John Williams' 20 greatest film scores, ranked

John Williams had an eventful, fruitful 1972, capitalizing on the momentum from his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of Fiddler On The Roof. While he spent part of his time that year on such intriguing projects as the John Wayne film The Cowboys, he also composed the score for the disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, music that was painted in bold, vibrant strokes. With its dramatic pomp and insistent melody, it pointed the way to the blockbusters he’d score for Steven Spielberg not many years later.

Forget all the paint can antics: at its heart, Home Alone is a Christmas film, a movie that’s directly in the wheelhouse of John Williams. Although he gives the chaos of the McCallister household dramatic force and highlights the absurdity of Macaulay Culkin fending off Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, Williams shines by giving Home Alone a main theme that sparkles like sunlight on fresh-fallen snow.

Unlike Ron Howard’s sodden Irish melodrama, there’s a sense of ease and grace to the score John Williams composed for Far And Away. Williams threads in various Irish folk themes—the specific melodies aren’t recognizable but the jigs, reels and ballads feel familiar—into a score that is designed to fill every inch of the big screen. Perhaps the end results are a little sentimental, but they still are effective, even memorable.

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan marked a turn toward realism in World War II films, with the movie distinguished by its astonishing opening sequence dramatizing the D-Day operation in June 1944. Spielberg strips away the niceties that characterized WWII films, yet he allowed John Williams to devise a score that’s simultaneously stirring and somber. It doesn’t trade in movie illusions yet it does suggest that there’s a heightened sense of importance to the proceedings, a quality that gives the film cinematic gravity.

Oliver Stone intended Born On The Fourth Of July as something of a retort to the conventional patriotic film: instead of celebrating war, his film would romanticize anti-war activist Ron Kovic. One of Stone’s tricks is giving his film a grandiose, heroic score from John Williams, one that’s drenched in sentiment and inspiration. Heard in the film, it serves as commentary; heard on its own, it’s effective music.

An unusual movie in the filmographies of both director Robert Altman and John Williams, Images finds Altman exploring psychological horror films similar to what Roman Polanski essayed in Repulsion. This interior torment gives Williams the opportunity to devise one of his creepiest, most unsettling scores, purposefully ignoring his melodic and bombastic strengths to deliver music that’s skewed off center and often scary.

There’s a direct line between Memoirs Of A Geisha and Schindler’s List, a connection that is partially due to the presence of violinist Itzhak Perlman on both, but also is due to execution. Where John Williams built his Schindler’s List score around Yiddish folk songs, here he takes Japanese musical motifs and respectfully expands them to the size of a widescreen. It helps that he’s joined by Japanese American flutist Masakazu Yoshizawa and cellist Yo-Yo Ma: they aren’t here to merely serve as accents, and their bond that gives this score depth and soul.

Lincoln came with a pedigree: the biggest director in cinema teamed with a Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter to adapt a biography of Abraham Lincoln by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, with Daniel Day Lewis accepting the title part. That’s an intimidating resume but Steven Spielberg avoided pitfalls of solemnity with his grandly entertaining picture. Unlike some previous Spielberg pictures, John Williams’ score isn’t pushed to the forefront: it’s empathetic, colorful support, a measured, sober score that nevertheless isn’t stiff.

Jurassic Park marked something of a comeback for both Steven Spielberg and John Williams, returning the pair to the thrills of Jaws. The analogy isn’t quite precise. Where the threat in Jaws was lurking under water, Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs are visible and majestic, so they called for the kind of cinematic, empathetic score Williams creates with his main theme. What gives the music teeth is how he can also create tension that mimics the stalking raptors and the lumbering threat of the T-Rex. It’s a return to menace that’s quite welcome.

When it came time for Christopher Columbus to bring J.K. Rowling’s wizarding saga to the silver screen, there really was no other choice for a composer than John Williams. As Steven Spielberg’s right hand man, Williams had a long, illustrious track record of infusing silver-screen blockbusters with imagination and flair, which is precisely what happens with Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone. Williams gave Harry Potter a theme as rousing as Indiana Jones but colored with a slight twilight spookiness, then he leaned hard into the twinkling fantasy of a child discovering that he’s a wizard, creating a wondrous score that also set the template for an entire franchise.

At first glance, it doesn’t appear that a maximalist composer like John Williams would be a good fit for a conspiracist like Oliver Stone, but JFK proves that the two complemented each other. Stone handed Williams rich material that the composer promptly gave an imaginative treatment, highlighting both the dashed dreams and the malevolent undercurrents of the early 1960s that Stone sought to capture.

