Most film score fans know the incomparable John Williams best for his iconic main themes – Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Superman, Jurassic Park, E.T., Jaws. Heck, even within both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones worlds, there are multiple themes everyone knows just as well as the main themes: “Princess Leia’s Theme,” “The Imperial March,” “Marion’s Theme.”

These are the pieces Williams invariably plays at his concerts, and they have crowds of hundreds, even thousands, standing and cheering, so familiar are they with every note. There is no sight quite like the tradition of the Hollywood Bowl, filled with almost 20,000 people, all conducting “The Imperial March” in the air with their glow-in-the-dark lightsabers along with Williams. His scores transcend the films as cultural icons.

And yet there is a rich world to Williams’s music beneath the obvious surface. He has gifted us with, according to IMDb, 148 scores for film and television projects. He has composed scores in seven different decades (so far).

As we pass through a year without a new Williams score, indeed without pretty much any new major film scores, it seems appropriate to look back on all the less well-known scores from Williams’s catalog and pick out a few cues that are every bit as beautifully crafted as his “greatest hits” but are perhaps a bit less frequently played.

Here then, intentionally avoiding his most famous compositions and films (with a few exceptions), are some of the greatest tracks John Williams has ever written, some of which you may possibly never have heard:

1966 – How to Steal a Million – “Main Title”

John Williams didn’t arrive fully formed in the 1970s as the master of symphonic, thematic, orchestral scoring. He worked hard through the late 50s as a session musician on other people’s scores, including those of his friend Henry Mancini, usually playing piano.

As the 60s began, Williams started getting regular work composing, but while his TV work was varied, with the many sci-fi projects he did for producer Irwin Allen, his feature films were usually light romcoms where the producers probably wanted Mancini but couldn’t get him. All these Williams scores are delightful, but one of the best is his playfully zippy, perky, bouncy work for this frothy Audrey Hepburn/Peter O’Toole heist romcom.

1970 – Jane Eyre – “Jane Eyre Theme”

Two of Williams’s breakout scores were for TV movies: Heidi in 1968 and then his ravishing, swirling, swooning score for an adaptation of Jane Eyre in 1970. It remains among Williams’s greatest scores and one he still loves; he premiered a concert arrangement at the Hollywood Bowl in 2019.

1974 – The Towering Inferno – “Main Title”

Williams’s lengthy working relationship with producer Irwin Allen culminated with this staggering orchestral score for one of the biggest, most spectacular movies ever made up to that point. The score is filled with memorable themes, gorgeous romantic underscore, and gripping action composition, but nothing matches this thrilling overture for the film that plays out, uninterrupted, over the five-minute opening titles.

It’s one of Williams’s most majestic, soaring compositions, a tribute to the scale of the skyscraper we’re introduced to in the final shot of the sequence, to the strength of those who built it, and to those who risk their lives to fight the fire in it. This may just be my favorite Williams composition ever, inside my favorite Williams score.

(Check out our review of the entire soundtrack release here.)

1975 – The Eiger Sanction – “Training with George”

Williams loves to use classical forms within modern contexts. For this sexy James Bond-y Clint Eastwood thriller, Williams wrote something similar to the fugues he would use that year in Jaws and two years later in Black Sunday for training/preparation sequences. His mastery of so many musical forms allows him to apply them in unexpected places, elevating the sequences he scores immeasurably.

1975 – Thomas and the King – “What Choice Have I?”

Williams’s only stage musical is this failed UK production about Thomas Becket. This number gorgeously shows Williams’s ability to write tentative yet epic music that expresses emotions vastly different from the triumph we’re used to in his famous themes.

1976 – Family Plot – “The Mystery Woman”

Bernard Herrmann had defined the musical world of Alfred Hitchcock, but by the time the Master of Suspense made his final film, the two had fallen out, so Hitchcock went to the rising star on the Universal lot who delivered a score that’s by turns tense and goofy, with breathtaking orchestral shadings.

1977 – Black Sunday – “The Blimp and the Bomb”

For one of the greatest films nobody has ever seen, Williams wrote one of his greatest scores that nobody has ever heard. The film is an enthralling thriller about a female Palestinian terrorist teaming with a deranged Vietnam veteran who pilots the Goodyear blimp to attack the Super Bowl, while a Mossad agent tries to stop them.

It was, until recently, the only non-Hannibal Lecter novel Thomas Harris had ever written, and the film itself is worth hunting down as both one of the greatest thrillers ever filmed, with a final 30 minutes all shot at a REAL Super Bowl with a REAL Goodyear blimp. It’s also one of the most insightful films ever made about international terrorism.

