MUSIC BY JOHN WILLIAMS (2024)

Laurent Bouzereau, who’s been making bios & backgrounders as DVD Extras for decades, found he had to expand his format into a full-length feature to even begin to cover the prodigious 60+ year career of film & concert composer John Williams.  (Longer if you count his session work & early jazz albums as pianist.)  And if the smooth result is more broad than deep, that’s probably appropriate for Williams, a man whose output rivals a baroque workhorse composer, more Vivaldi formulaic than Bach inspirational.  A mere list of his directors: Spielberg & Lucas most famously, going back to Wyler & Hitchcock (FAMILY PLOT/’76, a particular delight), forward to Howard, Columbus & Abrams, just gives a taste.  Plenty of clips & interviews (he seems universally adored by colleagues & family), but maybe most fun for early secrets at the piano: for Henry Mancini, that’s him on keyboard for PETER GUNN; for Elmer Bernstein opening a generation’s tear ducts with the piano intro on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And credit to Bouzereau for somehow, after all these years of familiarity, recreating the frisson in sight & sound of the BLAST OFF that opens STAR WARS/’77.  (A job Steven Spielberg, right after JAWS/’76, urged Williams to choose over the far more prestigious A BRIDGE TOO FAR/’77.)  Not covered in here is the elephant in the room: Williams’ magpie penchant for compositional suggestion.  You hear it everywhere.  STAR WARS famously glancing toward the sound world of Holst’s THE PLANETS, a love-theme that looks at Tchaikovsky and that opening fanfare that might be a fake-out from Korngold’s KINGS ROW/’42.*  To say nothing of the grab from Zoltán Kodály for the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS alien motif.   Still, if Williams can be charged with standing on the shoulders of giants, is there another composer with more themes that instantly recall specific films?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *These musical ‘suggestions’ not to be confused with the sort of wholesale quotes (orchestrations & all) of someone like M-G-M’s notorious Herbert Stothart.  Oscar’d for THE WIZARD OF OZ/’39, likely for the great Arlen/Harburg songs, his main contributions consisted of copying bleeding chunks of classical clips (from Mussorgsky to Debussy) into the background score.  Williams less in debt than influenced.  Favorites you can easily spot include SUPERMAN/’78 (listen to the music playing under the company logo in Universal films of the 1940s); E.T./’82, a hard one to spot, but the sound world is right out of the last (3rd) movement of Howard Hanson’s Third Symphony/Romantic.  Perhaps most surprising, SCHINDLER’S LIST/’93 is too close for comfort to the opening ideas in Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 2.  Far less known than Bruch’s First, the reference recording of this fine piece ironically features Itzhak Perlman.  Yep, the same soloist who plays on the SCHINDLER soundtrack.