Carly Simon’s song from the title open of “Working Girl”.
Brilliant. Earned that Oscar®…
In a similar vein,
Gang of Four’s Natural’s Not in It at the beginning of Marie Antoinette set a tone which suggested “this isn’t your typical costume drama”.
Whether that tone was actually tone deaf or not is up for debate.
CMC fnord!
No. It played in a long (but not complete) version at the beginning. At the end a little of it played during the tableau of Bender punching the sky, but when the credits rolled the music changed to, IIRC, Heart Too Hot to Hold.
And my DVD proves you correct. What’s weird is that this was the first movie I ever paid to see twice in the theater, and I bought the soundtrack album, and I heard Heart Too Hot to Hold on the album and had absolutely no recollection of actually hearing that song in the film.
The theme to Jaws.
…I’d never seen the opening to Joe vs the Volcano before: that was awesome! Now gotta see the whole movie…
Add another vote for the Stand and Dr No: both fantastic and stick in my brain.
My vote: "The Spy Who Loved Me. Mainly because this running narrative by Alan Partridge has ingrained the opening in my mind…
The two that popped into my head before I opened the thread were Pulp Fiction and Apocalypse Now.
Some good one already. (I’m on board with Donnie Darko)
A couple more:
Tom Petty’s “American Girl” at the beginning of Fast Times at Ridgemont High
And the musical opening of Office Space is pretty good, too.
Actually, it won because everyone had heard of Carly Simon. (And it was over the closing credits.) The song that should have won that year was the astonishing “Calling You” sung by Jevetta Steele from the movie Baghdad Cafe.
I love Carly Simon and wish she had an Oscar for songwriting that was earned for an excellent song, but this one is as undeserved as the one Randy Newman got for “If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc. when he should have won for “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2.
One of my all-time opening credit songs not yet mentioned was from the movie “Castway” (not the one with Tom Hanks).
The best cinematic moment for that song was in Silence of the Lambs.
Sinatra’s “Summer Wind” set the tone well for The Pope of Greenwich Village.
Did Rocky open with “Gonna Fly Now” or did that come in only later during the build-up?
“Speak Softly Love” from The Godfather.
The Magnificent Seven Theme is probably my favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iteRKvRKFA
I’ll nitpick here a little. The very first song in Fast Times was “We Got the Beat”, which played over the opening credits to good effect. However, we didn’t hear “American Girl” for a little while. It played during Jennifer Jason Leigh’s first day in high school.
There are so many, actually…Caddyshack, Nat’l Lampoon’s Vacation, Sound of Music, Brian’s Song, MASH, Bridge on the River Kwai…
It’s an incredible movie. It was my all-time favorite movie for many years, until Hero finally took its place. For the full impact of Joe vs. The Volcano, watch it several times. I watched it every day for a week, and found some new insight with each viewing.