First came the silence, when the average cinema audience would derive as much pleasure from a Charlie Chaplin short as the average deaf person. Then a talented pianist would be seated at an “upright” beneath the screen, playing an appropriate musical phrase for every pratfall and pie-in-the-face moment – at which point the deaf person was put at a disadvantage.

It wasn’t long before the pit piano gave way to a pit orchestra, as class came to cinema in the shape of biblical blockbusters such as The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. I was lucky enough to witness such an event, and the actual impact of arresting image plus live music is pure magic. But shows like these are now, unfortunately, all too rare.

Today, the soundtrack is everything – think of the lush score that accompanies ET’s final flight to freedom, Vangelis’s music for Chariots of Fire (more memorable for the theme than the running) and the soundtracks to Star Wars and Rocky. We know the music as much as we do the action; and that music manipulates us, makes us feel so much more towards the film than just the spoken words alone. Would a declaration of love, or a significant farewell, tug as much at us if it was not accompanied by music?

In olden days, Hollywood studios had famous composers under contract – and under their thumbs. Not many of its composers were homegrown, and more than one had fled Berlin for Beverly Hills when the Nazis came to power. Wolfgang Korngold springs to mind – he had a couple of well-known operas to his credit before scoring a number of hits for Warner Brothers, among them Kings Row (1942), starring Ronald Reagan.

These days the director also has a say about the music, although he is often shouted down. Take Michael Redford’s 1984, which had an original score by Dominic Muldowney that the producer chose to supplement with tracks by the Eurythmics. Despite these strange bedfellows, the film won an Evening Standard award for Best Film, which ironically gave Radford a podium from which to state his displeasure in public.

This sort of situation gets even sillier when we come to Ridley Scott’s fantasy film Legend (1985), starring Tom Cruise. It had original music by the stalwart Jerry Goldsmith, who won an Oscar for his work on The Omen. But if you are thinking of getting Legend for home viewing, you might find the soundtrack of your DVD version is by – surprise, surprise! – the German electronic band Tangerine Dream, in a desperate bid by the studio to appeal to the kids and boost box-office receipts. So even as we speak there are two versions doing the rounds.

But hold on, aren’t we forgetting another crucial ingredient of the soundtrack – sound effects? You know: explosions, car crashes, screaming victims, etc?

There’s the rub. Nearly all action movies of the past decade suffer from the same flaw – an indigestible mixture of sound and music. There is an undeclared war going on between the music editor and the effects editor, who invariably both want their precious tracks played at near-deafening level. The result is generally a cacophony that minimises the dramatic impact of the movie.

But when they’re properly planned, music and effects can work together beautifully. A prime example is Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), with unforgettable music by Sir William Walton. During the Agincourt scene, the music and the tension build and build and build to a sudden silence . . . broken by the spine-chilling swoosh of a thousand arrows fired high into the sky before wreaking havoc on the galloping French cavalry.

Now the orchestra takes centre stage again, in an eruption of musical mayhem. Mind-blowing, but a rare moment indeed.

For my money, though, you can’t beat the pioneers, such as Max Steiner and his work on Gone With the Wind (1939) and King Kong (1933). And who can forget Dimitri Tiomkin’s stunning soundtrack for Giant (1956), starring James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor? It’s true, though, that Tiomkin blotted his copybook when, in Tchaikovsky (1969) he reorchestrated the master’s Serenade for Strings for brass and percussion.

But my personal favourite for running the gamut of emotions is Korngold’s Kings Row soundtrack – which was played in church on a ghetto blaster during my last wedding. What sonic grandeur! What soulful schmaltz! My wife Elize and I wept buckets. These melodies are not known as “more corn than gold” for nothing.

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