Williams’s score is one of his unquestionable masterpieces, and I have to think he agrees. When the Kennedy Center did a series of films with his scores to coincide with his concert there a number of years ago, this was one of the handful of films screened, and my understanding was that Williams was involved in the selections.

The score enters the film gently. The first half has limited scoring, but as the tension grows and the terrorists’ plan takes shape, Williams’s music becomes more and more dominant until the final portion, when there is an almost uninterrupted stretch of nearly half an hour that Williams scores with some of his best writing ever, created only weeks before he would score Star Wars.

He finds a way to musically give life to the ponderous blimp yet invest it with menace and dread, and also to simultaneously score the frantic actions of the terrorists and their pursuer. Breathtaking.

1978 – Superman – “Leaving Home”

Alright, so this is cheating a bit, since it’s from one of Williams’s most famous scores, but this is decidedly not one of the many central leitmotif themes. Instead, it’s a sweeping, breathtaking, heart-pounding ode to America that manages to be Norman Rockwell without irony and foretells the sound Williams would bring to many of Steven Spielberg’s later films. The second half of this cue has to be one of the greatest things Williams has ever written.

1981 – Heartbeeps – “Crimebuster”

For this infamous flop film, Williams wrote one of his most tragically overlooked scores. There is genuinely moving orchestral work for the central pair of robots in love that brings astounding depth to the piece, but this jaunty, charmingly relentless theme for the “Crimebuster” robot has to be one of Williams’s most unexpected and delightful creations. It foretells his work on Home Alone, 10 years later, and remains an earworm no matter how many times you hear it.

1984 – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – “The Slave Children’s Crusade”

The mid 80s were an era when Williams would casually toss in minor melodies that would be career-best work for any other composer, like this rousing, darkly martial theme in the second Indy film.

1984 – “Olympic Fanfare and Theme”

Yes, the iconic Olympics theme we hear on NBC every four years is a Williams composition. He has also composed specific themes for the games in 1988, 1996, and 2002.

1984 – The River – “The Ancestral Home”

For this drama starring Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek about farmers struggling to keep their land, Williams wrote this soaring, breathtaking piece, again in full-on Americana mode. Has any film composer ever managed better than Williams to capture the greatness that America aspires to, no matter how unattainable it may always seem?

1985 – NBC News – “The Mission”

One of Williams’s most iconic themes is one that many are not even aware he wrote. This composition has probably been heard by more people, more times, than any of his film works. It was a standard encore piece at his concerts for many years, and it remains the template for news themes, with its sense of urgency and hope. It also contains the DNA of many of the more famous Spielberg scores Williams did around the same time.

1986 – SpaceCamp – “In Orbit”

This children’s adventure film had the atrocious bad luck to come out just after the Challenger disaster, which traumatized a nation. The film is largely forgotten, as is Williams’s work, but it’s a shame, as it has some of his most gorgeous, lyrical work of the 1980s.

1987 – The Witches of Eastwick – “The Dance of the Witches”

For this fantasy comedy from Mad Max director George Miller, Williams created a dark, swirling, playful score that gives hints of Hook, Harry Potter, and other scores to come. For anyone who thinks Williams can only do big and earnest, just listen to how dark and delightfully weird this is.

1987 – Empire of the Sun – “Toy Planes, Hearth and Home”

For the greatest Steven Spielberg film almost nobody has ever seen, Williams wrote one of his most breathtaking scores, suffused with the innocent, pure emotions of childhood in the most desperate of times, all refracted through the prism of a young boy’s merciful inability to process the horrors around him, imbuing them instead with magic and mystery. This is Williams at his absolute best, a work of pure genius.

1990 – Home Alone – “Mom Returns and Finale”

Home Alone is a brilliant score, rich with melody, but the “Somewhere in My Memory” tune, developed into a song in other portions of the film, is given full orchestral statement at the end of the film, when young Kevin’s mother finally returns and they are reunited. The soaring portion of this cue from about 3:00 on is some of the most joyous, lovely, heartfelt music Williams has ever written.

1991 – Hook – “You Are the Pan”

This cue from late in the film, as Robin Williams finally steps forward to claim his rightful place as leader of the Lost Boys, cannot fail to bring a chill to the spine. The score is among Williams’s greatest achievements.

1991 – JFK – “Prologue”

For Oliver Stone’s defining epic, Williams created a score of many colors, from paranoid to nostalgic, but this patriotic statement of the main theme gives the opening montage a sense of the hope that Kennedy (who never appears as a character in the film) brought to America. As a result, his horrifying absence from the country is profoundly felt throughout the three-hour film.

