Today is the 200th birthday of The Star Spangled Banner. One film that uses our National Anthem is Alfred Hitchcock's FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT. Musical Director Alfred Newman brings it up for the End Title and End Cast.
Besides Poltergeist I can only think of one other where I not only heard it in the film but it is also featured on the (way too) short soundtrack: A Few Good Men.
I don't know, but that Francis Scott Key fella must've gotten rich on all the royalties.
No one ever remembers John Stafford Smith, the composer of the Banner's tune. Francis Scott Key's poem entitled "Defence of Fort M'Henry" was set to the tune of a popular British song written by John Stafford Smith for the Anacreontic Society, a men's social club in London. "The Anacreontic Song" (or "To Anacreon in Heaven"), with various lyrics, was already popular in the United States.
Not film but TV: there's a famous use of Star Spangled Banner in Fred Steiner's score for the Star Trek episode "The Omega Glory".
Also on television, Ken Burns' original documentary "Baseball" consists of 9 "innings", each of which begins with a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner that is historically appropriate for the period covered in that episode of the series.
Rozsa incorporated the tune in (unsurprisingly) SO PROUDLY WE HAIL and humorously in TIME AFTER TIME. It's not a movie, but one of Giacamo Puccini's most popular operas usually draws a smile from the audience when the tune appears in connection with an American sailor.
In the classic "Animal House" (1978), "Otter" defends the Delta fraternity before a college hearing and the entire fraternity walks out of the hall with the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background:
