50 greatest movie soundtracks

The 50 greatest film soundtracks
From The Observer

From Psycho to Singing in the Rain, Slade in Flame to Shaft, our star-studded panel of big screen connoisseurs select the greatest soundtracks in cinema's history ...

1. The Wizard of Oz
Composer: Herbert Stothart. Songs by Harold Arlen / EY Harburg (1939)

Film soundtracks are a broad church, encompassing classic orchestral scores and pop jukebox compilations, spoken word and sonic effects. So we'll be having none of this 'incidental scores only' snobbery in our list. Fitting, then, that our number one contender is a cross-generic masterpiece (is it a jolly kids' singalong? A dark adult fairy tale? A subversive camp classic? Even a snuff movie?) which won Oscars for both original score (for Herbert Stothart) and best original song (Arlen and Harburg).

Legend has it that studio executives wanted to cut Judy Garland's 'Over the Rainbow' because it dragged out the downbeat Kansas opening. Certainly a reprise of the song was trimmed from the final cut, but 'Rainbow' survived to become one of the most memorable anthems of the century. Covered by everyone from Gene Vincent to Kylie Minogue, it was No 1 in the Recording Industry Association of America's 'Songs of the Century'. Other recognisable hits from the movie include 'Follow the Yellow Brick Road', 'Ding Dong the Witch is Dead', and 'We're Off to See the Wizard', all of which have since passed into popular parlance, ensuring that everyone (not just Elton John) can call themselves a true friend of Dorothy.

Early soundtrack fans had to make do with a Judy Garland 78rpm disc and a creaky Decca LP which featured key songs re-recorded by the Ken Darby Singers, but today's buyers can enjoy all the remastered originals, alongside outtakes like the 'Jitterbug' song.

Rumours that a stagehand can be seen committing suicide on screen as Dorothy trots down the Yellow Brick Road are baloney (it's a bird stretching its wings), but have simply added to the film's growing cult cache. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has long been alleged to provide an 'alternative' soundtrack, thanks to a number of 'coincidental' cross-matchings. Apparently, if you start the album as the MGM lion roars thrice, side one is exactly the same length as the black and white section of the film, 'The Great Gig in the Sky' accompanies the tornado, and 'Brain Damage' replaces 'If I Only Had a Brain'. Personally, I'd rather listen to Judy. (Mark Kermode)

2. Psycho
Bernard Herrmann (1959)

Not the most easy listening score from composer Bernard Herrmann, whose career ranged from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver, with key Hitchcock collaborations including Vertigo and North by Northwest. Yet Psycho remains Herrmann's most cutting-edge work, establishing an iconic shrieking strings motif which has become internationally recognisable as the quintessential sound of terror.

Hitchcock, who had originally planned to play the shower sequence without accompaniment, later admitted that '33 per cent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music', and doubled the composer's salary as a reward. Herrmann studiously matched the black and white visuals of Hitch's masterpiece by draining the 'colour' from his orchestrations, stripping away all but the stringed instruments to create a monochrome wall of aural unease.

Over the years, various versions of Herrmann's score have battled for fans' affections, ranging from a recording conducted by the composer himself, to a performance by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the baton of Joel McNeely which some consider definitive.

In 1998, Danny Elfman oversaw a new production of the Psycho score which is generally regarded as the only positive aspect of Gus van Sant's dismal remake. Whichever version you favour, there's no doubting the work's killer punch. (MK)

3. Star Wars
John Williams (1977)

Rumour has it that Steven Spielberg was after something subtle for the shark in Jaws - perhaps a piano motif. He was persuaded to change his mind and the famous 'chomping' of the low strings is one of the most instantly recognisable themes of all. In contrast, the moment when the bicycles soar though the air in E.T. would melt the coldest heart. The music in the film up to that point is quite low-key but it finally takes flight with a magnificent thrilling melody on the high strings.

Nor is his more recent work any less potent. A score like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a masterpiece of colour. Unlike so many contemporary scores, it explores the whole range of orchestral possibilities.