1993 – Schindler’s List – “Theme from Schindler’s List”

This was the riskiest film of Steven Spielberg’s career. Few thought he could pull it off. Even after he filmed the unfilmable, he still needed music for it that would express the inexpressible yet not sound trite or maudlin. After Spielberg screened the completed edit, Williams famously said, “You need a better composer than I am for this film.” To which Spielberg famously replied, “I know, but they’re all dead.”

Williams plumbed the depths of his soul to come up with this transcendent work, which pays noble tribute to the lives lost and those saved. His score is informed, he said in interviews, by the time he spent in Israel researching traditional Jewish folk music for his Oscar-winning score for Fiddler on the Roof. It is both profoundly specific to its roots yet deeply, all-encompassingly human and universal. It will stand forever as his and Spielberg’s untouchable, untoppable masterpiece.

1995 – Sabrina – “Growing up in Paris”

1995 – Sabrina – “Linus’s New Life”

Williams did not write a score for two years after Schindler’s List, just as Spielberg did not direct a film for four years. When Williams returned, it was with this utterly charming, beautiful score for the wildly underrated Sydney Pollack remake of the Audrey Hepburn classic. It’s another of Williams’s largely unknown gems.

His score brings the emotions to the fore, nowhere better than in these two cues. First is the montage sequence as Sabrina slowly mends her broken heart while in Paris. Next comes the finale cue, as Harrison Ford’s character, having stupidly dumped Sabrina, races to catch on her way back to Paris.

1995 – Nixon – “The 1960s: The Turbulent Years”

For his final collaboration with Oliver Stone, Williams delivered this breathtaking cue that hints at many of the scores he would write over the decade to come, including Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report. The theme that begins at 1:45 is one of the most thrilling Williams has ever written. It was used in the film’s stunning trailer and is a clear musical cousin to the most iconic cue he would write in Star Wars: Episode I four years later – “The Duel of the Fates.”

1997 – Amistad – “Dry Your Tears, Afrika”

For Steven Spielberg’s little-seen epic about a slave revolt and the ensuing trial, which made its way to the Supreme Court, Williams wrote this breathtaking choral piece, which he has performed in concert at the Hollywood Bowl. It moves from a mournful opening to a triumphant, beautiful piece that combines orchestral Americana with gorgeous West African elements to express something profound and hopeful about the idea of America.

1998 – Saving Private Ryan – “Hymn to the Fallen”

The actual score to the film is brief and subdued, but this wordless choral piece written for the film’s end credits is awe-inspiring. It’s a deeply felt tribute to Americans who have given their lives for the promise of their country and all those who have served it. It’s one of Williams’s most stirring, unironically patriotic compositions.

2001 – A.I. Artificial Intelligence – “The Reunion”

For the finale of Steven Spielberg’s maligned, misunderstood masterpiece, Williams wrote what may be his most gut-wrenchingly emotional cue ever. It’s a nearly 8-minute piece that plays over a sequence as the film’s hero, a young robot named David, gets to have his one and only dream – a single day with the mother who abandoned him early in the film.

It speaks to all those who have lost loved ones and wish for just another minute with them. Parental bonds are a key theme in Spielberg’s films, and never has that been expressed more powerfully than in this near-wordless sequence, carried only by the majesty of Williams’s music.

As Williams recorded the score, Williams described in interviews that it was proving difficult for him to conduct and for the orchestra to perform the extremely lengthy cue in time to the film. When film scores are recorded, the film is running on the stage, and the conductor and orchestra must hit dozens, perhaps even hundreds of tiny marks in their music precisely, to match the film’s action.

After a few attempts at recording the cue, as they both tell the story, Spielberg could see that the picture was holding Williams back, so Spielberg had the projectionist turn off the film and told Williams to conduct and record the cue as he saw fit, and then Spielberg would recut the film to fit the music, which is absolutely unheard of.

The two men had done this just once before, with the finale of E.T. The results speak for themselves. It is one of the great sequences in the filmography of one of the greatest living directors, and it’s one of Williams’s most masterful compositions, expressing the heartbreaking, joyful brevity of life and love.

2002 – Minority Report – “‘Sean’ by Agatha”

This brilliant film is remembered mostly for being one of the towering, iconic science fiction films of the last generation. However, at its core beats a wounded heart. It’s the story of a man who lost his son and cannot let himself live with that knowledge.

