Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies on Sky Arts; The 1970's Part 1

The 1970's was time of experimentation in film music. From lush orchestration to jazz to the avante garde. The programme started with a biography of Nino Rota, a child prodigy with a classical background who was a major composer of Italian cinema. With Federico Fellini, he wrote the scores for a number of the director's movies from 1950 to 1979 including La Strada and La Dolce Vita. Then with Franco Zeffirelli, he composed the music for The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. With so many compositions for films through the 40's, 50's and 60's  why is Nino Rota placed in the 1970's for this series? For one big reason. The Godfather. 

Francis Ford Coppola sought Nino Rota to compose the music for this 1972 classic movie. Each character is given their own theme, but it is the  instrumental "Love Theme" that is so well known (turned into a hit song "Speak Softly Love" and sung by Andy Williams. Rota followed this with the music for the whole trilogy.

Georges Delerue was another European composer with a broad classical background. He worked with Francois Truffaut on the classic 1962 French movie  Jules et Jim. Again working over many decades on countless films, he achieved recognition in Hollywood and the UK for his scores for A Man For All Seasons, Women in Love and Anne of a Thousand Days. Again, I guess he featured in the 1970's episode for his music for 1973's The Day of the Jackal and particularly his Academy Award winning score for the little known 1979 movie A Little Romance.

Jerry Fielding did not start composing for movies until after the end of the blacklist with 1962's Advise and Consent. He went on to compose the music for many Sam Peckinpah films including 1969's The Wild Bunch, 1971's Straw Dogs, The jazz loving Clint Eastwood picked Fielding to score The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976. All these films were notable for their common unsettling themes as Fielding was in the vanguard of experimentation.

At last we were told about Marvin Hamlisch, another child prodigy and a prolific master of movie music. Before he was seven years old, he was given a place at the Julliard School.His proficiency playing jazz as well as composing brought him to the attention of Woody Allen with whom he composed the music for Take the Money and Run and Bananas. In 1973 he adapted Scott Joplins music for The Sting which won Hamlisch his first Oscar. It's classic theme The Entertainer. was a huge hit. In the same year he won two Academy Awards for the the score and title song for The Way We Were. He went on to be nominated another seven times for an Oscar.

Michael Small was notable for his sores to thrillers including Klute (1971),  The Parallax View (1974) and Marathon Man (1976). Lalo Schifrin is famous for composing the theme to the long running Mission Impossible TV series that was later repeated in the movie versions. In 1967 he scored the movie Cool Hand Luke, then Bullitt (1968), Coogan's Bluff  (also 1968), Dirty Harry (1971) and The Eagle Has Landed (1977 amongst many other major movies. He was nominated for an Academy Award on six occasions.

I have to admit that the only composer with whom I was familiar with Marvin Hamlicsh. As for Nino Rota, Georges Delerue, Jerry Fielding and Michael Small, I knew some of their music, but none of their names. This has been an education.