Further, he succeeds in capturing the flighty wit of Catch Me if You Can with crisp, jazzy textures, while Minority Report conveys a disturbing futuristic vision through dissonant strings. And, like all his scores, there are moments of unexpected beauty. (Anne Dudley)

4. Pather Panchali
Ravi Shankar (1955)

I first saw Pather Panchali when I was very young as my Mum and Dad had a copy on video. My mum was a Bharatanatyam dancer and always played a lot of Indian classical music in the house, so I was always aware of great sitar playing, of Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan.

The film, my favourite of all time, is the directorial debut of Satyajit Ray. It contains a lot of themes, all of which concern family, love and redemption. Each raga you play as an Indian classical performer is associated with a different time of day, or a different mood, and as Ravi Shankar is the great exponent of Indian classical music, he was able to play in a lot of different ways, incorporating the myriad mood changes of the film.

Apparently Ravi Shankar created the music in 11 hours straight, in one session, because he was in the middle of a tight touring schedule. Unsurprisingly, he couldn't actually finish it all himself, meaning that some of the music was written by Subrata Mitra, Satyajit Ray's cinematographer. (Subrata actually also played the sitar on some parts, but it is Ravi Shankar throughout most of the film.)

Although Pather Panchali was made in the Fifties, it's a timeless story - and because Shankar used an equally enduring medium, Indian classical, the music doesn't really date either.

The way Shankar approached the music for Pather Panchali definitely influenced the soundtrack I've just finished for a film called The Namesake, which is about a Bengali family and, shamelessly, pays homage to his fantastic score. (Nitin Sawhney)

5. A Clockwork Orange
Wendy Carlos (1971)

Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos rose to fame in the late Sixties with Switched-On Bach, a Grammy-award-winning hit which Moog-ed up Johann Sebastian to great popular acclaim. After toying with Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother (the cover of which can still be glimpsed in the finished film), director Stanley Kubrick enlisted Carlos to provide a futuristic accompaniment for A Clockwork Orange, adapted from Anthony Burgess's controversial novel about tearaway teens. The result was an era-defining soundtrack which put Ludwig van Beethoven and Henry Purcell through the electronic mincer, turning a generation of young rebels into twisted music historians. The early use of a vocoder on an adaptation of Beethoven's Ninth still resonates throughout electro-pop culture.

The film's counterculture cachet was cemented when David Bowie used Carlos's Clockwork Orange music to announce his entrance on the Ziggy Stardust gigs. Later, bands as diverse as Heaven 17, Moloko and Sigue Sigue Sputnik would pilfer their names and/or wardrobes from the film, which had by then been banned from Britain by its own director. The official soundtrack album included orchestral selections and Gene Kelly's 'Singin' in the Rain', which Kubrick had licensed (to Kelly's dismay) after Malcolm McDowell sang it during an ad-libbed act of ultra-violence. Some purists, however, prefer the Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score album which features all the music generated by Carlos and producer Rachel Elkind. (MK)

6. A Fistful Of Dollars
Ennio Morricone (1964)

Awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar last month, Ennio Morricone has written nearly 400 film scores for directors such as Terrence Malick, and Brian De Palma. But it's his collaborations on spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone that provide his most distinctive sounds.

Leone, a former classmate of the composer's, hired his friend to create a soundscape to A Fistful of Dollars which would enhance the director's unique vision of the American western. Forsaking orchestral sounds, Morricone used gunshots, cracking whips, choral voices, Sicilian folk instruments and the then-new Fender electric guitar to punctuate the action. Morricone weaves in Mexican mariachi-style sounds and solos but, ultimately, it's the whistling that survives - evoking dusty landscapes and the virile loneliness of Clint Eastwood's stranger. (Jason Solomons)

Without Morricone's scores Leone's films would be pretty barren. As Morricone is Italian, he does more than merely replicate the sounds that are synonymous with America. Of course music always influences the way you view a film, but Morricone's music ensures that your reaction is determined by the music. (Michael Nyman)

