Quentin Tarantino names the greatest theme song in cinema history: “It’s so haunting”
Ever since Reservoir Dogs‘ seminal use of ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’, Quentin Tarantino has become synonymous with the cinematic needle drop, but it’s not a gimmick.
The filmmaker often writes what songs are going to be playing in the background into his scripts, so it’s not like he’s intentionally scouring his record collection prior to shooting for the next obscure track to single-handedly return to prominence: the music is there for a reason, and he knows what it is years before a frame has been shot.
Tarantino has largely foregone the use of orchestral scores throughout his career, but the avid film nerd couldn’t resist the opportunity to utilise the legendary Ennio Morricone for The Hateful Eight, having used several of the composer’s pieces in previous features. For the most part, though, he’ll pluck a song from his memory banks and drop it wherever he sees fit, even if David Bowie’s ‘Cat People’ was an anachronistic choice for the World War II-set histrionics of Inglourious Basterds.
The two-time Academy Award winner knows music almost as well as he does cinema, so when he says a certain picture has the greatest theme song of all time, he’s heard enough to make a judgment call. A 1983 political thriller that bombed at the box office is a typically out-of-the-box suggestion, but it’s stuck in his mind as the pinnacle for over 40 years.
“‘The Main Theme’ is one of the greatest pieces of music written for a movie,” he told Uncut of Jerry Goldsmith’s work on Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire. “It’s so haunting, so beautiful: full of pan flutes and stuff. It’s shattering, you know, like a Morricone theme. Oddly enough, ‘The Main Theme’ works really well, but they never play it over the opening credits. They play it over the middle and during the closing credits, which is very strange.”
For context, Tarantino praised the music for the revolutionary potboiler starring Gene Hackman and Nick Nolte when he listed his ten favourite albums of all time. The only movie soundtracks that featured were Elmer Bernstein’s contributions to The Great Escape, Bernard Herrmann’s work on Brian De Palma’s Sisters, and Jack Nitzche’s score for Tony Scott’s Revenge.
However, ‘The Main Theme’ from Under Fire was the only theme song that got singled out. By extension, Tarantino picking a particular track from his ten favourite albums and calling it one of the finest compositions ever created for film puts it in a class of his own, even if it’s one that won’t instantly be ringing in the ears for anyone who isn’t a cinephile on a similar level.
If nobody’s been able to come up with anything that’s been able to knock it from its perch in the last four decades, then it’ll take a hell of a track to dislodge it from the top of Tarantino’s pile.
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