Strike Up the Theme Songs
As the Oscars loom, the Siren pays tribute to the era of lavish title tunes
It’s almost Oscar time, and this year as in other years, the Siren sees some people out there suggesting we junk the Best Song category, because it’s riddled with bad entries and “Oscar bait.” You may count the Siren as adamantly opposed to any such tinkering. Sure, Best Song has gone to some stinkers, especially over the past couple of decades (and even before that). But that’s also true of the lead acting categories, and no one is blithely suggesting we dispense with them. Besides, as long as the category exists, there’s a chance something the Siren loves may make a comeback. That something is the big, glossy, over-the-credits movie title theme.
The Siren once wrote about the melodramas of the late 50s/early 60s—what we could call, for easy recognition, the Mad Men era. These were the movies the Siren’s mother loved, and the Siren grew up loving them too, whether sweetly romantic like Young at Heart or hard and cynical like From the Terrace.
This same era marks another phase. Peak U.S. years for movie title themes were roughly from the mid-1950s up to a last hurrah as the 1960s were ending. As with anything in Hollywood history, a beginning is hard to pin down, and a cutoff even harder. But the Siren knows a good theme song when she hears one and — this isn’t a contradiction—sees one. So do you, if you think about it. And in the Siren’s firmly held opinion, the best come from the 1950s and 1960s.