7. The Adventures of Robin Hood
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1938)

Errol Flynn swashbucklers brought out the best in that most lofty of Hollywood composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. An Austrian, Korngold was the son of a feared music critic, and yet the vivacious music he brought to Hollywood was anything but austere. Korngold treated the Flynn films as light operas without songs. All the immense pleasure of The Adventures of Robin Hood, which pits Robin against a scheming Norman Prince John, comes from an ever-present feeling of knockabout bonhomie. The ebullient way Korngold handles his medley of themes over the title cards, and then the transition into the film via medieval kettle drums, is a typically winning key to that feeling. With such rousing pieces as its 'Merry Men March' and the bizarre grand waltz that accompanies the forest banquet, the film's humour hardly ever lets up. Oh, and this is the film that virtually invented chase music. (Nick James)

8. Alexander Nevsky
Sergei Prokofiev (1938)

Stalin's cultural commissars didn't exactly welcome back the Soviet Union's two errant sons when the great director/innovator Sergei Eisenstein and the equally venerated composer Sergei Prokofiev both returned to Russia in 1932. But the authorities did eventually allow them to work together on this sweeping history saga of the medieval Russian folk hero Nevsky. The final result was not only epic cinema on the grandest of scales but a rare example of a film-maker and a composer working together, rather than a score being written after the film has been cut.

In his early career, Eisenstein had resisted non-realistic music because he felt it blunted the effect of his montage image assaults. He changed his mind, and Prokofiev's score for Nevsky is overwhelmingly brilliant, even though the composer's tinkering with microphones spoiled the recording. Particularly rousing is the 11-minute 'Battle on the Ice' sequence which is pure music and images. (NJ)

9. Shaft
Isaac Hayes (1971)

I was called out of the blue a few years ago by Scott Rudin, a Hollywood producer involved at that time with Paramount Pictures, to discuss scoring John Singleton's remake of Shaft. There was an issue which I felt had to be discussed, and John felt it, too.

The film's star, John Shaft, was 'the sex machine to all the chicks', working as a 'cop who won't cop out' in Harlem. Isaac Hayes had created a blueprint in his score for Shaft which every 'blaxploitation' movie thereafter slavishly copied. Consequently, Hayes, aka 'Black Moses', was a hero in the black community. I, on the other hand, am white and from Luton.

The conversation with Singleton covered a lot of ground, but what we concluded was that, as I felt I understood Hayes's music, not to stray far from his blueprint was by far the best solution.

I flew to New York to write (we only had 10 days as other writers had already been involved, none of whom worked out to everyone's satisfaction) and used some of Hayes's musicians in the band alongside the cream of New York's session players.

The highlight for me, though, was Hayes's presence while I was working in the venue (the old Brill Building, near Times Square, which has been home to numerous record companies) where the film was being cut. He was re-recording his theme for the new version and we used to spend an hour or two a couple of times a week jamming over grooves I had got together for various cues, or just talking about beating the system and how he lost his gold-plated Cadillac. He would sometimes bring in a track he had been working on, and sing me the vocal part while the sun went down and the lights went on in Times Square. Then he would disappear for a few days to do gigs elsewhere in America with his band.

None of this really tells us much about the brilliance of his score for the original film, a score he probably wouldn't be allowed to make today in the way that he did then, as it was constructed in the studio by Hayes and his band. There would have been no demos to get approved in those days: you had Isaac Hayes and, as such, you were grateful. No wonder: it is a thrilling, evocative score. Not only is the music wonderfully alive but the writing is so natural, earthy and sexy.

Inevitably, having scored the remake, I have a new appreciation for its ground-breaking genius. Like John Barry, Isaac Hayes is an impossibly tough act to follow. (David Arnold)

10. Lift To The Scaffold
Miles Davis (1958)

Miles Davis's lover Juliette Greco introduced him to director Louis Malle, who asked Davis to score this, his feature debut, in which two pairs of lovers fail to escape the machinations of destiny. With a US/European band to back him, Davis improvised this definitive cool jazz score live to projected sequences. The all-night studio session was attended by Malle's beautiful young star Jeanne Moreau, who helped the atmosphere by running the bar.

