However, as great as John Williams is, I don’t believe he’s the greatest film composer of all time. That’d be Nino Rota. I won’t go into detail, because I think the diversity, quantity, and quality of great film scores speak for themselves.
Great music and hot chicks! Double whammy!
OK, eye candy for Jess here.
Rota’s music gives the ending here to Nights of Cabiria a quality comparable to Chaplin’s City Lights that I don’t think it’d really have without it.
And as an addendum, I’ll include what is inarguably Rota’s most famous piece, although you’ve certainly heard it before a million times, and you really don’t need to hear it again:\
No wonder Francis Ford Coppola insisted on him for The Godfather—apparently, Robert Evans didn’t like Rota, the same way he didn’t like Brando, Al Pacino, setting it in NYC during the postwar era, the Sicily sequences, the three-hour running time, etc.!
EDIT:
Here’s Rota’s great uncharacteristic score for Fellini Satyricon:
