Film Music 50 years Ago, Then and Now - by John Caps

It was fifty years ago now that film scoring drew special attention to itself like never before, at least for that generation The old composer-complaint that "nobody notices film music" stood exposed, especially in 1975 when everyone, it seemed, was quoting (both in satire and in earnest), the unforgettable double bass string motif – just two notes sawing back and forth like a warning, signifying the approach on screen of a killer shark in the Steven Speilberg thriller film, Jaws. That musical motif, intricately and vigorously worked into the full orchestral score by John Williams, carried its film and blasted that whole Oscar-winning soundtrack and, as it turned out, the whole field of film music, into the public consciousness. Suddenly, everyone noticed film scoring and what it could do for a film. But look now: here, 50 years on, there appears to be a whole host of arts-and-culture articles and features in the remaining print journals, marking the 50th anniversary of that Jaws phenomenon... the film and its music score.

This particular year, 2025, does also seem to be a year awash in not only similar action/monster films but fantasy and superhero films, naturally requiring their own loud and noticeable action scoring. But how does all this compare to fifty years ago? Of course, the filmmaking may be very different these days and, more importantly, we have a significant new crop of composers. For the year so far, we notice the ubiquitous Hans Zimmer has given two-fisted scores to action TV productions like Chief of War and serious synth programming and macho score production to sport racing films like F1 The Movie. So, too, the younger pros like Michael Giacchino have taken over scoring for The Fantastic Four: First Steps where there is actually some more detailed orchestral attention to mimic the action on screen (like pizzicato strings playing along with those 1st step gestures) while John Powell's How to Train Your Dragon seems to combine those two influences: the elementary unison theme lines of Zimmer and the attention to certain orchestral detail as in Giacchino's work as far back as the animated film, Up. This season's major Superman film has a score more loud-than-lush, more sound than music and yet even that, it seems, took two guys to assemble: David Fleming and John Murphy.

Don't get me wrong -- 2025 wasn't just a year for simplistic, loud and braying soundtrack scores: the ever-amused Danny Elfman devised a sly, creepy swaying score for Dracula - A Love Tale, set to the rocking rhythm of a music box and sort of wrapped in a dark choral cape. More interesting still has been Laura Karpman's dark, assertive, and rhythmically alive scoring to that other superhero epic, Captain America: Brave New World. About this scoring venture, she told the Motion picture Association: "I started out with New Orleans drumline percussion. I got a drumline together, wrote a lot of rhythms, and we went into the studio before I wrote a note of music for this movie. Soon after, I went to the UK and recorded English musicians playing the same rhythms, performing really basic military beats. The idea was to combine the swing and swagger of New Orleans in combination with the straight Military feeling you'd get with more traditional playing. So, I started with percussion, and that was really the beginning." But why that works is because Karpman's thematic sense is always strong and blessedly non-derivative.

Perhaps most respected of all the recent action scoring -- and it is music to another sequel, this one hoping to inspire some more direct remembrance of past John Williams adventure music – has been Alexandre Desplat's solid but also detailed scoring for the new Jurassic World: Rebirth. He makes use of the one original Williams theme from the original movie, Jurassic Park, of which this is a spin-off, but then fills in a whole atmospheric orchestral arboretum around the dinosaurs with a wide sonic range: deep and scary, shrill and strange, all rising out of a rather dense harmonic jungle... not as formal or concert-ready as Jaws but confident and symphonic on its own behalf.

So, again, how does all this measure up to some representative scores from fifty years ago when Jaws's iconic score was all the rage, drawing audiences into the movie and (new to most people) drawing attention to the very practice of film scoring? The simple mention of a few major scores from 1975 might suggest comparisons, then leave it up to the listener (the reader, here) to draw conclusions: Are that past year's best soundtracks matched or surpassed by these? Jaws is one. In strong competition was Jerry Goldsmith's thundering action score, The Wind and the Lion, in which forthright percussion and virtuoso brass writing combined to support the story of a Moroccan sheik who kidnaps an American woman, creating an international incident. The scoring relied on the tonal interval of the so-called 'heroic 5th' for its main theme of war while the composer seemed to tribute an old Alex North tune (from Spartacus) when a love theme was needed. The result was old fashioned but compelling adventure music, losing the Academy Award that year for Best Score only because Jaws was winning instead. Meanwhile, and just as rhythmically exciting, was Alex North's own historically based score that year to the western Bite the Bullet about an actual 700-mile horse race.

In France (though its US release may have been officially in 1976 but the composer tells us it was composed in '75) the always convincing and composition-savvy Philippe Sarde was exercising three of the musical things he did best for Bertrand Tavernier's The Judge and the Assassin – attention to story and setting (in this case, a late 19th century folk-like quality and the sound of a period accordion to represent the assassin whose passion is born in the streets); Sarde's own strong sense of interpretive melody to personalize the story further; and some agitated dissonant string writing indicative of the judge-as-antagonist. Altogether, it was a powerful mix of musics, so subtly telling of a time when certain modernisms were entering the culture and, at least musically, reminding this writer of another past favorite concert-and-film composer from France (and Switzerland), Arthur Honegger.

Modern sensibilities were even more prominent in other 1975 films, if also a lot more depressing: remember how Bernard Herrmann's last score for Martin Scorcese's vicious portrait of corrupt New York City, Taxi Driver, sported a jazz-inflected bluesy sax tune as its main statement but was really more of a dark angry dirge. Certainly, that soundtrack was as effective in its way as Jaws and as dire in its account of the 20th century as was John Barry's portrait of decadent 1930s Hollywood in Day of the Locust with its purposely noisy and satiric negative sounds – whereas Three Days of the Condor looked to political intrigue, CIA, and spy forces as the greatest (and unreachable) threat to personal freedom. Dave Grusin's score played with the surface of the threat as did the characters we were rooting for.

Historical settings generally got memorable and sophisticated scores back in 1975: hear David Shire's unique soundtrack to The Hindenburg about that 1937 blimp disaster (Shire's graceful airborne-airship theme had a wonderful floating trapeze feeling to it while his theme for two lovers there referenced Brahms. Or check out Lalo Schifrin's clever, saucy music to accompany The Four Musketeers including bustling, swashbuckling themes and meters, and the funny idea of writing for pizzicato strings while the musketeers gingerly tiptoe their way across a frozen lake during a sword fight (another "fantastic four" to use this ruse).

No surprise, then: there were certainly handsome and ingenious examples of film scoring all through 1975 amongst the more usual rash of ordinary scoring. That's always the way. The same is true this year, but there are highlights, still. You just have to know what to watch for, listen for. It may be true in general that "nobody notices film music" – maybe especially these days when it's used less as a narrative support and more as a mere guide at the door and then as a marketing tool after the fact, but as a few films from fifty years ago and here a few vital representatives for this year can show, film scoring can still be eminently noticeable, both for itself and for its service in an ongoing cinematic cause.

by John Caps