GREATEST MOVIE SONGS
You’re watching a film. A song comes on the soundtrack - either heard or sung. And it’s memorable. And perfect. And right for the film, the time and the place. Might not be your favourite song but there - in the moment, watching the film - it is.
Here is my list of the greatest film songs.
Isn’t this a Lovely Day (Top Hat) - 1935
“The weather is frightening. The thunder and lightening seem to be having their way…”
If there’s a better song, I don’t know it. There’s probably not a day that passes where I don’t sing a couple of bars from this Irving Berlin classic. The movie poster hangs in my bedroom. In the film, Fred and Ginger are caught in a rainstorm and take refuge in a bandstand. As they sing and dance to this clever song, the rain outside pours. Their little shelter becomes a cacoon of flirtation, courtship and growing new love. To a great melody. We probably all wish for this. They weren’t complicated, Hollywood musicals of the 30’s. They went to the point. And what a lovely - make believe - world that was.
Sometimes, My Bloody Valentine - Lost in Translation 2001
Top five favourite movie. What’s not to like? Bill Murray. Bill Murray singing ‘More than This’ in a Japanese karaoke bar. Scarlett Johansson. Yes, Scarlett. A chaste romantic film. Clever. Laid back. The whirlwind of romance away from home. They go out with her friends. A club. A chase. A party. A karaoke bar. They drink and smoke and then get a taxi home. The early morning ennui following a night out. Dozy. Comfortable. With someone special. And this song plays. A surprisingly tender tune for a song with cranked up guitars. It floats along with the hazy reality of a blissful 3am with a girl. In a taxi. On the way back.
Get Back, The Beatles with Billy Preston - Let it Be (1970) Not the single. The final song from the movie.
The Beatles going down fighting. A cold January in 1969. The Beatles are nearly broken up and somewhat lethargic about their latest album. They decide to play one last impromptu concert on the roof of their building because they can’t be arsed going anywhere or organising anything else. So they play their latest songs across London to the unsuspecting office workers. The police get called after half an hour bringing this rooftop concert to an end. But there’s one more song. Get Back. John and George’s amp gets turned off after the first verse. And then ‘fuck it’ they switch it back on and their guitars come back with added urgency. This is it. The last song ever played live by the greatest group ever. It’s scrappy, it’s raw but it’s the fucking Beatles man. Going down fighting.
You’re Sensational, Frank Sinatra - High Society (1956)
“I’ve no proof. When people say, “You’re more or less aloof.”
Ah, Cole Porter… What a song writer. Famously, he wrote both the music and the witty and intelligent lyrics to his songs. High Society is one of my happy places. Happy memories of the family watching a good movie back in the 70’s. Of course, I like The Philadelphia Story too, but I grew up with the colour, musical version. From Louis Armstrong kicking it off on the bus, the hip jazz lingo, Bing Crosby being Bing, right through to the loveliness that was Grace Kelly. It’s a classic movie with a ‘sensational’ score. So many great moments; Bing and Grace harmonising on ‘True Love’, “now that’s jazz”, Frank and Bing duetting drunk, the breakfast outside on the patio. And the effortless class of ‘You’re Sensational’. I know I say it lot, but hardly a day goes by without my singing or humming its opening lines quoted above.
Bela Lugosi’s Dead, The Hunger (1983)
This is the classic opening for Tony Scott’s stylistic vampire movie The Hunger. The music is strange, other worldly and the perfect accompaniment to an unsettling, hip nightclub where Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie go out a’hunting for victims. Long coats, shades, cigarettes; the foundations of Goth are right there up on screen. Of course, in real life, Goths were just smelly losers in bad clothes and worse make-up hiding their acne. But in their mind, they were Peter Murphy, the chisel cheeked lead singer of Bauhaus who dominates this first scene from behind the bars of a cage (see below). Right song. Right movie. Well framed and shot. Hence, on the list!
