What’s your hurry?

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ve got the need for speed.

We’ll hear music from the second of the “Mad Max” movies, “The Road Warrior” (1981), which cleverly changed the course of the series by turning it into a kind of post-apocalyptic Western. Australian composer Brian May wrote the music, as he did for the original. The director, George Miller, specified that he was looking for a gothic, Bernard Herrmann-type mood to underscore his dystopian vision of the Australian Outback.

Maurice Jarre took over to write the music for the third installment, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” However, it’s purely by coincidence that we’ll hear selections from another Jarre score built for speed, “Grand Prix” (1966). The film’s international cast featured James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, and Toshiro Mifune, but the plot’s assorted relationship and business conflicts take a back seat to driver’s-eye views of lapping the track.

When we remember Steve McQueen, chances are, if he’s not jumping barbed wire on a motorcycle, he’s behind the wheel of his Ford Mustang GT 390 Fastback, tearing up and down the streets of San Francisco in “Bullitt” (1968). The high-octane action sequence became the yardstick against which all big screen car chases were measured (at least until “The French Connection”). Lalo Schifrin provided the jazzy score.

Finally, Marty McFly and Doc Brown’s time-travelling DeLoreon needs to hit 88 miles per hour in order to get “Back to the Future” (1985). Director Robert Zemeckis had already worked with composer Alan Silvestri on “Romancing the Stone,” but the producer of “Back to the Future,” Steven Spielberg, didn’t care for the music in that film. Zemeckis’ advice to his colleague: go grand and epic, since Spielberg had a marked preference for the music of John Williams. It was a very good choice.

I hope you’ll join me for an hour of chases and races, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Just be sure you’re not driving when you do!