Maybe Superman contains the slightest echoes of the score John Williams wrote for Star Wars—the main themes are bombastic tour de forces, with each element of an orchestra striving to create something heroic—but there is a difference. Where Star Wars does seem like a populist anthem, the sound of a bunch of rabble rousers uniting in rebellion, the main theme of Superman: The Movie is clean and purposeful, an ode to a singular hero. That individualist streak runs throughout the film, even during the earliest moments where Williams summons the spirit of 2001 to convey the majesty of the Planet Krypton: this is about one exceptional man, not a collective.

Like the Steven Spielberg film it accompanies, the John Williams score to E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial is filled with wonder and joy, all levied by the slightest sense of danger. The minor-key winds that blow through the score, suggesting either terror or tenderness, get washed away by the transcendent main theme, which manages to sustain a sense of escalating awe even as it’s pumped up with the full might of an orchestra.

Don’t let multi-part franchises fool you: Sequels are always a tricky business. The Empire Strikes Back defied expectations by being a deeper, richer film than A New Hope, a progression that’s echoed by John Williams score. Finding new variations on the ideas he etched out in the first Star Wars, Williams expands the universe considerably with the introduction of the ominous, alluring “The Imperial March,” a number that effectively is the opposite image of the main Star Wars theme: it makes the Dark Side of the Force seem alluring.

Just like how Steven Spielberg seized the opportunity to explore the mid-century modern milieu for his cat-and-mouse thriller Catch Me If You Can, John Williams designed his score as an homage to the splashy big-budget potboilers of that time. He comes up with one of his most delightful scores, a piece of work that’s fleet on its feet and clever in its sensibility, a score that’s steeped in jazz yet doesn’t ignore the grandness of cinemascope.

Much of Close Encounters Of the Third Kind is consumed with jittery, atonal swells of strings that suggest the unsettling presence of unidentified flying objects in the air. When John Williams breaks the tension it’s deliberate and usually cathartic, capturing a moment of chase or excitement. All of this delicate, effective work is overshadowed by the concluding five-note theme that represents the connection between human and extraterrestrial life, an invigorating and wondrous moment that retains much of its power when heard separate from its accompanying images.

The last score to win John Williams an Oscar—it was his fifth—Schindler’s List finds the composer threading traditional Yiddish folk tunes into his work, a decision that sets the tone for a nuanced, melancholy score. He hasn’t tempered his melodic proclivities but they’re delivered in a gentler, sadder fashion that allows guest violinist Itzhak Perlman to wring out the emotion from the swaying, sighing main theme.

Designed as a tribute to old-time movie serials as well as the swashbuckling adventures of Uncle Scrooge—the opening sequence where Indiana Jones swipes a gold idol and outruns a boulder is a direct homage to an old Carl Barks Scrooge McDuck comic—Raiders Of The Lost Ark is filled with bold, colorful melodies, all tied together with a stirring main theme song every bit as memorable as what John Williams conjured for Star Wars. Throughout Raiders, Williams opts for oversized gestures—even the love song is lacking in nuance—but instead of seeming overheated, the score seems sweepingly romantic, the sound of a boyhood fantasy come to life.

The two-note refrain expertly evoking a shark stalking its prey in the deepest depths of the ocean became iconic, so recognizable that it’s easy to forget that it’s surrounded by other elements that ratchet up the tension. Beneath that insistent, escalating refrain, there are countermelodies and accents at the margin that gives the illusion of underwater menace. The theme is the main reason why John Williams won another Oscar for his score for Jaws—a win that helped cement a lifelong collaboration with director Steven Spielberg—but his work, like the movie, is rich and lively, balancing moments of gentleness and excitement with that ominous tick-tock.

More than the titles flashing by in hyperspace, more than the slow narrative crawl among the stars, it’s John Williams’ blaring fanfare that sets the tone for what’s to come in Star Wars, the 1977 film that director George Lucas subsequently dubbed A New Hope. Williams summons the full might of his orchestra to create a score that’s a rousing hero’s journey graced with moments of real tenderness. That gentleness can be felt on screen, during quiet moments of contemplation, but it’s that blaring, inspiring title theme that’s indelible upon a first encounter, whether it’s heard at the age of 5 or 50.