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Score by Jerry Goldsmith TCM, Beginning at 7 p.m.
Jerry Goldsmith ranks as one of Hollywood’s most prolific, innovative and influential composers and conductors; over his six-decade career, he scored everything from episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Waltons (along with that series’ theme music)
among his television work to feature films across various genres, including horror movies (like Gremlins and his Oscar-winning
score for The Omen), dramas (such as Rudy and his Oscar-nominated score for Patton), thrillers (including Basic Instinct and his Oscar-nominated score for Chinatown), action flicks (such as Rambo: First Blood Part II and Air Force One); sci-fi/fantasy films
(his Oscar-nominated scores for the original Planet of the Apes and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, among those); and more. Goldsmith racked up 18 Academy Award nominations and one win over his career, and he is one of only five composers — along with
fellow film-scoring legends Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner and John Williams — to have had more than one score selected for inclusion on the American Film
Institute’s 2005 list of the 25 greatest film scores in American cinema. Tonight’s lineup on Turner Classic Movies celebrates the diversity and enduring legacy of Goldsmith
with four films for which he composed the scores. The evening starts with Seven Days in May (pictured) (1964), director John Frankenheimer’s political thriller, featuring a screenplay by Rod Serling, about a military-political cabal’s planned takeover of the U.S. government. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March and Ava Gardner star. Up next is the inspired-by-a-true-story prison-break classic Papillon (1973), which stars Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and which earned Goldsmith an Oscar nomination for his emotional score. Following that is a film that boasts one of Goldsmith’s finest scores of the 1980s and one that earned him yet another Oscar nod: Poltergeist (1982). Producer/co-writer Steven Spielberg’s haunted-house thriller is greatly
enhanced by Goldsmith’s memorable music,
not only through the more exciting and fast-moving parts of the score but also via the more quietly ominous elements of the movie’s main theme, the simultaneously soothing and creepy, lullaby-like “Carol Anne’s Theme.” The Goldsmith celebration concludes with The Wind and the Lion (1975), the action-packed Sean Connery and Candice Bergen-led war film that boasts another Oscar-nominated score by Goldsmith, who earned praise for incorporating a large and diverse ensemble of instruments for this music, including many from Morocco, the movie’s setting.