True aficionados of film scores may suggest that a better title for this six-disc set would be "100 Popular Film Themes" or "Themes from 100 Popular Films." It's a chronological survey, but there is an emphasis on the themes from the age of the blockbuster (i.e., the late '70s onward). Silva Screen's specialty is symphonic recordings of movie themes and music highlights sold as an alternative to the actual, full movie soundtrack/score recordings, and what's here is pulled from those recordings. Even in some of the highlights from the 1950s and early '60s, the full symphonic, stereo sound of these excerpts is so different from the original, monaural soundtracks and the scrappy studio orchestras that the music seems almost too "Evening at the Pops" or 101 Strings-ish. For everything else, however, the sound and energy are just as good as the originals. Memorable themes such as the guitar Cavatina from The Deer Hunter and Tubular Bells from The Exorcist break up the symphonic sound. There's plenty here that most people will recognize, even if they haven't seen all of the most popular movies of the last 30 years.
John Williams,
Danny Elfman, and
Hans Zimmer are well represented, as are their elders
John Barry,
Bernard Herrmann, and
Jerry Goldsmith. A few of the foreign films thrown into the mix are The Dambusters, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Cinema Paradiso, and Les Choristes. Nitpickers will argue that the unforgettable music from Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Red Violin are greater than that of Air Force One and The Da Vinci Code, and they'll complain about the scarcity of picks from Hollywood's Golden Age.
Korngold is completely missing from this collection, as are
Miklós Rózsa before 1959's Ben-Hur and the theme from the 1940 Mark of Zorro, which appears on other Silva Screen compilations. But for more casual fans of film music and fans of movies in general, it will remind them of some entertaining hours spent at the movies.