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Not a total abomination of course, don't think any of them is, and I like Los muertos vivos estan for instance, but overall I find Newman's sound generic, uninspired and forgettable.
You make good points here. There's the ghostly quality in the music, and we are dealing with Blofeld, who has been in the shadows. And Bond is only now finally unraveling the mystery.
The thought comes to mind that we're going to see how valuable John Barry was to Bond and what a great fit they were.
You are talking about TLD. I put that at 18, which is the lowest Barry for me as well.
No surprise that I have 8 Barry scores in my top ten.
But we’re a way off from that.
I’ve got QOS up next.
First we have our first huge discrepancy in popularity between music score and film. This one ended rather high in our film ranking game, but here it's bottom 3:
DR. NO
Music composed by
MONTY NORMAN
We do have a single big fan of this score since it did obtain one 5th spot, making it the lowest ranked score with a top 5 spot. The two next best placements however, were 14th and 15th (the latter two times).
That's more in line with the rest of the group, eleven bottom 5's were noted. One member even put it last. Only three EON's were put last in this contest, and DN is one of them.
The original music for DN acquired 71 points in total, avoiding the last EON spot by a single point.
Still though, unless I'm mistaking, its composer has been credited in every single official entry since then.
Same here, and agreed about your points.
Not only is it overused, and that is putting it mildly, it's used badly. The volume varies strangely, the bit of the theme that's played is unconnected to anything going on onscreen, it loops in weird ways.... It's just godawful. I, and probably anyone else here, could have done better.
I love the James Bond Theme as much as anyone here, but one should expect a bit more from a film score than to have the bulk of it be random clips of it slapped onto random scenes. I love "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" by R.E.M., but a film score that was comprised of nonsensical loops of that song popping up completely haphazardly would not impress me much.
The monster movie cues, as I mentioned before, are embarrassing. When Bond fights the driver early on in the film, the music would make one think they must be watching the invention of fisticuffs. I'm pretty sure this crap was dated even at the time of the film's release.
Monty Norman's actual tunes are pretty good though. But putting "Under the Mango Tree" in a score next to monster movie music and loads of random Bond theme hardly even counts as being a score at all.
Anyway, this is the only alleged score in the series I straight up dislike, and for me it's made worse by the fact that Dr No is an excellent film. I think this train wreck of a score really does some harm to it.
Yes, some of it sounds like it belongs in the previous decade but the Jamaican bits really add an unmistakable atmosphere that make the film so memorable. As far as the Bond theme goes, hey it was the first film and they were still figuring things out. As far as they knew it might be the last film, so they went for it.
Most importantly, it all adds up to a unique experience. There's no mistaking the music of DN for anything else in the series, which I can't always say for some of the more generic sounding modern Bond scores. So I just wanted to say some positive things about it because someone had to!
The Morse-like ‘Audio Bongo’ is the only proper ‘villain’ theme, although it’s only a variation of the cue used in the movie when Dr. No is introduced.
Well, apparently Peter Hunt didn't feel Monty's music was really working for the film, and Terence Young described it as "mining disaster music". So the James Bond Theme went in about eight scenes, presumably replacing even more dated cornball music concocted by Monty Norman and Burt Rhodes.
I believe it. It's such an extraordinary piece of music (imagine when it was brand new) that they must've been anxious to insert it anywhere they could. It also felt more modern at the time than some of the other music composed for the film. It makes sense.
Except for the original James Bond theme, I don't recall a single track in FRWL that re-uses any cues from DN. But much like DN, the soundtrack has several excellent cues ommitted, like the one where Grant shadows Bond from aboard the train.
The helicopter sequence near the end features one of Norman's cues, I think.
Edit:
Here it is. It's short and not really a big deal (FRWL is still my favourite Bond!) but I really don't like the DN score so it sticks out to me more than it would most.
Touché. Watched the movie countless times and never wondered why it sounded so familiar :)
But if that's the lone example apart from Bond's theme, then I think that's forgivable as everything else is original music by Barry.
Absolutely. It's very pedantic on my part! :))
But yes, not really a fan of DN. I had it at #24 in the end.
I do find it a bit silly when people complain about the supposed overuse of the Bond theme by David Arnold whenever Bond does something heroic in Brosnan's films when you have the Bond theme blaring while Bond vigorously brushes his teeth in Dr. No and From Russia With Love at one end and the complete absence of the Bond theme whenever Bond does something heroic in the Craig films at the other.
As for Dr. No, I do really like all the Jamaican songs, from "Jump Up" to "Underneath the Mango Tree," but these are songs and not score and no more a factor here than Patti LaBelle's "If You Asked Me To" would be for Licence to Kill or "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?" for OHMSS (apart from the fleeting instrumental use of that theme in the score).
The James Bond theme (by Norman and Barry) was of course phenomenal but as has been noted not really well used apart from the opening titles, and the rest of Monty Norman's score was dated for 1962 and pretty over-the-top in parts. I like that kind of music in films like Night of the Living Dead (I know, 1968) and earlier pulpy films, and I can kind of appreciate its use in the "mad scientist on an island" Bond film, but it really doesn't stand up against any other score in the series.
The songs are great on a summer day though.
I bet the vinyl is fantastic, I really need to pick it up. I only own a few, had my eyes on MR lately.
Agreed. Love the Jamaican flavor of the music. Hoping for some more with NTTD.
I like this one:
The piece that opens this video is lovely as well, among the best the score has to offer and doesn't feel out of place in a Bond film:
I also like the sneaky-sounding piece that plays when Fatima Blush arrives at the SPECTRE meeting. It's playful; goes well with the character.
Much of the score has a playful sound, even the serious moments. It's catchy enough. But it's not what I'm looking for in a Bond film-- not entirely.
The bike chase music is annoying with the trumpet going up the scale.
When I first heard Secret Room in the film, I thought some of its synth sounds were really modern-sounding for a Bond film. A bit like Shanghai Drive from Skyfall.
Admittedly, the Spectre score is indeed a little too subtle in places where a slightly more overt approach would've been welcome, but I also feel there is some good bombastic music, like the Backfire track. It reuses music from Skyfall, which isn't good, but I find it uses a little more to my taste, for example, in that moment where Bond is driving along the river bank (this was of course used in the bike chase in Skyfall-- here the percussion is different).
The music from the helicopter fight and the Spectre lair escape is very cool as well. I couldn't tell you how happy I was to hear the Bond theme chords in the classic key in the gunbarrel and when Bond avoids crashing the chopper in the PTS, as opposed to Skyfall, where the opening Bond theme blast is in a different key. It felt like they were being unabashedly Bondian with that moment rather than beating around the bush.
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Thomas Newman has a thing about apparently running a bow through some kind of string instrument, which he uses to open action cues like Health & Safety, Granborough Road and Backfire. Just something that struck me on repeated listens.
I believe Herb Alpert was just visiting the studio with no plans to record anything, and ended up doing that solo in that first video.