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All right. In reality my preference shifts all the time. The 80s are a great decade, with post-Star Wars return of Golden Age romanticism, but mixing in new sounds (thanks, Jerry, even though sometimes they didn't work out too great!) and just in general a lot of flourishing variety and quality.
However, at the same time there was the rise of crappy synth horror scores and the like (Christopher Young aside).
So I voted for the 40s. In the 30s film music was not fully developed yet. There were some great highlights but they couldn't match the explosion of quality, diversity, and maturity of the 40s scores. The 40s started with Korngold's best score of his career, The Sea Hawk, and continued with generally superior efforts from him until just after the war when he retired from film music. Alfred Newman's style matured over the course of the decade and he moved away from the occasionally Steinerish sound he had in the 30s to a more thoughtful, complex, and restrained style. (Compare Captain from Castile with The Black Swan.) Because of this he became my favorite Golden Age composer, kinda landing in the perfect middle ground between Steiner and Friedhofer.
Speaking of Friedhofer, in this decade his *composing* career flnally flourished and he wrote some of his best scores including his Oscar-winning Best Years of Our Lives. Perhaps the greatest victory for film music this decade was Alfred Newman taking over the Fox music department, which allowed him to improve not only his own scores but to create a haven for freshness and creativity with the clout to hire more daring composers like Friedhofer, Raksin, and Herrmann. Ah yes, Herrmann, who started his career with a bang working with Orson Welles and then went on to work for Newman producing such masterpieces as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Away from Fox, Miklos Rozsa continued to mature his style and he opened up the decade with a highlight: The Thief of Bagdad, followed a couple years later by The Jungle Book. He then wrote some excellent gritty noirs, some psychological scores, and finished the decade by inaugurating his strongest period, for historical films.
At Universal film scores were getting better too, despite lower budgets and a factory mentality, thanks to talented composers like Herman Stein, Hans J. Salter, and Frank Skinner. And at RKO Roy Webb led the charge for quality, not only with his classic noir scores which he's remembered for today, but also for a personal favorite of mine that decade: Sinbad the Sailor, the best Sinbad score to ever be composed (IMO, though Rozsa gave him a run for his money decades later), perfectly capturing the seafaring adventure and romanticism of Sinbad without any distracting skeleton battles and goofy fantasy elements.
While the 50s would witness the further maturity of Friedhofer, Newman, Rozsa, and others (including Herrmann who drastically increased his film score output and started his collaboration with Hitchcock), I'm giving the edge to the 40s because I think it is when film music first truly found itself and matured as an art form. The 30s was full of figuring out what to do (thank you, Max Steiner) and refining approach. The 40s was *doing* it, and doing it better and better.
Yavar
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