Maurice Jarre, 1924-2009
March 31, 2009

Last August, Isaac Hayes passed away and on these pages, I made a point of noting that part of his legacy includes that his wrote and performed the coolest movie music of all time--the title song and soundtrack from 1971’s Shaft. Nobody disagreed with me. Well, it’s now sad to say that the gentleman who composed and orchestrated the grandest movie music of all time has died. The music is the theme for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and the man is Maurice Jarre.

Jarre died this past Sunday at the age of 84.

Numbers never tell the tale in its entirety, but whatever relevance they do offer can fuel the argument that Maurice Jarre is one of the greatest film composers in the history of cinema. With more than 150 scores to his credit, Jarre has picked up countless awards, including a Grammy, three ASCAP Awards, four Golden Globes and three Oscars (he was nominated for nine) for three of the four pieces he composed for the films of director Lean.

And the list of filmmakers with whom he collaborated over his nearly half-century-long career reads like a “Who’s Who of Cinema.” From older masters like Alfred Hitchcock (Topaz), Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face, Therese, Judex), William Wyler (The Collector), John Frankenheimer (The Train, Grand Prix, The Fixer), Richard Brooks (The Professionals), Fred Zinneman (Beyond a Pale Horse), Elia Kazan (The Last Tycoon) and John Huston (The Mackintosh Man, The Man Who Would Be King) to more contemporary filmmakers such as Karel Reisz (Isadora), Clint Eastwood (Firefox), Peter Weir (The Year of Living Dangerously, The Mosquito Coast, Dead Poets Society), Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Jacob‘s Ladder), Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist), Mike Figgis (Mr. Jones) and Paul Mazurky (Enemies: A Love Story, Moon Over Parador), Jarre worked with’em all, his majestic, string-filled scores underlining and enhancing whatever transpired on the screen.

It’s the Lean films, of course, with which Jarre is most usually associated. But, hell, if you’re gonna be remembered primarily for a quartet of films when you’ve composed scores for nearly 160 of them, they might as well be for such films as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984).

Check out this great video of Jarre conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing the theme from “El-Awrence” in a musical tribute to Sir David Lean from 1992.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on March 31, 2009 | Comments (2)