This movie is one of my favorites, and the music is some of the most well-crafted for a film that I’ve ever heard.
The Sound of Music came immediately to mind in terms of most enduring.
Saturday Night Fever is the best selling soundtrack of all time, isn’t it? It’s got to be up there.
As for the best soundtracks, I’ve got to go with Help! and A Hard Day’s Night.
I’m fond of Don’t Knock the Rock,but seriously,folks,would Woodstock be appropriate here? If not,the I’ll nominate Easy Rider
My favorite soundtrack, as an audio album to listen to at any time, is The Rapture. Not a flawless movie, but an amazing soundtrack–
- Hymn No. 27 (Opening Theme)
- Wave - Antonio Carlos Jobim
- Ruler of My Heart - Irma Thomas
- Now I Lay Down
- Directly from My Heart to You - Little Richard
- 6 Years Later
- Aguas de Marco - Elis Regina
- Writhe & Wither
- Alarm
- Well Enough - Julie Christensen
- I’ll Be Your Mirror - The Velvet Underground
- Grace Disengaged
- Shallow Grave
- In Jail
- Next Diaspora
- Cheap Sleep
- Astronaut Anthem - Meredith Mon and Vocal Ensemble
–oldies, oddities, plus occasional bits of atmospheric film score to keep it interesting. Ditto Natural Born Killers: an awful, horrible, very bad movie, but a brilliant soundtrack album produced by Trent Reznor. ***The Crow ***ain’t bad either; similar mix of music. ***Until the End of the World ***has some great, great songs on it too, and works very well as an alternapop album. Beetlejuice is Danny Elfman’s best soundtrack, and Raising Arizona is Carter Burwell’s. Although Burwell’s soundtrack for The General’s Daughter–another bad movie with a great soundtrack–has some phenomenal tracks on it.
Any soundtrack album by Carter Burwell or Graeme Revell is usually good for a spin.
Greatest film scores? Probly Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky; Erich Korngold’s score for The Adventures of Robin Hood; Goblin’s score for Dario Argento’s Suspiria; and almost any score by Bernard Herrman, Ennio Morricone, or Angelo Badalamenti.
Are we limitted to music specifically composed for the film? Then I’ll go for Star Wars. If not then the wholesale usage of famous classical music by the film industry rather renders things moot. Beethoven in The Longest Day, Mozart in 2001…
What can I say? Great minds and all that sort of thing… 
Leonard Bernstein’s score to On the Waterfront.
I think Henry V is possibly the greatest original score that enhances the movie (described beautifully by Kizarvexius).
I, too, really like The Crow and Until the End of the World as albums.
One other score I haven’t seen mentioned is Lawrence of Arabia. Maurice Jarre has a bunch of high-quality stuff.
No comment. I have a feeling the soundtracks in your universe are just plain better, and I’m jealous.
My favorite music to listen to when I’m working on a project is still Desperado: The Soundtrack. Just real cool music. It’s hard to get too uptight listening to it.
It was Johann Strauss in “2001,” wasn’t it? “The Blue Danube Waltz,” most notably.
Some personal favorites:
-
A Man and a Woman (the French version)
-
South Pacific
-
Chinatown
-
The Pink Panther (and so many Mancini soundtracks)
Although I grew tired of “Lara’s Theme,” the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago is a jewel.
The soundtrack that Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa did for Black Orpheus gets my vote. It’s the best thing that Jobim ever did, and that’s saying a lot.
I don’t think I could ever name a best, given all of the worthy examples mentioned. One I enjoy is from The Red Violin.
Starstruck is a fun movie built around Aussie new wave music, and it’s got a great soundtrack.
It’s a pity Going Upriver doesn’t have a soundtrack album, because in the “soundtrack = collection of pop songs from the era” category, it’s the best ever. But it’s a 2-hour documentary about John Kerry during the Vietnam era, so not many people are going to want to watch the movie itself.