Sweet Transvestite, Tim Curry - Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Cracking song in one weird musical. Great was the day I found this movie. Suddenly everyone in sixth form was a sweet transvestite as both an insult, a compliment and - at the Christmas disco - a costume. I liked this song so much, I got my group to learn it and we’d chuck it in every now and then to get the crowd going. Or to stop them going. Whatever. At our final gig, at the Hare and Hounds in Brighton in early 1996, this was the last song we ever played. Pissed. Out of tune. Camping it up. And then I pulled a strop and sacked the band and went solo. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Good song though.
There She Goes, The La’s - The Parent Trap (1998)
One of the greats. Of course this song stands on its own. Lee Mavers’ beautiful, beautiful indie twinkling guitar ditty packs three minutes of audio gold. And here, in a mainstream kids movie, it’s framed perfectly. As Lynsay Lohan’s American twin is driven around London - in a vintage Rolls Royce of course - images of London flash by as There She Goes blasts out. The two go together like an American travel agent’s perfect ad of quirky, historical, sunny London. With a iconoclastic soundtrack.
The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music, Julie Andrews - The Sound of Music (1965)
Yeah, I know. A bit route one. Too obvious. What’s your favourite band? The Beatles. Favourite piece of classic music? Beethoven’s Fifth. Favourite movie song? As Time Goes By, Casablanca. They’re culturally ubiquitous for a reason, no? They’re the Stairways to Heaven of their field. Same here. I’ve tried to give a wide range of movie songs in this piece but - hey! - indulge me one indulgence. A toss up between the Dooley Wilson classic (If she can stand it, I can. Play it!) and this one. I went with Julie running around the Austrian Alps singing about mountains. And music. What makes it so special though, apart from the song, of course, is the helicopter shots, the gradual build up before Julie finally comes into shot. It is a classic, musically and cinematographically. Once seen, never forgot. Job done.
70's Films
Rocking that hat! Olly Reed.
70’s Films: Not Crap
Movies of the 70’s. Yeah - I can remember the 70's. Lots of long hair, rounded collars and power cuts. A few years later - in the later 80's - I worked for a Tory MP and edited a Conservative In-Touch leaflet for the voters of Bury North that basically painted the 70's as a huge 10 year drift into communism (fault of Callaghan, Wilson, Benn, Heath and other assorted fellow travellers). There's something in that, of course, but my actual memories of the decade - as opposed to my teenage political views - are fabulous; warm, comforting, happy.
And the films? Pretty damn good. A better decade than the 60’s and certainly, in retrospect, more watchable than the 80’s where all the films seemed to be populated by big haired actors wearing shoulder pads battling intrusive crap music taking the place of characterisation.
So, today's listette is the best films of 1970's with a slight bias towards films I actually saw. Yeah. In the 1970's at ABC Cinema in Rochdale town centre. Probably a bloody Wetherspoons now.
Star Wars (1977)
Of course Star Wars. I saw it when it came out in 1977 and was pissed off it would 1984 before it came on TV. These were days before videos, online Disney etc. Christ this movie, and the franchise, is big now. BIGGER in the 70's when the tech wasn't so dated and before Lucas messed it up with crap CGI in the 90’s. I collected the cards. Swapped them at school. Iconic movie. 70's classic. It doesn't get much better than this.
Grease (1978)
Saw the film. Watched all the hits on Top of The Pops as Summer Nights and You’re the One That I Want each set up camp at Number One. Got the album for Christmas. An album that - framed - adorns my hallway right now. All the innuendo and smutty lyrics went right over my head. Were we more innocent back then or was it just me? But great casting (if somewhat old for high school kids), great songs, dance routines all stuffed into a pleasing boy meets girl, loses girl, gains her back again three act plot.
The Long Good Friday (1979 released 1980)
Obviously, I didn't see this in the 70's! Well, it wasn’t released until 1980 but I’ll squeak this one in as it was filmed in the decade. Bob Hoskins on fine form and Helen Mirren looking (as she always does) stunning. Dream girl. London as I remember it in the late 70's - a shit-hole but ringing to the song of Cockneys getting all useful with each other. A time piece of a world in transition before Thatcher reinvented the country and builders transformed the Thames riverside into skyscapers of glass and money.