Davis described the studio as 'an old gloomy building' perfect for the film's mood: it was the first time he had taken on such a large-scale composition. The result is the quintessence of cool, with Davis's playing unrivalled in its distillation of urban sadness. The scenes in which Moreau wanders the Champs-Elysees while Miles and his band brood over the blues are exhilarating in their anguished perfection. (NJ)

11. Singin' In The Rain
Arthur Freed / Nacio Herb Brown (1952)

Voted the No 1 musical of all time by the American Film Institute, this classic remains as fresh as the advent of sound itself. The peculiarly self-reflexive story finds Gene Kelly's silent movie star Don Lockwood making the leap into 'talkies'. A magpie selection of existing musical favourites are inventively interwoven with a couple of original ditties, most notably 'Make 'Em Laugh', which Donald O'Connor turns into one of cinema's greatest musical comedy sequences. 'Moses' is no less of a treat, transforming a stuffy elocution lesson into a riot of punning pranksterism. Trivia buffs love to invoke the ironic dubbing of Debbie Reynolds by Betty Noyes on 'Would You', but the 19-year-old Reynolds never puts a foot wrong on smashers like 'Good Morning'. As for the title track, not even the sacrilegious antics of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (see no. 5) can undermine the exuberant purity of Kelly's performance. (MK)

12. Trainspotting
Compiler: Danny Boyle (1996)

Danny Boyle's energetic screen rendering of Irvine Welsh's novel was the Clockwork Orange of the Nineties - a movie which redefined the face of modern British cinema, leaving an indelible impression upon contemporary youth culture. Essential to the film's success was an audaciously scattershot jukebox soundtrack which perfectly embodied the film's anarchic charms. Listening to the CD is like watching the entire movie in your head, from Iggy Pop's frenetic 'Lust For Life' (the opening high-street chase sequence), through the ironic melancholy of Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' (Renton's heroin overdose), to the blood-pumping climax of Underworld's chanting heartbeat 'Born Slippy' (our anti-hero's gleeful escape). (MK)

13. High Noon
Dimitri Tiomkin (1952)

Gary Cooper is the retiring town marshal who discovers, just after he's married Quaker girl Grace Kelly, that a murderer he rode out of town 10 years before is coming back with his gang to kill him. He has an hour before the noon train arrives to prepare and suddenly no one wants to help him. His dilemma is aptly summarised in the song the film made famous - 'Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin"- sung over the credits by Tex Ritter. Its melody is the basis for the whole of the landmark score by Dimitri Tiomkin, one of several by the great Ukrainian.

For a major Hollywood score to begin with just a singer, guitar, accordion and drums was unheard of, but the lack of strings in the later orchestration makes it even starker. When midday arrives and Cooper writes his will, the score hammers home the passing seconds in a raucous pulse of song fragments, ending with the train whistle's blast. It's heart-stopping stuff. (NJ)

14. Blade Runner
Vangelis (1982)

'I've seen things you people would not believe ...' Ridley Scott's genre-defining dystopian future-noir flopped when it first opened, but subsequently resurfaced (in a new 'Director's Cut') as an undisputed cult classic. Much of its long-lasting appeal is down to a pulsating score by Greek composer Vangelis, which provides an awe-inspiring backdrop to the enigmatic, eye-popping visuals.

Significantly, the score gave this famously impersonal film a real 'soul' - without Vangelis, would Rutger Hauer's android angst have had the same emotional clout? For years the original synthesiser soundtrack was officially unavailable, with a horrible orchestral version being rejected by fans in favour of a hard-to-find unofficial 'Offworld' edition. Since the early Nineties, however, a CD replete with outtake cues and dialogue fragments has become a must-have item for all serious soundtrack collectors. The future never sounded so good. (MK)

15. 2001
Compiler: Stanley Kubrick (1968)

My overwhelming memory of seeing 2001 as an 11-year-old was Gyorgy Ligeti's music. I'd never heard anything like it before.

I would shut myself in wardrobes and play the music and drift off into these zones, listening to 'Lux Aeterna'. So when we came to record the score for Danny Boyle's new film, Sunshine, which is also set in space, we had some points of reference, namely esoteric German abstract soundscapes.

