What is the most recent live-action comedy film you saw that had a really memorable original score? Liar Liar? Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery? Home Alone? To me, most comedy films of the past few decades have had scores that were perfectly serviceable, but not impactful. I won’t be humming them anytime soon.
But more than that, the music composed for comedies seems to be thrown in rather than well thought out. That wasn’t always the case. Big-name composers used to provide the scores for comedies, and they don’t get much bigger than Elmer Bernstein. He teamed up with two of the most prolific comedy directors of the 1980s to produce great pieces of music that have stood the test of the time. You might even call him the secret weapon of ‘80s comedies because of how much they benefited from his contributions.
Elmer Bernstein started working with John Landis in 1978. He worked on the score for nothing but classics: National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Spies Like Us, and Three Amigos.
He started working with Ivan Reitman in 1979. Those scores include Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters, and Legal Eagles. He also did the score for Heavy Metal, which Reitman produced.
It was a stroke of genius for these two directors to use Bernstein’s talents in their (mostly) comedy films. Bernstein was well known at the time as a great dramatic composer. He had composed the scores for such classics as The Ten Commandments (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960), To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Escape, and True Grit (1969). He brought his considerable talents to bear for each of his assignments in the ‘80s, creating memorable results. Continue reading →
Deja Reviewer 