Johann Strauss, yes, and no Mozart–but also music by Richard Strauss (the opening theme is from his Also Sprach Zarathustra), Khatchaturian, and Ligeti.
I was just listening to “Purple Rain” today!
“Saturday Night Fever” still makes me dance.
“2001/A Space Odyssey” is still incredible.
Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcrucker Suite” is still awesome as is vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire.”
“City of Angels” is also holding up well."
In the same vein as “American Graffiti” we have “Forrest Gump” which are both great soundtracks.
I’ve been scanning posts to see if anybody would mention something that would make me think “Oh, yeah! That’s it!” This is as close as anyone has come to naming one I’d vote for. I had to check the IMDB page to verify that Jobim was involved in the music. I have the album! Until now I thought it was just Bonfa or Bonfa with another composer. This is indeed a revelation!
The problem I have with soundtracks in general is that way over half (if not most) of them are basically a theme-and-variations concept. After a while any theme will wear thin and if all the album has is a rehash of the same theme it will get stale. Musicals can escape this problem if they’re written by a competent team like Rodgers and his collaborators. Of those, I’d probably pick Pal Joey (the Sinatra version) as my favorite.
But when it’s not a musical as such, it gets harder to select. I think Henry Mancini came as close as anyone to realizing the kiss of death of the theme and variations approach. The only thing he wrote the music for (that I really like) that suffers from this is Experiment in Terror which, except for a few haunting melodies, has the sameness amplified throughout. Other Mancini soundtracks that are less troubling are:
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Hatari!
Charade
and the already mentioned The Pink Panther
Since my favorite Mancini soundtracks are from TV shows (Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky), I have to say that Mancini’s better work came outside the movies.
The weird thing is that with few exceptions I can identify the composer of a soundtrack before the credits do. Lalo Schifrin, James Horner, John Barry, John Williams, and most big name score writers, all have very identifiable “fists” when it comes to music. I believe I’d vote for Jerry Goldsmith as having the least bothersome trademark.
Having said all that, and despite the fact that the soundtrack is nothing but theme and variations, I’ll toss in Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver as being one I can listen to many times without getting bored.
And, of course, the theme from Laura by David Raksin is by far the best piece of music ever written for the screen.
There are some obscure soundtracks that feature jazz that I like. Miles Davis has several. But they aren’t great soundtracks, nor great jazz. (Surely I’m just not remembering one that negates this.)
But Black Orpheus, for all it did as a soundtrack and for its heralding the Bossa Nova movement to the world, is still the most fascinating album of movie music I have.
Gotta give a nod to Vangelis’s Bladerunner.
Spooky, futuristic, noir . . . Really a unique package.
I’m surprised that noboby’s mentioned Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The soundtracks for this flick and for *2001: A Space Odyssey * were what got me seriously interested in classical music.
An obscure little cult film, Zachariah, managed to produce a soundtrack much more interesting than the film itself. The LP is long out of print, and it isn’t available on CD, I presume because of copyright issues. The soundtrack featured the James Gang, Country Joe and the Fish, the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, Doug Kershaw and White Lightenin’, as well as some very nice incidental music by Jimmy Haskell. The film was a kind of psychedelic Western comedy, supposedly a re-telling of Hesse’s Siddhartha. First draft of the script was written by the Firesign Theater, who later disowned the film and were right to do it. Two or three Firesigners appeared in the film in bit roles. The film flopped at the box office, but became a regular at midnight showings around the country and evunetually made it to both VHS and DVD. The LP is something of a collector’s item now, and I’ve been surprised by the prices it sometimes gets on eBay.
I don’t have many soundtracks, but the ones I enjoy listening to over and over again are O Brother Where Art Thou and Pulp Fiction. Geez, Quentin Tarantino wields music like a cudgel. The music in his movies is practically another character.
In the musical realm, I like A Chorus Line, Oklahoma! (the Broadway soundtrack, though), and, for nostalgic reasons, South Pacific (my mother had an LP and I used to act out the whole movie to the recording. My “Honey Bun” is marvelous to behold 
)