Initially we knocked up some pieces using some of our own records, before we quickly hit a brick wall in terms of the kind of sounds we could draw upon. 2001, we thought, was out of bounds, until we were given the go-ahead by Danny, liberating us from our self-imposed confines.

The result, then, alludes to everything from Faust to ambient and, of course, Ligeti. And to interpret a score that's been in my blood for so long was fantastic. (Karl Hyde)

16. American Graffiti
Compiler: George Lucas (1973)

'Where were you in '62?' Long before Star Wars, George Lucas whipped up the definitive celluloid jukebox soundtrack for this nostalgic coming-of-age fable, a glorious evocation of innocent adolescent angst.

Approaching the end of their last summer together, a group of fresh-faced American kids cruise around in search of roller-skating teenage kicks. Demonstrating pop music's Proustian ability to capture and preserve a moment in time, American Graffiti boasts a wall-to-wall background burble of hits, from Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock' and Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B Goode' to Lee Dorsey's infectious 'Ya Ya' and Booker T's growling 'Green Onions'.

If it wasn't for American Graffiti, we wouldn't have Philip Kaufman's wonderful The Wanderers, nor indeed the Mel's Diner franchise which Graffiti single-handedly revived. Would you like fries and a shake with that? (MK)

17. American Beauty
Thomas Newman (1999)

A score that inspired a thousand imitations. The glassy vibraphones and repetitive riffs convey a sense of detachment perfect for the Kevin Spacey character in the film. Only the simplest of chord changes are used (mostly from the tonic minor to the fourth of the scale) or sometimes none at all. A very characteristic 'soft' piano sound, muted strings, ambiguously ethnic percussion, plus all sorts of guitars and plucked string instruments, provide the tonal palette. It's beautifully produced and mixed, combining sampled ambient sounds with real instruments and achieving something quite new. And while its impact may have been diluted by subsequent lukewarm rip-offs, it remains strikingly original. (AD)

18. Fire Walk With Me
Angelo Badalamenti (1992)

Few film-makers understand the marriage of sound and vision as well as David Lynch. His debut feature, Eraserhead, spawned a cult soundtrack album packed with industrial hissing and groaning, while Blue Velvet ensured that Bobby Vinton would never sound innocent again. Best of all, however, is this heartbreakingly beautiful work from the director's most underrated movie in which Lynch's long-time composer Angelo Badalamenti proves that he is indeed 'the master of the suspended chord'.

Covering the events leading up to the death of Laura Palmer, Fire Walk With Me ventures into genuinely horrifying territory, with a pervasive sense of dread whipped up by Badalamenti's moody score. Jimmy Scott provides threatening vocals for the edgy 'Sycamore Trees', while Julee Cruise drowns in waves of ethereal ear candy on 'Questions in a World of Blue'. And then, of course, there's the spine-tingling guitar twang of the TV series' title music which rears its head briefly amid a montage of off-kilter themes.

Unlike so many soundtrack albums, the Fire Walk With Me album has real internal coherence, and stands up magnificently to repeated listening, provoking sorrow, elation, and genuine wonderment, time after time. (MK)

19. Paris, Texas
Ry Cooder (1984)

Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1984, Wim Wenders's film gave a central role to Ry Cooder's slide guitar. The twanging sound has now become synonymous with a certain type of US cinema. Cooder's slide - a tribute to American bluesman 'Blind' Willie Johnson - is a signature for the wide open spaces Harry Dean Stanton encounters, both on his road trip and in his soul. Cooder's silences, the gaps in between embarking on another slide up the fret board, are almost as important as the notes. Cooder and Wenders's other collaborations since include their hugely influential Buena Vista Social Club. (JS0

20. On Her Majesty's Secret Sevice
John Barry (1969)

My allegiance to John Barry's Bond scores changes frequently. While You Only Live Twice will always have a place in my heart - it being largely responsible for me wanting to become involved in film and music - these days it seems less potent than On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Cunningly, Barry's OHMSS theme, in which a horn-led melody and Moog take unexpected twists and turns, articulates Bond's raison d'etre: kill or be killed. Additional swirling strings remind us of the urgency of his task, refusing to let us off the hook for a minute. Accordingly, OHMSS has become an iconic piece of instrumental music, its enduring popularity ensuring it's still used on TV shows whenever driving dangerously is involved, or to imbue a presenter with heroic traits.

Better still, in addition to the theme, there is the masterful ballad 'We Have All the Time in the World' (sung by Louis Armstrong), which is used to underscore the burgeoning love affair between Bond and Tracy, the woman he marries and, subsequently, sees assassinated only hours after their wedding.

All this, along with the remainder of the score, results in 80 minutes of iconic brilliance and a bar set so high that every Bond score thereafter struggles to match its originality, elegance and power.
DA

21. Dougal and the Blue Cat
Narrator: Eric Thompson
(1972)

Spoken word albums rarely stand up to repeated listening - but then so few of them are narrated by someone as engaging as Eric Thompson. He conjures a fabulously satirical feature-length netherworld in which Dougal and his chums go head-to-head with fiendish cobalt cat Buxton, who plans to paint the garden a darker shade of blue. Their adventures lead them from the eerie glue factory on the hill to the surface of the Moon, which (as Buxton points out) is 'worse than Barnsley'.

As with all the best kids' stories, the tone is innocent, but also creepily psychedelic, with a hint of menace lurking in the shadows. French animator Serge Danot conjures much memorable onscreen malarkey, but nothing can match Thompson's extravagant aural invention which is reproduced in almost its entirety on the dazzling Music For Pleasure soundtrack album. The tunes are wonderful, too - especially 'Florence's Sad Song' . (MK)

22. Gone With The Wind
Max Steiner (1939)

Composer Max Steiner was the synthesist of late Romantic styles who created the archetype for golden age Hollywood film music in such early sound films as King Kong and The Informer.

Schooled in Viennese operetta in his native Austria, he also worked on Broadway as a musical director during the formative years of American musical comedy and his range entirely suited Hollywood's conservative view of orchestral music.

Reputedly bullied out of him by interfering producer David O Selznick, his lush score for Civil War romance Gone With the Wind hardly stops for breath and is heavily reliant on individual character themes or leitmotifs: what could be more lump-in-the-throat American than the binding 'Tara's Theme', or more arrogant than Rhett Butler's march? Sometimes it's hard to tell if the score is a vivid unpinning of the melodrama, or the film a blazing illustration of the music. (NJ)

23. The Godfather
Nino Rota (1972)

Nino Rota's score for Francis Ford Coppola's crime-family saga was hotly tipped to win the Oscar until it was realised that the composer had reworked themes from his Fortunella score from the Fifties. The nomination was promptly withdrawn, but Rota's music has since passed into history. Coppola's father, Carmine, also added to the musical mix, keeping things in the family with his mall wedding music. (MK)

24. West Side Story
Leonard Bernstein (1957)

Although originally the music for a 1957 theatre production, West Side Story must go down as one of the great film scores, particularly as Leonard Bernstein re-wrote parts of it specifically for the 1961 screen adaptation.

Bernstein brings in furious Latin rhythms for the Mambo dance scene in the gym - seen as an extremely bold move by a classical composer at the time - while 'Cool' allows for finger clicking and big band sounds. Bernstein's enduring triumph, however, must be the 'Tonight Ensemble', which brings all these sounds and themes together as all the characters prepare for the big rumble.

West Side Story songs have been covered many times but notable versions include jazz readings by the Oscar Peterson Trio and the Stan Kenton Orchestra, and the Pet Shop Boys' 1997 version of 'Somewhere'. (JS)

25. Slade In Flame
Songs by Slade (1974)

The Citizen Kane of British pop movies, this grim fable about a squabbling pop group plucked from northern obscurity by money-minded London businessmen boasts a scorching soundtrack by Slade at the peak of their powers.

