The 1980s File Feature
Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)
Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do): Christopher Cross and the Song That Won EverythingA Velvet Voice in a City of SteelPicture midtown Manhattan on a gray…
01 The Story
Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do): Christopher Cross and the Song That Won Everything
A Velvet Voice in a City of Steel
Picture midtown Manhattan on a gray autumn morning in 1981. Taxis honk, steam rises from the grates, and somewhere in a penthouse suite a lovable millionaire drunk named Arthur Bach is discovering, against all odds, that love matters more than money. That is the world Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do) was born to inhabit, and Christopher Cross inhabited it like he had been living there his whole life.
Cross arrived at the project already carrying the rarest kind of momentum in pop music. His 1980 debut had swept the Grammy Awards, taking home four trophies including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for Sailing. He was the artist of the moment, polished and warm, built for exactly the kind of sumptuous ballad that a glossy Hollywood romantic comedy demanded.
The Making of a Movie Standard
The title theme for the 1981 film Arthur was co-written by Christopher Cross, Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager, and Peter Allen, a collaborative pedigree that reads like a songwriting hall of fame. Bacharach brought his unmatched sense of orchestral architecture; Sager, his wife and creative partner at the time, shaped the lyrical warmth; Peter Allen added a theatrical buoyancy; and Cross supplied the voice and the radio-ready melodic sensibility that would carry it all to shore.
The result was something almost impossibly well-crafted. The arrangement glows, all polished strings and cushioned piano, with Cross's tenor riding the melody with relaxed authority. It felt expensive without feeling cold, cinematic without feeling remote. It was the kind of song that studios had been paying for since the golden age of Hollywood, and it landed perfectly.
A Number One and an Oscar
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 15, 1981, entering at number 71 and climbing with the steady confidence of a track that everyone involved knew was special. By October 17, 1981, it had reached number one, the peak of a 24-week chart run that kept it circulating on radio well into early 1982.
The industry honored it at the highest level. At the 1982 Academy Awards, Arthur's Theme won the Oscar for Best Original Song, a validation that elevated it from hit single to genuine cultural artifact. It was also nominated for a Golden Globe, and the attendant ceremony coverage kept the song in the national conversation for months. For Cross, who had burst onto the scene so recently, the Oscar cemented a legitimacy that would outlast any chart position.
The Wider Landscape of 1981
Radio in 1981 was a negotiated territory. Hard rock, post-disco pop, early synth sounds, and soft adult contemporary all competed for the same ear. Cross occupied a lane that the decade would eventually label soft rock or AOR, a glossy, emotionally legible style that radio programmers loved because it offended no one and comforted nearly everyone. The song shared the airwaves with Olivia Newton-John, Hall and Oates, and Kim Carnes, a class of polished craftspeople who understood that a great melody, properly recorded, was its own argument.
The accompanying film, starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli, was a substantial commercial and critical hit, which kept the song in continuous circulation. A hit film and a hit single in the same season created a feedback loop that extended the song's life far beyond what a standalone single could have managed.
A Legacy Longer Than the Charts
More than four decades later, Arthur's Theme has accumulated 24 million YouTube views, a figure that speaks to the affection of listeners who return not out of nostalgia alone but because the song genuinely rewards repeated listening. It appears in countless retrospective playlists of early-80s pop, in film score compilations, and in adult contemporary radio surveys as a touchstone of the era's best work.
For Christopher Cross, the song represents a pinnacle that few artists reach: a recording that is simultaneously a chart-topper, an Academy Award winner, and a piece of genuine popular songwriting craft. Turn it up, let those strings wash over you, and remember what 1981 sounded like when it was trying to be beautiful.
"Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" — Christopher Cross's singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do) Is Really About
A Fairy Tale Framed as Romance
On its surface, Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do) is a love song, but it works on a second register that gives it genuine depth. The lyric builds its argument around a simple but resonant idea: when you are caught between the life you were handed and the life you actually want, the best anyone can do is choose the person who makes the choosing worthwhile. That is not quite a love song and not quite a philosophy, but somewhere between the two.
The song was written to accompany a film about a man who has everything money can buy and finds it insufficient. Arthur Bach, Dudley Moore's lovably dissolute millionaire, is forced to choose between a socially approved engagement and a genuine love he cannot explain or justify. The theme crystallizes that dilemma without spelling it out, which is why it works both inside and outside the movie theater.
The Imagery of the City
The lyric anchors itself in New York City imagery, using the urban landscape as a metaphor for the vertigo of adult life. The city in the song functions the way cities often do in popular music of the period: as both a playground and a pressure cooker, a place of possibility that also demands constant navigation. The moon over Manhattan becomes a kind of romantic permission slip, a signal that even in the hardest-edged environment, feeling something real is allowed.
This was resonant territory in 1981, when New York had just begun its long climb back from the fiscal and social crises of the late 1970s. The city was simultaneously gritty and glamorous, and a song that romanticized it without sanitizing it entirely caught a genuine cultural mood.
The Philosophy of Enough
The core emotional argument of the song is a gentle but firm endorsement of sufficiency over perfection. The repeated idea that doing the best you can is itself a kind of grace landed with particular force for listeners navigating a decade that was just beginning to fetishize ambition and acquisition. Against the rising tide of 1980s aspiration culture, the song offered a quieter counter-melody: that love, chosen freely, is the real prize.
Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, two of the song's four credited co-writers, had spent careers articulating exactly this kind of emotional intelligence in pop form. Their fingerprints are visible in the way the song refuses cheap sentimentality while still delivering warmth.
Why It Resonated Then and Resonates Still
The song occupied a particular emotional frequency that the early 1980s were hungry for. After the cynicism and upheaval of the 1970s, there was a genuine appetite for something that felt sincere without being naive. The song reached number one on October 17, 1981, and in doing so validated that appetite at the highest commercial level. Arthur's Theme managed that balance by grounding its romanticism in specific, believable circumstances rather than abstract declarations.
Christopher Cross's voice carries the lyric with the right calibration of longing and ease. There is no anguish in his delivery, no melodrama. The song trusts the listener to feel its weight, and that trust is part of what has kept it alive. Forty-plus years after its 1981 Oscar win, it still plays as something more than a period piece. It plays as a genuine argument about what a life well-lived might look like.
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