HOWZAT

15 QUENTIN TARANTINO AND KARYN RACHTMAN

Think Reservoir Dogs and you hear Stealers Wheel (Stuck in the Middle With You). Think Pulp Fiction and it’s the Statler Brothers (Flowers on the Wall). Tarantino and Rachtman, his music supervisor, transformed the way we “listen” to movies, putting the music upfront, out there, vying for attention with the characters.

14 MARLENE DIETRICH AND JOSEF VON STERNBERG

Whether she was smoking moodily in The Blue Angel, strutting in a man’s tux in Morocco or singing Jonny off-key in The Song of Songs, it really never mattered who Marlene Dietrich was acting opposite , as long as von Sternberg was behind the camera. He brought her over from Berlin, he made her a star (shooting her gorgeously, in six movies for Paramount), and he redefined the femme fatale for ever.

13 RICHARD CURTIS AND HUGH GRANT

Every film-maker needs an on-screen alter ego. Scorsese has De Niro. Spielberg has Richard Dreyfus. So it’s only fair that Curtis should have Grant. “I think I’ve become very like Richard,” Grant told an interviewer. The sad irony, of course, is that the relationship has become so symbiotic that both men falter when outside each other’s orbit — Curtis’s recent TV drama The Girl in the Café was a miss, as was Grant’s Music and Lyrics.

12 JULIA ROBERTS AND RICHARD GERE

It could all have been so different if Molly Ringwald and Al Pacino hadn’t turned down Pretty Woman (Ringwald didn’t want to play a prostitute; Pacino, presumably, didn’t want to play a non-shouting banker). Their replacements, an unknown Roberts and a floundering Gere, nailed it. Whereas Roberts rarely looks comfortable with her romantic co-stars (her chemistry with Brad Pitt in The Mexican is matey, not romantic), with the silver-fox Gere she inspired a decade of glossy rom-coms and even returned for the quasi-sequel, Runaway Bride.

11 DEAN MARTIN AND JERRY LEWIS

With other classic comedy double-acts such as Laurel and Hardy it was all about the clever banter and the physical comedy. But with Martin and Lewis all they had was the chemistry. Working from increasingly lightweight scripts they stumbled through 17 movies on ramshackle joie de vivre. They are an acquired taste to some, to others the essence of modern character comedy.

10 D. W. GRIFFITH AND BILLY BITZER

Thanks to the undeniable style, pacing and emotional tempo of his creepy KKK-fancying 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, Griffith is often regarded as the Father of Film. But he’s really its co-uncle, alongside his cinematographer, Bitzer. The latter changed how we see movies, literally, with regular close-ups, fade-outs and shadowy studio shooting.

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