Grail music

One of the theses of Mark Cousins's excellent book The Story of Film is about how filmmakers influence each other. This may seem obvious, but Cousins reveals that this can happen in a very direct way; so, for example, the crane shot which climbs up an office block and entres a window and pans across several desks to get to a particular one in King Vidor's The Crowd (1928) is repeated in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Orson Welles's The Trial (1962).

It occurs to me that this takes place in all aspects of the business, from the direction and cinematography to the script writing process and scoring of a movie. This struck me today while watching The Knights of the Round Table (1953). The film starring Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner is almost completely without merit. But the music by Miklós Rózsa has, to my ears, similarities of tone and mood in the more melancholy moments of John Williams's score for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). I suspect that Steven Spielberg suggested Williams think of the sword and sandal epics of the 1950s and 60s when composing it and it is possible that he had this context in mind. Of course both films make use of the Holy Grail legend which could be why my brain has made the link. We know that Williams sometimes plays Rózsa's theme from Ben Hur (1959) at his concerts and I would love to know just how much of an influence the Hungarian has been.