John Williams: Overrated or Underrated?

10.12.12 | and
Tags:

When you see a shark, can you hear any particular tune in your head? What does it sound like?

Well, of course:

YouTube Preview Image

Has any other film composer so successfully identified a living creature through music? There are some film fans, however, who find the legendary John Williams—whose credits include not only Jaws but all six Star Wars films, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Accidental Tourist, Schindler’s List, and many others—to be overrated. For them, the “Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra” from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade might as well be “To Scarborough” from Dracula or “The Mission Second Part”  from The Today Show.

So, is he one of the greatest film composers of all time, or has he been overly derivative of himself ever since ”Johnny Williams” penned the theme song for TV’s Lost in Space…and stolen too much from Korngold? Here’s Movie Irv:

YouTube Preview Image

Now it’s time for you to, ahem, chime in. For some additional fun afterwards, see if you think Williams should perhaps have occupied every slot on our recent poll about ’70s soundtracks.

  • Wayne P.

    Hes the modern eras equivalent of studio age composer giants Max Steiner and/or Bernard Herrmann… so, just about right sounds really good (like his film scores) as an answer!

    • msdoni

      My exact thoughts, Wayne P.—Williams is in a class of his own (“class” being the operative word), and I have long considered him to be the closest thing to Max Steiner that we now have. And I also agree with Blair Kramer–I can’t think of “Jaws” without hearing that ominous strain, or “Star Wars” without that opening march running through my mind.

      • William Sommerwerck

        To call John Williams “the closest thing to Max Steiner we now have” is to damn Williams.
        Steiner was the Mickey-Mouse master, and criticized for it during his lifetime. Even Bette Davis dumped on him. She griped (when making “Dark Victory”) “Either I will walk up those stairs, or Mr Steiner will walk up those stairs, but not both of us.” She apparently understood that underlining dramatic moments rarely helps the film — it distracts the viewers from the actors’ performances. Why tell us in music what we can see on the screen?
        The next time you watch “Brokeback Mountain”, you might want to pay attention to its Oscar-winning score. It has one Leitmotiv — the guitar music that represents Jack and Ennis’s relationship — which is used very sparingly. Almost all the music is atmosphere, rather than “dramatic enhancement”. >> Good dramas don’t need that sort of enhancement. <<
        Of course, had Mad Max scored this film, he would have emphatically "punched up" the scene in which Ennis slams Jack against the apartment-house wall and kisses him — likely evoking audience laughter.
        If you ever get around to watching "Get Low" (worth seeing just for Bill Murray's performance), you might ask yourself whether the music is necessary or effective. If you can't come up with a reason — one way or the other — then you shouldn't be critiquing movie music.

  • Blair Kramer

    So…  You think John Williams isn’t original?  Really?  Has anyone ever written a more perfect opening for ANY film than Williams wrote for JAWS (including Bernard Hermann’s opening for PSYCHO)?  Could there be more heroic music than the opening titles of SUPERMAN?  Those introductory compositions are spot-on for their material.  No one in the world could have done better!

  • Ron

    Steiner, Tiomkin, Korngold, Herman, Waxman, Horner and a very few others are in a very exclusive group of truly great composers that includes Mr Williams.  In my opinion, movie composers are the modern day version of Beethoven, Tschakovski, Mozart and others long dead but still heard.

  • Barbaramoss1

    NOT ONLY IS JOHN WILLIAMS A  BRILLIANT COMPOSER AT CAPTURING THE TARGET OF THE STORY THROUGH MUSIC, HE IS A GREAT CLASSICAL COMPOSER, AS WELL AS A WONDERFUL CONDUCTOR.  BUT FROM WHAT I HEAR FROM THOSE WHO HAVE MET HIM, HE IS ALSO A VERY NICE MAN.  

  • Lala1941jan

    He is right on the money,,,,, love his music.

  • Ctyankee

    Yawn.  Must be a slow day at the Thought Factory that is Movies Unlimited.   

    • Joaniehenz

      Why bother leaving a comment if you are bored?

