, structure, and intent. More on Corman later. Sayles, who also wrote The Howling the year after this, would move on to prestige pictures later in his career, writing Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and writing and directing my favorite baseball movie, Eight Men Out. I also have a ton of appreciation for Piranha. What I’m saying is Sayles is no slouch at the keyboard, and Alligator benefits immensely from his involvement.

By no means is Alligator a great film. The love story is shoehorned in and nonsensical. A lot of leg work is done to set up a plot about animal testing and growth hormones and corporate malfeasance, but none of it adds up to anything more than creating human villains we’re excited to see the alligator eat. Speaking of which, the movie’s greatest flaw is that it fails to learn the most important lesson from Jaws: the less we see the creature, the better.

Teague, who later directed the Stephen King adaptations Cujo and Cat’s Eye, does everything he can to put the alligator front and center as often as possible in the final two thirds of this movie. When the gator finally busts out of the sewer and onto the city streets, all is lost because the creature effect just isn’t that good. It’s so poor, in fact, that any time it kills someone, Teague plays the attack in a series of incomprehensible extreme closeups. Steven Spielberg left the camera on the surface and forced us to imagine the carnage below. Here, Teague would love to show us some carnage but is limited by budget.

Despite this, it’s still fun when the alligator attacks a wedding party, there is a lot of tension rung out of the idea of not being able to open a manhole cover, and the labyrinth of a sewer system is a wonderfully creepy setting for any horror sequence. Alligator is a good time and a fine addition to the post-Jaws creature feature canon.

So, what of the Corman-produced Humanoids from the Deep? Well, for starters, if I didn’t tell you Corman produced it, I think you could have guessed. The title, the poster, the creature effects, the gratuitous nudity – it all adds up to a New World Pictures production. I say that with no derision, only affection.

In this small seaside town, the locals are very excited to bring a new cannery to the area, while the scientists who work for the corporation promise advancements that will lead to bigger salmon in the surrounding waters. This will be accomplished by, you may have guessed, some fictional growth hormone, which has the side effect of producing super-intelligent, rapidly evolving fish people. These would be the titular humanoids from the deep.

Let’s pause and examine the connection here: two movies from the same year with vaguely similar plots set into motion largely by genetic testing, shady corporate machinations, and specifically growth hormones. Now, hormone additives in food have been around in the US since at least the 1950s, but one gets the impression that something must have been going in the news around this time that producers felt they could capitalize on. That’s what horror does best, right? It taps into the subconscious fears of the audience by making the figurative literal.

In this case, what we are literally dealing with is a horde of fish people who greatly resemble the Creature from the Black Lagoon, another obvious antecedent of this picture. Within the first 10 minutes (I checked the time stamp), these fish men have killed a child and a whole bunch of dogs. This leads to a misunderstanding in which a group of locals, led by Vic Morrow, accuse an indigenous man of killing the dogs. The indigenous man opposes the cannery, so they have other quarrels, as well.

I should note that Morrow appeared in just two more films after this before his tragic death in an accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The mutants eventually make their way onto the land and beginning killing the men and raping the women, which is less graphic than it sounds but more graphic than you might expect. It’s worth noting the scenes of nudity and violence toward women were insisted upon by Corman to ratchet up the exploitation bona fides of the movie, and they were filmed behind Peeters’ back and without telling most of the people involved in the picture. The first time many of them saw these scenes was at the premiere. Most were rightly angry.

Anyway, wouldn’t you know it: The fish people’s chosen day of insurrection just happens to coincide with the town festival. This means plenty of people in the streets and an opportunity for maximum carnage and mayhem. And, in fairness to Peeters, who tried to disown the film over her clash with Corman, this sequence is truly bonkers in the best way.

Let’s bring Alligator and Piranha back into the discussion here. All three of these films feature a climax in which the creature or creatures disrupt a major event. In Humanoids, it’s the town festival; in Alligator, it’s the wedding; and in Piranha, it’s the opening of a new lake resort. In many ways, this makes perfect structural sense. Save your big set piece action-horror sequence for the end.

