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The Living Daylights by John Barry.
The Empire Strikes Back - John Williams.
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The Living Daylights by John Barry.
The Empire Strikes Back - John Williams.
The Living Daylights is John Barry's best film? And his best score?
The Empire Strikes Back is....?
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Bernard Herrmann - Vertigo
That said, you could also make an argument for North by Northwest and Psycho.
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Jerry Goldsmith: CHINATOWN
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Bernstein -- To Kill a Mockingbird
Friedhofer -- Best Years of Our Lives
Barry -- The Lion in Winter
Jones -- In Cold Blood
Goldsmith -- Chinatown
Schifrin -- Bullitt
Rota -- La Dolce Vita
Moross -- The Big Country
Herrmann -- Citizen Kane
Morricone -- Cinema Paradiso
Williams -- The Reivers
One could make an argument that the above scores are the best by that composer, and that those films were the best films scored by that composer. Of course, many alternative films/scores could work, as well.
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For Alexandre Desplat: GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
For Jerry Fielding: THE WILD BUNCH
For James Horner: STAR TREK II - THE WRATH OF KHAN
For Jerome Moross: THE BIG COUNTRY
For Ennio Morricone: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
For Max Steiner: THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
Three of the films above happen to be among my personal favorite movies as well as scores; but my favorite scores by my other favorite composers don't happen to have been created for the greatest films they worked on -- and vice versa.
My favorite of Barry's is THE LAST VALLEY ... a still-underrated picture that has a number of wonderful qualities, but hardly the single best film that he ever scored.
While NORTH BY NORTHWEST is my favorite Herrmann, it's not necessarily Hitchcock's best or the composer's.
Goldsmith, my most favorite composer, already has been cited multiple times in this thread for CHINATOWN, yet I've never been a fan of either film or score. And while my three favorites of his scores are THE SAND PEBBLES, ISLANDS IN THE STREAM, and UNDER FIRE, all are very good films ... yet I would never claim they were the three best movies to which he was attached. Not even though the first two are both among my top-10 favorite pictures, and the last is my single favorite Goldsmith.
I won't waste time trying to decide which I'd say was Alfred Newman's best score in order to tackle the question.
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Here's a sub-set from the list of my favorite films that also have their composers' finest works:
Onibaba/Hikaru Hayashi
Woman in the Dunes/Tôru Takemitsu
Lady in a Cage/Paul Glass
Les Biches/Pierre Jansen
L'eclisse/Giovanni Fusco
Tam Lin/Stanley Myers
Pressure Point/Ernest Gold
Nóz w wodzie/Komeda
Night of the Eagle/William Alwyn
The Fox/Lalo Schifrin
Doctor Faustus/Mario Nascimbene
Figures in a Landscape/Richard Rodney Bennett
The Haunting/Humphrey Searle
Eva/Michel Legrand
8½/Nino Rota
I tre volti della paura/Roberto Nicolosi
Don Juan 73/Michel Magne
House on Telegraph Hill/Sol Kaplan
Psyche 59/Kenneth V. Jones
The Prisoner/Benjamin Frankel
The Manchurian Candidate/David Amram
Images/John Williams
Séance on a Wet Afternoon/John Barry
Herz aus Glas/Popol Vuh
Lycanthropus/Armando Trovajoli
The Night My Number Came Up/Malcolm Arnold
Faces in the Dark/Mikis Theodorakis
The Bedford Incident/Gerard Schurmann
The Old Man and the Sea/Dimitri Tiomkin
Town on Trial/Tristram Cary
La última cena/Leo Brouwer
La sirène du Mississipi/Antoine Duhamel
Point Blank/Johnny Mandel
The Snorkel/Francis Chagrin
Mr. Klein/Egisto Macchi
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). 
