Music is the most underrated element of film

[Ray Jackson]

I watched two movies last night--Vertigo and Escape From New York.

Vertigo has maybe the best score in the history of cinema. Bernard Herrmann was as crucial to the success of that film as the cinematographer or Jimmy Stewart imo. It's a movie that achieves greatness on so many different levels, that it would still be great even without the music. But at the same time, can you even begin to imagine Vertigo without that score? I think you replace Jimmy Stewart or Kim Novak with inferior actors and it could still be one of the greatest films of all time. But you replace Bernard Herrmann with an inferior composer and I don't know if it's the same movie.

Escape From New York, on the other hand, is a good movie--not a great movie. But a good movie that had its material elevated to a higher level by that infectious electronic score composed by John Carpenter. You replace that score with something substandard or generic and I don't know how successful that film would've been. Same thing goes for Halloween.

Watching these two films back to back, it just underscored the ability of music to elevate a great film into an all-time classic film or a good film into a great film. Or even a bad film into an entertaining film.

Other examples of music being as crucial to the success of a movie as the acting or the writing or the photography?