This cue comes from one of the most powerful scenes in the film. In the midst of an action epic, with spectacular CGI effects and jaw-dropping stunts, this scene simply allows the brilliant Samantha Morton to deliver a monologue, in a static closeup, describing the life Cruise’s son might have led had he lived, while a weeping and transformed Cruise looks on and simply listens. It provides an unexpectedly raw, human, emotional soul that allows this film to transcend merely being a genre film.

2002 – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – “Fawkes the Phoenix”

Though Williams’s main theme from the first film may be the one everyone remembers, for my money, it’s this largely unknown ravishing, playful, majestic theme from the second film that is the greatest musical moment in the three Potter films he scored.

2002 – Catch Me If You Can – “The Float”

For this Spielberg masterpiece that alternates between feather lightness and deeply felt wounded emotion, Williams composed a score that had hints of his early roots in the jazzy 60s, while also bringing the sweeping, playful orchestral sound he had perfected, This cue, for the sequence when Leonardo Di Caprio’s character perfects his scams, is one of the film’s highlights.

2004 – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – “A Window to the Past”

For the one Harry Potter helmed by a true auteur, Alfonso Cuarón, Williams added this melancholy, nostalgic theme, played primarily on flute.

2004 – The Terminal – “The Tale of Victor Navorski”

For this unjustly maligned Spielberg comedy that blends influences from Capra and Tati, Williams contributed this playful Eastern European theme for Hanks’s comic everyman.

2005 – Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith – “Anakin’s Dark Deeds”

The musical highpoint of the Star Wars prequel trilogy is arguably this furiously orchestral, pitch-black cue that plays as Anakin turns to the dark side and slaughters the Jedi. The first half is one of the most epically horrific cues Williams has ever written, with a massive choir and the addition of the original drums on this 2018 remastered version, which were left off the original soundtrack CD in 2005. The second half of the cue builds slowly from a place of despair and hopelessness to a pinnacle of epic agony that never fails to give me chills.

2005 – Munich – “Munich, 1972”

Williams and Spielberg had a run of unparalleled masterpieces from 1998-2005, culminating in this brilliant look at terrorism and its causes, which originally had the much more fitting and poetic title “Vengeance.”

The first half of this cue is the opening credits, an anguished cry against the violence in the world. The second half is reminiscent of his score for Black Sunday, 30 years before. The propulsive, relentless, ominous theme that Williams first uses for the terrorists as they attack the Olympic village later also plays as the Mossad assassins hunt down the terrorists, in turn causing further terrorist attacks, requiring further assassinations. It’s Spielberg’s most unapologetically confrontational film.

2006 – NBC Sunday Night Football – “Wide Receiver”

Williams’s themes are so woven into the tapestry of our lives that we often don’t notice them. That’s surely the case with this iconic melody, which probably almost nobody realizes is his. It was composed around the same time as he did Star Wars: Episode III, and once you listen to it knowing that, you can definitely hear their similar DNA.

2012 – Lincoln – “With Malice Toward None”

For this most subdued and restrained of Spielberg’s masterpieces, Williams crafted a subtle but gorgeous score that elegantly supported the exquisite script and one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema from Daniel Day-Lewis.

2017 – Star Wars: The Last Jedi – “Supremacy”

The first half of this cue, in fairness, is gorgeous but standard Star Wars action scoring from Williams. It’s the second half that elevates this cue to unforgettable status.

As Princess Leia is shockingly blasted out of her ship into space, everyone in the audience assumes this will be how the film will deal with the tragic death of actress Carrie Fisher. Then, in one of the most controversial moments in all of Star Wars, she comes back to life and uses The Force to pull herself back into the ship. Think what you may of the moment on a storytelling level, I happen to love it, but forget the movie and listen to the music.

Everyone sitting in auditoriums around the world knew that Carrie Fisher was gone, but Williams allows us to have her back with us, momentarily, as he first hints at Princess Leia’s theme in the deep black void of space and then brings it back in a soaring orchestral statement that allows Leia and Fisher, for the briefest of instants, to be young and vibrant and alive again.

Anyone who grew up with Carrie Fisher’s  portrayal of Princes Leia, and Williams’s theme for her, can be forgiven for fighting back tears as the impossible happens for just a moment, and Williams’s music gives us one more moment with a beloved communal friend.

2017 – The Post – “The Presses Roll”

For their most recent collaboration, Spielberg and Williams brought us this urgent tale of a free press struggling against a tyrant to keep the public informed. This cue plays as Katherine Graham bravely decides to publish The Pentagon Papers in The Washington Post, and Williams conveys the urgency and tension of the moment, as well as the relentless nature of the printing presses once they start to roll.