It would take a secret agent with an obsessive interest in film music to settle the authorship question dogging one of the most indelible themes in cinema.

Meantime, let us pay tribute to Barry -- John Barry. The five-time Oscar-winning composer and musician, 77, died Sunday of a heart attack. For decades, the authorship of the 103-second masterpiece that will forever remain Barry's signature achievement, the "James Bond Theme" introduced in the first Bond film, "Dr. No" (1962), has been a matter of dispute.

The credited composer was Monty Norman, who, by most accounts, wrote the theme that launched a thousand parodies. The theme apparently was, in part, self-plagiarized from a song in the forgotten stage musical "Bad Sign, Good Sign," co-written by Norman.

Barry, who scored 10 more Bond films in addition to "The Lion in Winter," "Out of Africa" and others, was initially hired by the Bond producers to replace Norman as the "Dr. No" composer, and to punch up Norman's "James Bond Theme." That he did. Barry arranged it in the style of his pre-Bond records, giving it an overlay of headlong, irresistible danger. Burt Rhodes is the credited orchestrator, although the way the brass wails through-out the theme, it sounds like Barry's handiwork.

The "Dr. No" musical authorship conundrum is especially confusing: Barry, uncredited, ended up composing nearly all of the film's score, but the film's original soundtrack album included mostly Norman's music. The theme, as written, arranged and orchestrated, probably was the work of three men.

As finessed by Barry, it is the essence of imperialist, Cold War-era swagger -- the opening, snaky guitar line contrasting perfectly with the more traditional orchestral flourishes a few bars later.

Barry won five Oscars, for the film scores of "Born Free" (1966), "The Lion in Winter" (1968), "Out of Africa" (1985) and "Dances With Wolves" (1990), as well as the peerlessly drippy title tune (lyrics by Don Black) for "Born Free." Much of his scoring can be characterized as reliably, sentimentally solid. Much of it carries a lugubrious streak.

But Barry's contribution to the Bond pictures was something else. Is it reductive or absurd to claim that for all of Barry's assignments and Oscars, across epics and intimate pictures alike, his peak achievement came in the arrangement of Norman's "James Bond Theme" (which Barry sometimes claimed, in ambiguous language, as his own)?

I think not. Questions of authorship sometimes have a way of turning into drilling expeditions that come up dry. But we will forever associate Barry's arrangement with 007. By doing what he did to the "James Bond Theme," whoever wrote it or rewrote it, Barry did eternal honor to the crucial middle step between composition and orchestration.

Throw in Sean Connery and a license to kill, and you have the sound, the aura, of movie history being made.