Retro-fitting their trademark Seventies glam-stomp sound with Sixties-style honking horns, Jim Lea and Noddy Holder served up their most coherent long-player. The movie spawned two moderate hit singles: the anthemic 'Far Far Away', and the majestic 'How Does it Feel?', both of which exhibited a thoughtful introspection often overshadowed by their glitzy reputation. Elsewhere, the slide guitar strut of 'Them Kinda Monkeys Can't Swing' and the ballsy 'Standin' on the Corner' showcase Slade's crowd-pleasing panache.

The band's teenybop fans were shocked by the tough tone of the movie, which revealed some unpalatable truths about the myths of fame and fortune. Three decades later, the Flame soundtrack always stands as proof that Slade were so much more than just another flash in the glam pan. (MK)
·Slade in Flame is released on DVD for the first time on 2 April on Union Square

50. The Devil in Miss Jones
Alden Shuman (1973)

Beyond all the grunts and moans syncopated to the key of desire, porn movies are not usually noted for their soundtracks. One 1973 porn classic, The Devil in Miss Jones, is a stark exception. It's one of only two films in the history of hardcore ever to spawn an original soundtrack album - the other being the most famous, Deep Throat. Both were directed by Gerard Damiano, for whom the importance of music involved more than just the metre of body parts locking in rhythm.

'I liked to cut my films to music,' says Damiano, a sprightly 78-year-old, long-retired from the sex trade and living in Florida. 'Each scene had to start in one place, build to a crescendo then move on with a kind of ebb and flow. So I would often get a piece of music ahead of time and cut to it.'

The Devil In Miss Jones (re-released on DVD last year by Raincoat Theater) is not only one of the best performing porn flicks of all time but also one of the most dour; detailing the progressive mental deterioration of a virginal spinster, who has died by her own hand and is given one week to indulge her every sexual fantasy before she descends to the pits of hell.

More morality play than masturbation aid, Devil seemed so keen to confound that reviewers of the time invoked comparisons to Modigliani and Sartre to suggest its darkness of mood. It opens on the long drawn-out suicide of Miss Jones, as she prepares to slit her wrists in the bath, and Damiano picked a suitably morose piece of music to accompany it: Simon & Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'. 'It had just the right rhythm and feeling,' he explains. 'So I transferred the song to 35mm mag stripe film and cut the scene to it.'

Predictably enough, he was stymied when it came to getting clearance - 'They wouldn't even talk to me!' - at which point he hooked up with composer Alden Shuman. The unlikely success of Deep Throat had provided Damiano with a budget to commission an original score. The evocative orchestral score provided by Shuman ranks up there with any great soundtrack you'd care to mention. A discomposed, melancholy funk, it sounds like a lost album by cult LA composer-producer David Axelrod. So much for grunts and moans ... (Chris Campion)

26. The Third Man
Anton Karas, (1949)
27. The Graduate
Simon and Garfunkel (1968)
28. The Pink Panther
Henry Mancini (1963)
29. Toy Story
Randy Newman (1995)
30. Round Midnight
Herbie Hancock (1986)
31. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
The Rza (1999)
32. Trouble Man
Marvin Gaye (1972)
33. Rosemary's Baby
Krzysztof Komeda (1968)
34. Head
The Monkees (1968)
35. Alfie
Sonny Rollins (1966)
36. The Italian Job
Quincy Jones (1969)
37. Once Upon A TIme In America
Ennio Morricone (1984)
38. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Jack Nitzsche (1975)
39. North By North West
Bernard Herrmann (1959)
40. Crooklyn
Various (1994)
41. Deliverance
Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandel (1972)
42. Don't Look Now
Pino Donaggio (1973)
43. Casablanca
Max Steiner and Hugo W Friedhofer (1942)
44. On The Waterfront
Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim (1954)
45. Reservoir Dogs
Various (1992)
46. The Magnificent Seven
Elmer Bernstein (1960)
47. Snow Falling On Cedars
James Newton Howard (1999)
48. The Wicker Man
Paul Giovanni (1973)
49. Dirty Harry
Lalo Schifrin (1971)
50. The Devil In Miss Jones
Alden Shuman, (1973)