music during opening credits...
Can anybody tell me the name of that march heard during the opening credits?
share"Aces High" by Ron Goodwin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNVVoH9-QH0
"Oh dear. How sad. Never mind!"
Just today I accidentally found a piece of music that I had heard and comes into my head now and then. It only plays for a short time in BOB and my memory tells me it was when a young German Pilot is taken to Berlin.
BOB is 1969 movie. Aces high 1976. I must assume the Ron Goodwin has reused material he had written. I did enjoy the slowish moving piece being used in BOB.
I also must admit that for some reason composers are at ease giving the German machine rousing and stirring music in scenes obviously of Germans troops etc..
Eh, well.. the original music was rejected
https://youtu.be/F3idxKxRPSw?list=PLKp4ps5RSRpxMnoJeGgWgNdwfk255ML3i
http://www.allmusic.com/album/battle-of-britain-original-motion-picture-soundtrack-mw0000240056
'.. one must realize that the original soundtrack to the movie Battle of Britain was one of the most controversial movie scores of the 1960s.
At the time, United Artists Records, the music division of the movie's distributor, was having particular luck with orchestral pop-type releases, such as John Barry's James Bond scores, and Walton wrote a complex, serious music score that sounded like it came from the concert hall. The producers replaced his music with a much simpler, more conventional movie score, authored by Ron Goodwin and built around various brass-heavy march tunes, interspersed with a romantic theme or two. Then Olivier, who (with Michael Caine, was the star of the epic film, threatened to have his name taken off the credits of the movie over the snub of his composer friend's music. A compromise was worked out, wherein Walton's scoring for the climactic "Battle in the Air" was kept in the movie;
mostly, it was the presence of the five-minute "Battle in the Air" theme that kept the Battle of Britain soundtrack in print (the movie was a notorious failure) for years.
Walton's score sounds old fashioned and straight out of a 1950s movie- very worthy and somewhat glum. Someone said once that you can write good music but not necessarily good film music and IMO Walton's score is an example of what didn't work.
Ron Goodwin was a prolific movie scorer and realised immediately what the film needed and his score IMO is bang on.
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
They used Walton for the montage towards the end, which fits it like a glove but I fear you're right about using it throughout the film. I've tried it on the dvd and switched back to Goodwin.
Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.
Walton's score, with the exception of "Battle in the Air", was a thorough dud. Goodwin's music was brilliant, one of the best film scores of all time.
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