A great theme tune forms the backbone of any classic war movie, but which are the best? Here’s Mark’s selection…
When I was growing up in the 60s, there was a definite nostalgia for the war that stimulated the making of some excellent movies, mostly based on real events in World War II. But through some entirely inexplicable quirk of fate (or the fact that they had big enough budgets), many of them ended up with such evocative theme music. Just hearing some of the music stirs up the emotions.
I bought a few such themes on various movie soundtrack albums, but eventually hit gold with a record put out by Geoff Love and his orchestra called Big War Movie Themes. This has, without exception, some of the best examples of the genre.
I don't really need an excuse to talk about war movies, so which were the most stirring themes? Here’s my pick of favourites.
633 Squadron
Sod the Spitfire, when I saw this movie there was only one aircraft I wanted to fly, and it was the de Havilland Mosquito. The notion of hedge hopping across occupied Europe at nearly 400 miles an hour, causing untold mayhem on the Nazis, seemed positively idyllic when I was eight.
The movie pulls some actual events and some more fanciful ones together into a rather predictable yarn that has a love triangle, plenty of derring-do, and some half decent flying sequences. Where it's quite horrible in my opinion is in the liberal use of back projection, often in sequences where it's combined with location shoots where it wasn't really necessary.
The poor optical composition and some very obvious model work sullies some of the excellent work done by those who shot the small number of remaining Mosquitos the production had access to. But along with the sleek and lethal combat aircraft, it's also the great Ron Goodwin score that elevates the whole film. What I especially like about it is the sequence that starts the theme, where the descending pitch embodies a falling leaf, or in this case a rapidly descending aircraft.
It entirely emphasises the lyrical nature of the flying, and how starting out high, this aircraft could drop rather dramatically on its ground-based prey, before unleashing a formidable array of weaponry, which is where the main chords kick in. As such, it really embodies the excitement of a low-level ground attack, and the thrill of zooming away with flak shells bursting around you.
In retrospect, the music and the movie are implausibly jingoistic in places, and dramatically inhabited by panto villains, but that's tempered to a degree by the horrific levels of attrition, as none of the crews make it back from the final mission.
It’s music with real gusto, if something of a cliché these days.
Honorable mentions: A Bridge Too Far (John Addison), Zulu (John Barry), Schindler's List (John Williams), Das Boot (Klaus Doldinger), The Longest Day (Maurice Jarre).
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