This is what sets Jaws apart from so many of its imitators. For the entire film, all of the characters stress the importance of the Fourth of July, and the mayor’s only mission in life is to ensure the beaches are open on the Fourth. The beaches are open, and people die. In any other movie, this would be the climax, but remarkably, Jaws still has 40 minutes left, and they’re the best 40 minutes of the movie. It’s a classic case of “You sing the words but don’t know what they mean.” Jaws is about people. Its imitators are about scary creatures.

At the end of the day, Humanoids from the Deep is fine. It is certainly not the worst picture Corman ever produced. But, if you’re looking for your creature feature fix, Alligator is the superior film here. Of course, Jaws and even Piranha are superior to that, but go with what your heart tells you.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Director

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Director

The nominees are:

Martin McDonagh for The Banshees of Inisherin

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once

Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans

Todd Field for TÁR

Ruben Östlund for Triangle of Sadness

From 1960-1999, a span of 40 years, Best Picture and Best Director split just four times. Mike Nichols won Director for The Graduate in 1967, when In the Heat of the Night won Picture. Bob Fosse won Director in 1972 for Cabaret, beating out Francis Ford Coppola for his Best Picture-winning The Godfather. In 1981, Warren Beatty won Director for Reds, which lost Picture to Chariots of Fire. And, in 1989, Oliver Stone won his second directing Oscar for Born on the Fourth of July but lost Picture to the ever-controversial Driving Miss Daisy. That’s it. Four times in 40 years.

Since 2000, it has happened nine times, six in the past 10 years. I am not sure exactly what explains that shift. As we have discussed in previous years, splits tend to happen when there is a film voters admire but don’t love in the race, going up against a film they love but which maybe doesn’t display the same technical prowess. La La Land vs. Moonlight. The Revenant vs. Spotlight. The Power of the Dog vs. CODA, etc. This tends to hold pretty true.

They match when the well loved film can also boast some sterling crafts achievements, such as Birdman, The Shape of Water, and Nomadland. But, even then, movies don’t tend to win big anymore. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King tied the all-time record with 11 Oscars in 2003. Since then, the highest totals came in 2008, when Slumdog Millionaire won eight awards, and 2009, when The Hurt Locker won six. Since 2012, no Best Picture winner has won more than four awards. That likely ends this year. Right now, the only question with Everything Everywhere All at Once is: How high can it go?

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once – Winning this award will make Kwan and Schinert the sixth- and eighth-youngest directing winners in history, respectively (Kwan is roughly eight months younger). Coincidentally, sandwiched between them at No. 7 on the list will be Lewis Milestone, who was 35 years, 36 days old when he won his second Best Director trophy for All Quiet on the Western Front. Kwan will be 35 years, 30 days old on Oscars Sunday. 

Milestone will remain the third-youngest winner, having won his first award just before his 34th birthday. Damien Chazelle sits at the top of that list, being roughly seven months younger than Norman Taurog was when he won for Skippy in 1931. Taurog held the record for 85 years before Chazelle came along with La La Land. Anyway, the Daniels. Usually, a Best Director Oscar gives you the freedom to do whatever you want the next time out, but if Swiss Army Man and Everything Everywhere All at Once don’t represent them doing whatever they want, then I can’t even imagine what it is they want to do. But, it sure will be interesting to see whatever it is.

Todd Field for TÁR – If you haven’t noticed, I am just so happy to have Todd Field back and directing movies again. It was a long wait between Little Children in 2006 and this, but it was worth it because Field came back with a masterpiece. It is an undeniable work, announcing its brilliance from the very beginning with a wild gambit: opening with the full credits, run in reverse. Instantly, we are made aware this will be unlike any movie we have ever seen.

Field then delivers on that promise over and over again. It’s not just the precision of the camerawork or the propulsive rhythm of the storytelling or the high-wire balancing act of character and tone. It is the way Field orchestrates all of them, conducting his film like Lydia Tár might conduct a symphony except that Field is very real and the results are plain as day for anyone to see. If you want to call this a comeback film, then it is the greatest comeback film ever made. Let’s just hope the next one comes a little quicker.

Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans – Spielberg is already part of a lot of Oscars history. For instance, with this nomination, his ninth, he ties Martin Scorsese for the second-most nominated director of all time, three behind William Wyler. An interesting tidbit I found: Spielberg was already on the list of 32 directors nominated in consecutive years when he achieved the feat for Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. Now, after being nominated last year for West Side Story and this year, he joins the list of eight directors who have achieved the feat twice or more.

I’ll give you that list, in addition to Spielberg: Wyler was nominated four years in a row from 1939-1942; John Ford (1939-1941) and John Huston (1950-1952) were each nominated in three consecutive years; Billy Wilder achieved the double three times; and Clarence Brown, Frank Capra, and Fred Zinneman did it twice. If we’re playing “one of these things is not like the other things,” I’ll admit I had never heard of Clarence Brown. He’s actually a six-time nominee, good for eighth all time. Of those, I have heard of but never seen National Velvet and The Yearling, and the other four I have never even heard of. A knowledge gap I’ll need to rectify.

As far as Spielberg and The Fabelmans, the master still has his fastball, as they say. No films look like Spielberg films. No one moves the camera like he does, with due credit to his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. There is something classical about the feel to everything he does, which suits this material well. I wouldn’t call it my favorite Spielberg film of recent vintage, but there is no mistaking what makes the legend a legend.

Martin McDonagh for The Banshees of Inisherin – McDonagh gets unfairly painted as only a writer in certain film circles. It is true that his screenplays are second to none, but it is not true that he lacks a visual flair or a directorial stamp. On the contrary, his work reminds me most of ‘70s Terrence Mallick or William Friedkin: gritty but gorgeous. Everything is purposeful but never feels overplanned. Camera movements flow effortlessly, motivated by plot and character.

Coming from the stage, as he does, he is of course an actors’ director. Between this and his previous film, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, he has directed six different actors to nominations, garnering recognition in each of the four acting categories at the Oscars. That’s not an accident. The Banshees of Inisherin only works as well as it does because McDonagh is a smart, insightful director, in addition to being one of the great film writers of our time.

Ruben Östlund for Triangle of Sadness – This is what most Oscars watchers would call the wild card slot. It’s the fifth Best Director nominee that always feels like a one-for-us nod from the Directors Branch. In recent years, that has mostly meant recognition for foreign auteurs making critically acclaimed arthouse pictures. Last year, that would have been Ryusuke Hamaguchi for Drive My Car. In 2020, Thomas Vinterberg for Another Round. Bong Joon-ho won it all from that position in 2019 with Parasite. In 2018, we got Paweł Pawlikowski with Cold War.

This time around, it’s Östlund’s turn with his Best Picture-nominated satire Triangle of Sadness. It’s likely Östlund’s fans, myself included, are more excited for this nomination than the Swedish auteur himself is, considering he is coming off winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this very film. That was his second Palme in as many features, an even shorter list than the one we talked about above with Spielberg. Triangle of Sadness is an excellent film, wonderfully directed by a world cinema master at peak form. Gotta love the Directors Branch for bringing him to the show.

The final analysis

The Daniels are just the fifth directing pair in history to be nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards. They will be the third pair to win, following Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story in 1961 and Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men in 2007. 

I could pretend like there’s some competition in this race, but there’s not really even a whiff of it in the air. Like the Coen Brothers before them, there is every likelihood the Daniels will win three awards on the big night: Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay. It’s a helluva coming out party for a duo with just one previous feature on their resumé.

Will win: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: Todd Field for TÁR

Should have been here: Sarah Polley for Women Talking

A note about my favorite snub: There couldn’t be anything else here. Women Talking is the best film of the year, and apart from perhaps Todd Field’s work on Tár, it is also the best directed. From the color palette to the performances, to the way the camera soars in and out of certain sequences, Polley’s work is first in its class, and she deserved to join that all-too-short list of women nominated for Best Director.

Next time: Best Actor