The Three / Four Musketeers (1974/5)
Richard Lester screwing over Olly Reed, Michael York et al by claiming to make just one movie but then cutting it in half and releasing two. Funny, irreverent, with Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway engaging and distracting the fab four as they flash their swords in France and England. I saw this one rainy holiday in Dorset 1974 when the weather forced us to the cinema. Glad it did. There’s not a day when I don’t think about this film.
Manhattan (1978)
I thought this one better than the more celebrated Annie Hall. Shot in black and white. When Woody Allen was vaguely funny. Didn't see this until the 80's. Plot: Woody forms an inappropriate relationship with a much younger girl. Mmm, yeah. An artist, right?
Animal House (1978)
“Greg honey, is it supposed to be this soft?” I don't think I've ever progressed beyond the humour from this story of the worst Frat House on campus. Kent Dorfman. Wow! Tim Mattheson, John Belushi lead the lads into one gross out misdeed after another. Toga! Toga! Louie Louie. Spawned a genre. And no, I didn’t see it at the time.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
"Saigon. Shit!" President Andrew Bartlett goes off to kill The Godfather to sound of the Doors while reading Heart of Darkness. Or something like that. It goes on for, like, nine hours and is always on when I come back pissed from the pub. So I see a bit here. A bit there as I fall asleep on the couch. If I wake up and see the deleted French scene, I must be watching the director's cut. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!"
Monty Python's Life Of Brian (1979)
What can I say? Possibly one of the most iconic and funniest films ever. So many scenes that are now comedy gold and have slipped into the culture. Hard to see that it was controversial at the time. Christianity is a bit of a soft target though, isn't it? Not then, apparently. I suppose one could imagine a comedy team doing a piss-take of another religious figure from a different, militant religion now? Edgy, no? No? They'd rather take lame shots at Trump? How we've progressed since the 70's. Not.
The Godfather 1&2 (1974/5)
Mario Puzo / Francis Ford Coppola's epic tales of a mafia family in New York moving to Vegas and Cuba. What's not to like? Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, James Caan, Robert Duvall. "Forget about it". “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Well worth watching again and again. It stands up as a timeless classic - out of time, not of its time.
Well there you go - some great films. Some good times. Superman in January 1979 at the ABC in Rochdale was memorable only because it was the Winter of Discontent and so the heating was off because of the strikes. Really looking forward to Andy Burnham taking us back to those days. Without the iconic films and music though, eh?
Did I miss off Wild Geese? Travesty! Another time perhaps.
Read On
Like this? Then read my greatest 70’s music choices. Or all my music critiques, more lists and hot takes!
What's a DVD anyway?
I like the word cohere. It's one of those words, not complicated, not a tongue twister, that sorts the linguistic sheep from the inarticulate goats. The donkeys from the asses. The Trumps from the Hillarys.
I mention this not because I'm a pretentious nob - I am, of course - but because it reminds me of something I once wrote (I paraphrase):-
"The list format helps the struggling writer cohere a random set of unrelated facts and opinions around a predefined structure to save them actually having to be creative."
Or something like that. Snappy, eh? Some of my best work lies on the cutting room floor of the draft folder, or banished into the dusty corners of the hard drive.* Which is my way of backing ungracefully into a flimsy article which has a list at its core.
Tim's Top 5 DVDs
DVD's - remember them? Yes, grand-dad, I do. What we had before the internet and Amazon Prime and Netflix. I still have some DVDs, tucked away in my French oak coffee table. Well, that is, until I sorted them out yesterday and packed them up in cardboard boxes. I'm moving house, you see.
Necessarily, this little list has an air of a few years ago. I don't mind that - so do I.
Clerks - Foul mouthed, funny, low budget, clever. "36?"
Groundhog Day - Bill Murray relives the same day over and over again until he finds redemption.
Lost in Translation - Bill Murray has an unconsummated but profound romance with Scarlett Johansson (haven't we all?)
Before Sunrise / Before Sunset / Before Midnight - Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy in a classy, verbally rich, trio of films shot over 21 years.
The Wicker Man - Early British 70's horror set in Scotland with great folk music, Britt Ekland and a shocking end for Edward Woodward.
And that's it. I thought you might like to know.
* Beating it hard tonight.