The one singer Tom Hanks said made every movie better
There isn’t a single movie that Tom Hanks has made that hasn’t elicited some strong reaction over the years.
While there’s always bound to be a few duds in any actor’s catalogue, there’s a good chance that anyone would be buying tickets to watch one of his movies solely because he’s starring in it. But even if his magnetic presence is more than enough to get the theatre packed, Hanks knew that there was a whole crew behind him that made everything feel absolutely perfect.
Hell, even some of his greatest performances is more about the way that Hanks works off of the rest of his castmates. While that final scene at the gravesite in Forrest Gump is one of the finest lone acting performances in film, the empathy that you have for him in The Green Mile would be nothing without Michael Clarke Duncan, nor would Captain Miller have the same impact if we didn’t know the backstory of everyone else in Saving Private Ryan.
But for all of the great films that he’s made over the years, Hanks has proven himself to be one of the most musical dads that Hollywood has ever spit out. Despite becoming everyone’s favourite superstar onscreen, That Thing You Do was far from a simple passion project. Hanks had been around to see what bands like The Beatles were like when they debuted on Ed Sullivan, and would do whatever he could to make people feel the same way he did when listening to them.
Then again, Hanks’s films have always been a bit varied when it came to the music. There’s no way that any John Williams score could ever be considered bad by any means, but it’s clear that a movie like Saving Private Ryan sees music and sound design a lot different than the fever dreams that were happening throughout Elvis. There’s certainly a time and a place to go over-the-top, but the music with the most impact is sometimes the ones that are the most subtle.
A lot of Williams’s famous scores practically fill your eyes with tears for you, but getting Bruce Springsteen to work on the soundtrack for Philadelphia was the perfect companion piece to the movie. This was during the time when people were still seeing the LGBTQ+ community as an unholy entity when talking about AIDs, but getting ‘The Boss’ to write about that big a topic helped a lot of people think about the issue in a completely different way.
And while Hanks plays the role of Andrew Beckett perfectly, he did admit that a lot of the best in the business could afford to take some cues from how ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ fit into the movie, saying, “If you ever want to have a great moment in a motion picture, walk out a door and make sure they just put up a Bruce Springsteen song.” But that quote is about more than people adding ‘Born to Run’ at the end of every feel-good movie.
If you think about, Springsteen has written the kind of music designed to be experienced on a large stage, and while every single concert venue has become his unofficial church of rock and roll whenever he plays, there are tunes like ‘Highway Patrolman’ and ‘The River’ that have enough details for an entire motion picture on their own, even if they only manage to last a few minutes at a time.
But if you look beyond the mythology that’s been built up around both Hanks and Springsteen throughout their careers, they do feel like kindred spirits in a sense. Each of them treat their status like a job every single time they perform, and even if they play an exaggerated version of themselves whenever they go to work, they are a lot more content with leaving their egos on the shelf whenever they can.
