Old fashioned romcom When Harry Met Sally helped launch Harry Connick Jr’s career and ushered in a brief fashion for big band jazz in the late 1980s and early 90s, says Selwyn Harris.

“Even though this was a modern-day love story, I wanted to give it a timeless feeling, so I was going to use standards like ‘It Had To Be You’ and ‘Our Love is Here to Stay’."

So said film director Rob Reiner, talking about his smash 1989 proto-romcom When Harry Met Sally. Using pre-recorded pop songs in place of a written score can be traced back to The Graduate (1967). By this time, Hollywood had already realised the potential of the score as a money-spinning by-product of a film and vice versa. For the beginnings of this development we can go back as far as 1955 and composer Elmer Bernstein’s hit big band title theme from The Man With the Golden Arm (Jazzwise 61).

When he was alive Bernstein continued to express emotions somewhere between guilt and disdain for the trend that he had somehow kickstarted. Mainly because the increase in the use of songs in film has reduced the role of the film composer in the industry, in song-based scores often to simply arranging cues of ‘incidental music’. Yet, using pop songs of a specific period can also have the effect of dating a film very quickly. As Reiner surmised, the universal classics of the Great American Songbook have no immediate connection to a zeitgeist and therefore don’t automatically locate When Harry Met Sally in a specific time period. Not that it was an entirely novel idea to use jazz standards as a backdrop to a romantic comedy; Woody Allen had been blowing the dust off his scratchy old swing era discs to spin on his film scores since the 1970s.

To read the rest of this article subscribe here