    • GeorgeDAllen

      Just about as much as coming up with that barb probably represented a busy day for you. :) With all due respect, though, the critique could be taken a bit more seriously if it were not vague as well as snide ; I have no idea if you think the topic’s dullness is because you think the question has a self-evident answer, or if you think it’s illegitimate to conduct such debate in the first place.

  • ANH

    Proof of the success of John Williams is the immediate recognition of his music – and the movies with which his music is connected.  He has definitely left his unique mark in the world of music composition.

    • TmtJo8

      T.Crowe;
      Couldn’t have put it better myself….

  • Joaniehenz

    John Williams can never be overrated and anyone who says he is has a tin ear.

  • Cbessw

    When one’s body of work is in the public view, or in Williams’s case ear, anyone can criticize it whether they are qualified to do so or not.

    • William Sommerwerck

      Doesn’t it also require “qualification” to praise something intelligently?
      “Oh, I dew so lack the one that goes “Mammy, mammy, mammy”.”

  • BernardS.

    John Williams is not OVERRATED, he may be OVEREXPOSED but NOT overrated. Can he help it if ALL the
    popular movies in the past three or four decades had been scored by him ? He has been given wonderful material
    and come up with very very “fitting” scores, his main themes are always hummable and therefore memorable.
    If there were no Max Steiner before him, he would be the preeminent “Movie Composer”, now if we want to praise
    him some more, some moviegoers may want to count how many Oscars he had won or nominated for, then maybe
    he still is underrated. Each listener of film music would have their own favorite composer or favorite score. I
    always want to make a list and compare lists make by others. Then the fun starts when everybody would say, oh I disagree about that ranking, or I totally agree with you about that composer or this composer, now, George and Irv,
    lets start the comments, my LIST of the TEN GREATEST film composers are : (in order) 1. KORNGOLD, 2.STEINER, 3.ROSZA, 4.HERRMANN, 5.NEWMAN,6.WAXMAN, 7.John WILLIAMS,8.GOLDSMITH,
    9.NORTH,10.MANCINI.— So, in my book, WILLIAMS rank 7th, but look at the ten, is he overrated ?
       

    • GeorgeDAllen

      Can’t quibble much with that list! Except that in mine, I’d have John Barry in there somewhere. And I’m getting to be a big fan of Alexandre Desplat.

  • Joaniehenz

    Yes critics abound and I was out of line and assume I ruffled someone’s feathers with my comment. Excuse
    me for my audacity. I am not qualified to say if someone’s talent is excellent or poor but I do know what is
    pleasing to my ear and John Williams has stolen my heart, as well,  with his beautiful music.

    • William Sommerwerck

      The only valid judgment of the quality of film music is whether it complements or enhances the film. One can write beautiful music that doesn’t do those things.

  • Mikejaral

    music scores and composers can make or break a good movie, or at least help it along with giant steps

  • Mike

    my favorite is elmer burnstein

  • Marty

    I think that John Williams is certainly not underrated. He belongs in the same category of all of those wonderful composers of the Golden Age of Film, Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Bernard Herrman, Jerrry Goldsmith, Mikla Rosza, Franz Waxman and Albert Newman among others. The Indiana Jones series alone was one of his great accomplishments. 

  • Jimmarietta

    No way is John Williams OVERRATED!!  hE IS AN EXCEPTIONAL TALENT; AND I FOR ONE
    HAVE ALWAYS ENJOYED HIS WONDERFUL MUSIC!!!

  • Brygolf

    it still gives me the creeps

  • Bonnerace

    Williams is a great composer…try to think of another  that matches music so brilliantly to subject matter.  Max Steiner, Erich W. Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa are a quick “classic” short list.  I can”t think of any of his scores that didn’t like and at least 80% were truly outstanding.  If you were a kid in the 1950′s-60′s the old SUPERMAN tv show theme was it, until SUPERMAN came out in 1978.  Almost everyone adopted that instantly, a hard thing for ANY composer to do.  STAR WARS, RAIDERS, HARRY POTTER, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, JAWS—modern film composers just don’t have that many memorable scores.  Enjoy and be glad for the blessing!

  • Fmartins

    There is nothing more enjoyable that sitting in Symphony Hall in Boston, watching and listening to John Williams conducting his own music with the Boston Pops. Even in these concerts of movie music with other composers are on the program Williams music shines through. Williams is still humble enough to pay tribute to the classic movie composers that have come before him.
    I always find it funny when he does his encore that the open notes still catch the audience by surprise, when the whole orchestra comes in with main theme.

  • NTNBaessi

    I believe John Williams is overrated, he is a master when it comes to create a theme easy to remember and to hum to fill up the generic music that he composes. Tintin and War Horse were a massive disappointment and still were nominated to Oscar, this alone shows how overrated he is . His scores made some people think that a score is just a jingle for the movie.

    • William Sommerwerck

      The use of a “title song” to promote a film (and make money from) goes back at least as far as “Laura”, and became popular in the ’50s. Its decline seems more related to changes in popular musical taste than any desire by the studios to abandon the practice. It was Bernard Herrmann’s absolute refusal to write “exploitable” music that led to his break with HItchcock — and Hitchcock was the loser.

  • William Sommerwerck

    There was a time when Williams wrote outstanding scores. Those days are long gone.

    Yesterday I watched “TinTin”. The opening titles — and Williams’ jazzy music — are terrific (though the music is perhaps unduly reminiscent of Michael Giacchino’s style). One hopes this will continue.

    UInfortunately, the rest of the film is the same old same-old. Williams comes up with a musical idea (whether or not it has anything to do with the character or situation), then more or less beats it to death (something neither Herrmann nor Goldsmith were guilty of).

    Two well-known films stand out as having atrocious scores. One is “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”. Frank DeVol’s music is the perfect model of how //not// to write a Mickey Mouse score. (It can be done, with the right film, as Max Steiner did in “King Kong”.) The other is “Jurassic Park”. I wanted to scream every time that idiotic brass theme that had nothing to do with anything in the film was played. (Williams’ Yoda theme is similarly pointless.) It’s the worst film score I’ve ever heard.

    I’d like to invoke Bernard Herrmann, who remains the master of film scoring. One of his tricks was to create a unique orchestral sound by using unusual instruments or combinations of instruments (eg, the serpent in “White Witch Doctor” and “Journey to the Center of the Earth”). In his rejected score for “Torn Curtain”, he used 12 flutes. “The sound of twelve flutes is terrifying,” he said.

    (Note Goldsmith’s highly effective use of the glass harmonica in the first Star Trek film, and Zimmer’s atmospheric cembalom in “Sherlock Holmes”.)

    Yet in “Jurassic Park”, Williams does neither of these things. “JP” was an intentionally PG-13 film. Spielberg knew kids would want to see it, so he deliberately held back on the violence. It was Williams’ responsibility to add musical horror that Spielberg could not show. He utterly failed to do so. I can’t think of a more-serious failure at scoring.

    Here’s another example of Williams’ failings. There’s a sequence in which Sir Francis Haddock tries to blow up his own ship, with Red Rackham repeatedly stomping out the burning powder trail, and Haddock re-igniting it. How would a composer approach scoring this?

    One approach might be to alter the music’s harmonies (and perhaps key) to create a rising sense of tension each time the powder is set buring again. Or one might write a fugue to achieve a similar effect.

    Williams does neither. Once he’s got his fight music (which I believe is derived from Haddock’s basic theme), he just keeps repeating it.

    John Williams might be a genuinely talented composer, but his work over the past 25 years doesn’t reveal it. To me, anyway.

  • Cara

    His first film score was to How to Steal a Million. It’s not an epic. It’s not an adventure film. it’s a sly, witty gem of a romantic comedy, and he does a delightful job. He was credited at Johnny Williams. John Williams belongs with the greats. And he and Spielberg have now, including Lincoln, collaborated on close to thirty films. There hasn’t been as long and as productive a collaboration between director and composer in the history of cinema. If anyone gets the chance, watch a repeat of Williams and Spielberg on TCM. It’s just the two of them talking to each other and to a small group of graduate film students. The conversation is very insightful in regards to both the artists and their partnership.