Film Studies: Easy on the chords please, I'm trying to watch a movie...

On American television the other day, I saw a documentary about Miles Davis. It included that moment in the 1950s when the young Louis Malle asked Miles to watch his movie, Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud, and simply improvise on the sequence in which Jeanne Moreau walks the streets looking for her lover.

The marriage of the two was uncanny; there was a feeling of the plaintive trumpet coming from her face, like tears or worry. It left me thinking how seldom these days music really "works" on film, as opposed to being a cute, commercial ribbon for the picture.

Does this seem fanciful? Are you of the nearly automatic opinion that film scoring is richer and better than ever? I'd like to think that, too, and I will note that this year, at least, the Philip Glass music for The Hours makes a remarkable contribution to that film. For it is the way those rolling chords run through the picture, like waves, that helps us feel the pattern of repetition in the human actions. But I am of the opinion that much of the previous use of Glass music on screen has been pretentious and muffling.

There are other exceptions – music is used throughout The Talented Mr Ripley and American Beauty, say, with ingenuity and passion. But far too much these days, music is added to a movie like foam insulation in a new house – the addition makes for comfort and mood, maybe. But it hasn't been chosen with particularity. It isn't inspired. And for decades we have lived with a kind of cliché – "movie music" – an accompaniment that doesn't really help the picture you're seeing so much as tell you you're at the movies.

If you think this is nonsense, try to recall theme music from some movie of the last 10 years or so. And then think of the music to these films: The Grifters, Last of the Mohicans, Chinatown. I'll bet you can hum passages of the Jerry Goldsmith score to that last film. Try humming the music from LA Confidential or Jerry Maguire or Braveheart or most of the big pictures of recent years. Then think of the music from pictures maybe made before you were born – The Godfather; Bonnie and Clyde; Lawrence of Arabia; Sunset Boulevard; Gone with the Wind.

I wouldn't raise this large matter if I didn't think it was important. From Citizen Kane to Vertigo to Taxi Driver, the musical conception is vital to great movies – and some of you will know that Bernard Herrmann composed all three of those pictures. You can argue that Herrmann was better than our composers now; just as Welles, Hitchcock and the Scorsese of 1975 are not equalled today. But there's something else at work – the steady awareness of how pointed and organic music is in film, and how disastrous the approach to it can be if the music is treated as simply decoration or window dressing or the album that will help sell the picture.

It isn't just Miles Davis on Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud that set me thinking this. At Sundance recently, a new version of The Singing Detective was presented. That's right, the Dennis Potter work that created such an impact on British TV in 1986. The film version is directed by Keith Gordon. And it has a fine performance from Robert Downey Jr in the Michael Gambon role. But no one attempting this remake seems to have noticed that the original was profoundly English, and that the innovative use of popular songs came from a man, Potter, who wept to hear such old favourites, who knew them by heart, who had been formed by the music.

This has happened once before: Potter did Pennies from Heaven for TV, with Bob Hoskins and an entirely English between-the-wars feeling to it. A lot of people in Hollywood loved the work, and wanted to do it themselves. So there was a remake, with Steve Martin, that was clever, pretty and cold. And not just because the makers weren't English. But because they didn't understand the place of music in an age before rock'n'roll.

Now I daresay this sounds old-fashioned or reactionary. Whereas, what I'm attempting is a diagnosis of one reason why so many films today feel dead. (If you want death in candied aspic, try the new musical Chicago, which has not one glimmer of life, warmth or show business in it, but which seems to exist inside a light bulb). Moulin Rouge was a truly radical departure, in that its frenzy of cinematic life always knew that you can't do music without belief. It wasn't just a revival of the musical – Moulin Rouge was a picture where music spoke to the heart.

Think it over. And get ready for this: I believe the same sort of malaise has also overtaken cinematography itself.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk