Chain Reaction (Jerry Goldsmith, 1996): During the 1990s, Jerry Goldsmith frequently took jobs scoring 2nd tier action films.  These were usually medium-budget major studio releases with reasonably well-known actors, but they weren’t big budget tentpole releases starting top box-office draws.  Goldsmith delivered very competent scores for these films, even often helping to elevate the film’s overall quality, although they didn’t usually count among the composer’s most memorable work.  Chain Reaction, which starred Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman, was one of the more forgettable of these films and scores.

Goldsmith created a nicely melodic main theme, introduced during the opening cue “Meet Eddie”.  The theme is orchestral with a strong emphasis on strings, but also with a substantial synthesizer assist.  The synthesizer component gives the theme a bit more of a pop sensibility, particularly in its overall rhythmic line.  The rest of the score (as presented on the CD) is pretty typical Goldsmith action and suspense music, very competent but not extremely distinctive.  The cue “Ice Chase” is one of the better examples of Goldsmith’s approach to chase music during this period of his career, though.

Most of Goldsmith’s scores during that era were recorded in Los Angeles with union musicians.  At that time, the musicians’ union had a pretty rigid and costly re-use fee regulations that would greatly limit the viability of soundtrack album releases that were unlikely to be big sellers.  Various music labels, especially Varese Sarabande, did still put out albums of these scores, but with short running times.  This one runs just slightly over 30 minutes in length.  While some of the scores from that era have received expanded releases now that the union has adopted more favorable fee structures, Chain Reaction is one that has not been revisited.  It is possible that this is a score that would make a bigger impression with a more complete release.

Chaplin (John Barry, 1992): Chaplin was John Barry’s first major film score after his big, Oscar-winning success with Dances With Wolves.  While this is a smaller-scale score than this one, it does clearly come from the same era of Barry’s career, when his focus had shifted more towards lushly romantic melodies than big action cues.

The score is dominated by piano and strings, although with some occasionally very prominent trumpet sections.  The main theme has a gentle, kind of melancholy quality to it.  While the score is mostly fairly upbeat, the lush style that Barry utilizes often gives it a bit of an edge of sadness.  This actually reflects the film pretty well as it is a biography of a comedic genius with a bit of a dark side. 

Barry also provides some very lively music for the segments depicting Chaplin filming.  The cue “Discovering the Tramp/Wedding Chase” contains great examples of this aspect of the score.  The cue “The Roll Dance” is a particularly fun, old-fashioned turn-of-the-century nickelodeon style cue. This overall more up-beat approach becomes somewhat dominant during the later part of the score, as the film shifted its focus to Chaplin’s professional career.  This puts the score into a more upbeat territory as it progresses.

Central to score is a melodic love theme that suffers a bit from a perhaps slightly too close resemblance to the main theme from Dances With Wolves.  The theme starts off almost the same as the previous film’s theme before veering off with a different conclusion.  This theme is particularly prominent in the cue “Charlie Proposes”.

The soundtrack also includes instrumental, orchestral versions of Charlie Chaplin’s famous song “Smile” incorporated into the score at a few points.  The album also ends with a vocal performance of the song, sung by the film’s star Robert Downey Jr.  It is a kind of odd, modern pop arrangement and it would have been nice if the soundtrack had included a more straightforward performance of it as well.

The Charge of the Light Brigade (John Addison, 1968): This score was included in Film Score Monthly’s “MGM Soundtrack Treasury” boxed set.  The film was a remake of a 1936 Errol Flynn movie (with a score by Max Steiner) about the events surrounding England’s involvement in the 19th century Crimean War against Russia.

The album opens with a title song performed by Manfred Mann, featuring lyrics taken from Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem that served as a basis for the film’s storyline.  The song has a late-60s contemporary, folk song style.  The liner notes mention that it isn’t clear if the music to the song (which wasn’t used in the film) was written by score composer John Addison or by Mann, but the melody is not incorporated into the score.

The “Main Title” is a Victorian-style choral and orchestral work with a fairly royal sound to it.  This style continues to be incorporated into other parts of the score, with occasional repeats of this primary choral theme as well as other musical motifs that often bring to mind royalty. This includes some familiar, period-appropriate choral songs in the cues “War Fever” and “Across the Seas” as well as a very traditional sounding waltz in the cue “Lady Scarlett’s Ball”.  The score is heavy on brass fanfares and other brassy melodies. Strings are dominant in some of the more romantic sections of the score.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Danny Elfman, 2005): Tim Burton’s 2005 remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was largely a more faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, while also bringing Burton’s distinctive style to a story that was pretty well-suited to it.  It was definitely a challenge to remake a film that is a childhood favorite for many and still holds up well, but the result was a different take on the story that stands up quite well to the earlier version.

As usual, Burton enlisted Danny Elfman to write the music for the film and he provided one of his most enjoyable recent scores.  While this version was not a full musical like the earlier one, Elfman still did have the opportunity to write four songs for the Oompa Loompas as well as “Willy Wonka’s Welcome Song” that plays during the character’s first entrance.  The lyrics to the songs are taken directly from the versions of the songs in Dahl’s book, while Elfman provides some distinctively strange pop/rock style melodies for each.  The songs from this film actually resemble Elfman’s work with Oingo Boingo more than almost anything else he has done in his film scores.  The “End Credit Suite” cue is a reprise of the Welcome Song followed by instrumental versions of the Oompa Loompa songs.

The score occasionally uses the melodies of the songs as well as instrumental-only themes.  The score is very distinctly Elfman’s, complete with his trademark use of unusual orchestrations, otherworldly gothic choral elements, and very fast-paced and dynamic piano, string and brass instrumentation.  He also includes some of his more gentle, fairy-tale melodies for the quieter moments.  The exciting “Main Title” cue provides a great overview of the film’s themes and range of styles. While this score is definitely in the style that is most associated with Elfman, there is a reason why that style has become so popular.  This score really is an example of Elfman firing on all cylinders. 

Charlotte’s Web (Danny Elfman, 2006): Just a year after Charley and the Chocolate Factory, Danny Elfman once again took on the score for another film remake based on a classic children’s story.  His score for Charlotte’s Web was considerably less manic than his previous one, maintaining a gentle, fairly-tale style with a bit of a rural flavor to it.

The soundtrack opens with a very lively “Main Title” cue that is very string heavy, giving it a bit of an orchestral country feel.  It is melodic, although it doesn’t quite coalesce into a particularly distinctive theme.  In later cues, Elfman also adds quite a bit of fairly lively piano work as well as some nice woodwind melodies.  Brass is present, but mostly fairly muted.  Choral elements are used fairly sparingly, but are included periodically.

The most distinct thematic material in the score is a lullaby that is introduced with a child’s vocals in the cue entitled “Lullaby/Escape” early in the score.  The melody from this song is then weaved pretty liberally into the rest of the score, essentially serving as the film’s primary theme.  While the lullaby emphasizes the fairy-tale nature of the story, the rural setting is reflected by the pretty extensive use of violins, often with fast-paced, fiddle-style playing.

The soundtrack album ends with a folksy pop song entitled “Ordinary Miracle”, which is performed by Sarah McLaughlan.  The song was written by Glen Ballard Steward and David A. Stewart and is not connected to the score at all.

Checkmate (Johnny Williams, 1960): Originally released on LP at the time that the TV series was on the air, I believe that the TV soundtrack to “Checkmate” is the earliest album released of music composed by John Williams (billed as “Johnny” in those days).  I came across the LP at a record store back in the late 1980s and thought it was an especially cool find.  The album was released on CD by Film Score Monthly in 2006, paired on the disc with Williams’ 1961 jazz album “Rhythm in Motion”.

Performed by a relatively small ensemble primarily featuring horns and piano, this is a very jazz-oriented score that still provides some early examples of Williams’ melodic skills.  The album opens with the series’ main theme, which is a fast paced theme for horns, piano, and percussion.  Williams has often said that Henry Mancini was one of his earliest influences and it is definitely evident here with a theme that is cut from the same cloth as Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” (on which Williams played piano) as well as other similar themes from that era.

The album’s second cue, entitled “The Isolated Pawn”, is a moody, melodic piece that more closely resembles the more symphonic melodic style that would come to dominate the majority of Williams’ scores.  While still played by the smaller ensemble, and thus missing a string component, this piece is still pretty recognizably a John Williams composition.  Through the rest of the album, the music tends to shift back and forth between very jazzy, sometimes swing-styled music and the more moody, melodic elements.

Cherry 2000 (Basil Poledouris, 1987): For a time, the CD release of this soundtrack was one of the rarest titles out there and one of the most expensive to obtain on the secondary market.  It was an early release of the Varese Sarabande CD Club with only 1500 copies available and the rare copies that went up for sale often sold for hundreds of dollars.  In 2004, Prometheus Records released an expanded edition of the score (paired with Poledouris’ No Man’s Land).  While out-of-print as well now, that edition is currently fairly easy to find at reasonably inexpensive prices. Finally, the score is now available as a downloadable release as well.

The film itself is not a particularly well-regarded, kind of exploitative late-80s sci-fi entry, but the score is quite strong.  Poledouris provided an orchestral, fairly lush and melodic score that even could, at times, qualify as romantic in approach.  The score is pretty strongly thematic, with core melodies that sound like they could possibly have come from a western, but with carefully placed additions of electronic instrumentation used to give it a futuristic edge. 

This score hasn’t managed the same level of prominence as other Poledouris scores from that time period (the film was in theaters at the same time as Robocop), almost certainly because the film itself is so widely regarded as being terrible.  This is a case of a bad film inspiring a very strong score, though.  In fact, I think it is one of Poledouris’ best.

Chicago (John Kander & Fred Ebb, 2002): I had heard of the Kander & Ebb musical Chicago before the 2002 film version and was familiar with a couple of the songs (particularly “All That Jazz” and “Razzle Dazzle”), but I had never seen the show or even heard a cast album recording of it.  After hearing good things about the film, my wife and I decided to go see it and we thoroughly enjoyed it and quickly purchased the soundtrack CD afterward.

The film was cast with generally well-known actors, but most were not generally associated with musicals.  The two female leads were Catherine Zeta-Jones and Rene Zellweger while Richard Gere was in the most prominent male role.  All handled the musical performances extremely well and brought a considerable amount of personality to the roles.  Zeta-Jones’ performance (which won her an Oscar) was extremely high energy and tremendously amusing, while Zellweger showed a much darker side than she had generally shown in past performances.

Richard Gere was something of a revelation in his performance.  Not only does he handle the songs better than expected, he also brought a light touch to his overall performance (especially his singing) that was definitely a change from the usually grave and brooding performances for which he was generally known.  He has three major showstopper numbers in the film (“All I Care About”, “We Both Reached for the Gun”, and “Razzle Dazzle”) and all play extremely well both in the film itself and on the soundtrack album.

In the two most important supporting roles, they did cast actors with more of a musical background: John C. Reilly as Zellweger’s suffering husband and Queen Latifah as the prison warden.  Reilly, who had a fair amount of stage experience, has a part that is relatively small, but his one featured solo, “Mr. Cellophane”, is one of the musical’s most famous songs.  Latifah is the one performer in the film that probably saw the biggest career change from her performance.  Known almost exclusively as a hip-hop/rap performer up to that point, the skill with which she belted out the old-fashioned jazz number “When You’re Good to Mama” was quite a surprise.  She has since released at least one album of jazz standards.

Since seeing the movie and hearing the soundtrack, I did purchase the recent Broadway cast album featuring Bebe Newirth and Ann Reinking, but I have to say that I generally prefer the film soundtrack.  I’m sure much of that comes from simply becoming familiar with those performances first, but I simply find it to be a more lively and engaging version of the album.  The soundtrack album does include one new song that was written by Kander & Ebb for the film, “I Move On”, a duet performed by Zeta-Jones and Zellweger over the end credits.  One key song from the show, “Class”, was cut from the movie, but is still included on the soundtrack album.  It is a duet between Zeta-Jones and Latifah.

Danny Elfman was the surprising choice to provide additional musical score for the film and the soundtrack does contain two short cues of his contribution.  Both are very jazzy instrumentals that Elfman definitely designed to blend well with Kander’s compositions.  It is nice that a sampling of his music is included.  I’m not really sure how much additional music Elfman wrote for the film, but it is possible that these two cues are a pretty complete representation.

The soundtrack ends with two songs not used in the film.  The first is a hip-hop/rap version of “Cell Block Tango (He Had It Comin’)” performed by Queen Latifah along with a couple other hip-hop performers, which has very little resemblance to the original song.  The other is a totally unrelated pop song entitled “Love Is a Crime” performed by Anastacia.  Neither of these are to my taste and I generally skip them when listening to the album.  They are easy to ignore since they are at the very end.

Chicken Little (John Debney & various artists, 2005): This was the first fully computer animated feature from Disney’s Feature Animation division (Dinosaur featured live-action backgrounds) and had a fairly strange and uneven style that is reflected in the soundtrack album.  The album opens with a number of songs by various artists, some not written or recorded for the film (or both).  This is followed by a handful of cover songs performed by the film’s cast.  Finally, the album ends with about 15 minutes of John Debney’s score from the film.

The first cue on the song is actually a sort of modern updated remix of a song from another movie, Patti LaBelle’s “Stir It Up” from Beverly Hills Cop.  This version of the song adds some kind of hip-hop style electronic overlays and is credited to both LaBelle and Joss Stone.  The second cue is “One Little Slip” by Barenaked Ladies, which I think may have been specifically done for the film, although I’m not sure.  This part of the album continues with a cover of “Shake a Tail Feather” from Disney Channel stars The Cheetah Girls, “All I Know” from Five for Fighting, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Donna Summer, and R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”.

The songs performed by the film’s cast are “We Are the Champions”, “Wannabe”, and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”.  While these are familiar songs, of course, the performances by the film’s characters do make for fun versions that tie in well with the film.  The last one, in particular, is lots of fun and I can’t help wonder if the film might have worked better had they gone ahead and made it fully a musical instead of using so much music by various pop artists.  Note that these three cues are all extremely short, adding up to only just under 3 1/2 minutes total.

The best words to use to describe Debney’s score are probably “big” and “broad”.  He pretty much scores the film as if it were a big science fiction/fantasy epic.  The opening score cue, “The Sky Is Falling”, contains religous-sounding choral elements, old-fashioned science fiction motifs, and some driving, partly electronic action music.  The other score cues include a lot of brassy fanfares and pretty broad action music as well as some quieter, fairly rural sounding cues.  It is fun stuff, although I think it is reasonable to say that the score is as much all over the map as the songs, and the film itself, were.

Chicken Run (John Powell & Harry Gregson-Williams, 2000): The first full-length feature film from “Wallace and Grommit” creators Aardman Animation was a very loose parody of The Great Escape starring chickens  striving to escape from an oppressive chicken farm.  The score re-teamed composers John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams, who had previously teamed up for Antz and would later separately or together be very much in-demand as animation composers.

The score is a very lively orchestral work that, as the source material would suggest, contains a lot of parody music.  Of course, Elmer Bernstein’s famous Great Escape score is an obvious inspiration here, with a “Main Title” theme that isn’t a direct copy but certainly brings Bernstein’s score to mind.  One very obvious element that moves this theme more into comedy territory, though, is the composers’ use of a chorus of kazoos.  Additional color is added to the score through the use of harmonicas (particularly prominent in the cue “Chickens Are Not Organized”), bagpipes, and even whistling at various points.

The score is mainly orchestral with electronic elements occasionally included, but used very sparingly.  The composers also make very good use of choral elements in several cues, especially during the impressive finale cue “Lift Off”.  Typically, the choral elements are used to give the score a bit more of an epic scope in some of the film’s bigger sequences.  The score also includes a few cues that have some jazzy/swing rhythms, including in the cues “Rocky and the Circus” and “Flight Training”.  The score does occasionally include some more serious elements, particularly in the tender, even melancholy cue “Rocky, a Fake All Along”.

The soundtrack album also includes the songs “Flip Flop and Fly” performed by Ells Hall and “The Wanderer” performed by Dion.  Both are familiar songs that were used in the film, but were hardly original to them.  They seem a bit like padding on the soundtrack CD.

Cartoon Concerto (Bruce Broughton, 2003): I generally haven’t been including compilation albums in my reviews of my soundtrack collection (although I have many), but I am making an exception in order to call attention to this wonderful collection of cartoon scores composed by Bruce Broughton.  The scores are generally complete and not available anywhere else.  This is actually a promotional release, but copies can usually be tracked down with some searching.  At the time I’m writing this, there is one copy available at a reasonable price from the Amazon link above and Percepto Records (which, I believe, produced the album) has copies available from their website.

The CD includes complete scores to the Disney animated short “Off His Rockers” (which played with the Broughton-scored film Honey, I Blew Up the Kid) and the two Roger Rabbit shorts “Roller Coaster Rabbit” and “Trail Mix-Up”.  Also included is an 18-minute suite of music from Broughton’s numerous scores to the popular Steven Spielberg produced TV series “Tiny Toon Adventures”.  The CD also includes another 18 minute suite entitled “Scherzo Berzerko in 3 Portions”, which isn’t identified as coming from a specific source.  This is most likely a suite compiled from a variety of sources and, since this is a promo disc, it may be partly or entirely example music composed specifically for the promo.

Considering that the majority of the source music was pretty clearly inspired by the classic Warner Bros “Looney Toons” shorts, it isn’t surprising that Broughton’s style throughout this album calls to mind the work of Carl Stalling.  The music is all orchestral and extremely brass heavy with a very fast paced and lots of quick stings and humorous motifs, including occasional samples of familiar melodies.  The music is exceptionally well organized on this CD and it really does play like a cohesive symphonic work.  This disc is simply a lot of fun!

Casablanca (Max Steiner, 1942): Casablanca is a pretty likely candidate for being the most truly beloved of American films.  I’m sure there are people out there that don’t care for it, but I can’t say that I recall encountering any.  The movie was a nearly perfect mix of drama, romance, intrigue, and humor.  Max Steiner’s score and Dooley Wilson’s entertaining performances of several classic songs contributed a lot to the film’s success.

Rhino Records released a soundtrack CD, which contains a mix of dialog, songs, and score.  A better, purely score and songs release would certainly be welcome, although the Rhino release is probably a more commercially acceptable approach for this film.  The condition of the recordings is also surprisingly poor for such a famous film, with quite a bit of static and noise in many of the cues.  The orchestral score portions are in much better condition than the songs and dialog segments and sometimes there is a noticeable shift in quality even within a single cue.  In some cases, it sounds like the music may have come from LP sources.

The most famous music in the film is, of course, the song “As Time Goes By”, written by Herman Hupfeld.  The song wasn’t originally written for the film, but is now pretty much inseparably associated with it.  In addition to Wilson’s famous performance of the song, Steiner very frequently incorporates the melody into the score.  The rest of the score is extremely romantic, with extensive use of lush strings and piano melodies.  Some ethnic elements come into play, particularly during the medleys from the Paris sequences.

I’m generally not a fan of dialog on a soundtrack album and do feel that there is too much here.  On the other hand, Casablanca has such a rich selection of exceptionally well-known lines and speeches that it isn’t hard to understand why it was included.  Very little of the album features score that doesn’t have dialog and/or sound-effects over the top and it almost plays more like a story album than a score soundtrack.  At the end of the album, there are 3 cues, running about 15 minutes, that do present some of the score cues without the dialog.  A better presentation of Steiner’s score is definitely needed, but at least the key parts are there.

Casino Royale (David Arnold, 2006): For most of the history of the series, the producers of the James Bond movies had never been able to obtain the rights to Ian Fleming’s first novel featuring the character, Casino Royale.  Through various business deals, most notably one of the many times that MGM changed ownership, they were finally able to get the rights and produce a film that was released in 2006.  They took the opportunity to do a “reboot” of the series, casting Daniel Craig as a young and inexperienced Bond going on his first major mission after earning his license to kill.  The result was a the series’ biggest critical and financial success in years.

One major behind-the-scenes figure retained from the Pierce Brosnan starring Bond films was composer David Arnold, who was scoring his 4th consecutive film in the series.  Arnold really embraced the concept of the film, delivering a score that built the musical conventions of the series over time.  Over the course of the score, Arnold regularly hints at Monty Norman’s famous James Bond Theme, often presenting a couple recognizable notes of it, without playing it in full.  This all led up to a wonderfully full-blooded, orchestral performance of the classic theme that played over the film’s closing moments and end credits.  This works extremely well, allowing the music to play a definite role in the film’s concept of showing James Bond becoming the character the audience knows so well.

Arnold’s Bond scores have all shown a good balance between faithfulness to the series’ musical conventions that John Barry established, while still lending them a bit more of a contemporary sound.  The Barry style horns and fast paced strings are still there, but with a somewhat stronger emphasis on percussion.  The more direct jazz influences that dominated Barry’s work give way in Arnold’s scores to a bit more of a rock influence, including sparing use of electronics.  He also provides a nice piano and strings love theme, best presented in the cue “Vesper”.

Of course, distinctive opening title songs are another convention of James Bond films and this one has one of the best of recent memory.  Chris Cornell performed “You Know My Name”, which Cornell and Arnold co-wrote.  The song has a classic style that makes it recognizable as a James Bond theme, although it has a somewhat rougher, grittier sound in keeping with the film’s style.  Cornell’s somewhat gravelly voice gives it this grittier sound, while Arnold helps to deliver a melody that still sounds like a Bond theme, and which is incorporated periodically into the score.  Oddly, rights issues resulted in the song not being included on the soundtrack album.  It is available as a CD single or as an individual song download from the usual sources such as Amazon and iTunes.  The extra effort to obtain the song is definitely worthwhile.

The soundtrack album as included on the CD is a very good album presentation of the score, organized to provide a good overall listening experience.  It contains about an hour and 15 minutes of Arnold’s score and covers all the key thematic material.  Sony also made a deal with Apple to offer an exclusive to iTunes version that includes an additional 14 minutes of score as bonus tracks.  While the extra music isn’t essential, it does include some nice to have bits, particularly the music from the film’s prologue sequence.

Those extra tracks are all marked as “album only”, meaning that they can’t be purchased separately.  Unless you are willing to buy the standard album twice, you are basically faced with a choice between the higher sound quality of a lossless presentation on CD or getting the extra music but at the price of reduced sound quality.  I did opt to purchase the album from iTunes for the extra tracks, but I find it lamentable that the full score isn’t available with the best sound quality.

Casper (James Horner, 1995): The Steven Spielberg produced live action adaptation of the “Casper the Friendly Ghost” cartoons was a film that was much better than the source material ever would have suggested was possible.  Much of that was a result of an overqualified cast and crew, including a highly entertaining score from composer James Horner.

The score is one of the better, if somewhat lesser known, examples of the type of melodic, sentimental fantasy adventure scoring that was common to Horner’s output in the late 1980s and the early part of the 1990s.  The score’s strongest parts are built around variations of one primary theme, which is presented in a concert arrangement in the cue “Casper’s Lullaby”.  It is a gentle, sensitive theme that is played at various points on solo piano, woodwinds, strings, and even a few brass arrangements.  Choral elements also are used to elevate the theme at some points as well.  It is one of Horner’s strongest melodies from that period of his career and it is very well used in the score.

The film’s format as a family friendly, kind of sentimentally comedic haunted house movie does also provide Horner the opportunity to write some light suspense cues, sometimes with a bit of a comic tone.  The cue “First Haunting/The Swordfight” is a good example of this aspect of the score.  Particularly during the first half, it includes some harsh strings, sudden bursts of brass, minor key piano, and a few brief choral outbursts.  It then transitions into a more fully adventure-oriented conclusion, with lots of strings and brass.

While Horner does not use the well-known TV series theme song in the score, the soundtrack album does include a performance of it by Little Richard, which I believe played over the first part of the end credits.  The album also includes another song entitled “Remember Me This Way”, which is performed by Jordan Hill.  This song was written by David Foster and Linda Thompson and is a fairly typical early 90s pop song.

The Cassandra Crossing (Jerry Goldsmith, 1978): This score comes from one of Jerry Goldsmith’s strongest periods both creatively and in the caliber of films that he was being hired to score.  While a fairly short LP program was released with the film and has been re-issued a few times, the best representation of this score is definitely the 2-CD set put out by the Belgian label Prometheus Records, which includes both the full score and the LP program.

One of Goldsmith’s trademark strengths was his skill at composing lush, romantic main themes, usually with a strong string and woodwind base, as a central component to action film scores.  These themes would help to provide a strong emotional anchor, something that was especially helpful in films like this one that have a strong focus on ordinary people in peril.  First presented during the “Main Title” cue, the main theme to The Cassandra Crossing is well used during most of the score’s quieter, more character driven segments and is also effectively dropped in during some of suspense and action sequences to better connect them with the human element.

The score also has some great, driving action cues.  The second cue on the soundtrack, “Break In”, includes some extremely wild and aggressive string playing that is very impressive.  In the cue “Train on the Move”, he includes some atonal, basically mechanical sounding elements that eventually transition into some really kinetic action music, all of which really plays up the on-board a train setting of the film.  Many of the action cues also have a progressive rhythm that helps to convey the sense of the moving vehicle.  Occasional atonal elements somewhat resemble the style Goldsmith used in his famous Planet of the Apes score, making this a very rare example of him mixing that approach with his usual, more melodic action scoring.

The original LP program was a much shorter (less than 30 minutes) presentation of the score that, not surprisingly, focused mainly on the melodic main theme and some of the more accessible action music.  While there are a few hints of the score’s more atonal elements, the bulk of that material was absent. 

The LP also included two songs, including “It’s All a Game” which is based on Goldsmith’s primary theme and featured lyrics by Hal Shaper.   The version on the Prometheus album is instrumental only and I am not sure if the original album included an actual vocal version.  The instrumental basically sounds like a pop/disco version of the theme.  The other song is called “I’m Still on My Way” and was written by Dave Jordan and performed by Ann Turkel.  The Prometheus album includes the album version of Turkel’s performance of the song plus an instrumental version (which also has the backing vocals) and a vocal-only track.  The song has kind of a folksy/country sound and doesn’t really fit too well with the score.

Cast a Long Shadow (Gerald Fried, 1959): This score was included as part of a Film Score Monthly 3-CD collection of scores from five different movie westerns released by United Artists.  The collection was originally released for $35, but is now out of print and used copies tend to go for much higher prices.

Fried’s score was from a fairly lesser known western that was classified as a B-movie.  The score is a generally colorful, fully-orchestral score that follows a lot of the standard western conventions.  The “Main Title’ cue opens with big brassy fanfares, with a strong emphasis on trumpet.  At various points, the score incorporates the other various instruments most commonly associated with westerns, including harmonica, banjo, and acoustic guitar. 

Despite it being a fairly conventional western score, Fried creates some very good melodies and it is a fun score to listen to.  The set includes a fairly generous 41 minutes of the score, which the liner notes indicate to be a complete presentation.

Cast Away (Alan Silvestri, 2001): This score is an extremely unusual case.  Robert Zemeckis hired his usual collaborator, Alan Silvestri, to score this film which, of course, generated interest in the music within the soundtrack community.  Zemeckis made the artistic decision, though, to leave the film unscored for the first 1 hour and 24 minutes of its 2 hour and 20 minute running time, which didn’t really leave enough music for a full soundtrack album. 

While there is about 20 minutes or so of score during the final act of the film, it is all built around a single theme that Silvestri wrote for a relatively small ensemble.  It is a fairly quiet, melancholy theme that principally features the oboe, piano, and the orchestra’s string section.  It is a great theme and this musical approach works amazingly well in the film.  The scene where the Tom Hanks character leaves the island where he had been stranded and the score swells up for the very first time is rather breathtaking.

Obviously, the nature of the score made a full soundtrack release a difficult prospect at best.  Varese Sarabande came up with a pretty good solution, though.  They licensed the 7 minute closing credits suite and released it as the anchor for a compilation album that contained suites from each of Silvestri’s scores for Zemeckis’ films to date.  The suite contains a complete presentation of Silvestri’s theme and then ends with a couple minutes of ocean sounds intermixed with brief orchestral bursts.  The result is a very effective orchestral suite that is quite evocative of the film.  The inclusion of the other Silvestri/Zemeckis scores makes for an overall great compilation album as well.

Catch Me If You Can (John Williams, 2002): This is one of the most atypical scores in John Williams’ catalog.  The jazz style certainly really stands out as a significant stylistic change of pace among his scores for Steven Spielberg’s films, although I don’t want to overstate it as the score contains many orchestral melodies that are distinctly and recognizably Williams’.  This score has become one of Williams’ favorites to include during his concerts as it provides a great opportunity both to showcase skilled jazz instrumental soloists and the performances of the full orchestra.

As a primary approach, Williams chose to score this film using a predominantly jazz-inspired orchestral approach.  Substantial sections of the score feature solo saxophone, sometimes playing clearly defined melodies but also frequently performing in a highly improvisational-sounding (but not truly improvisation) manner.  One of the most impressive accomplishments of this score is Williams’ success at making the music sound like improvisational jazz even as though the players are still performing to a fully defined score.  Piano is also more dominant in this score than is often the case for Williams, with the pianist occasionally joining with the saxophone in the pseudo-improvisation.

Even with the jazz inspired approach, Williams still makes substantial use of the full orchestra.  The solo saxophone and piano segments are nearly always eventually joined by the full orchestra, often providing highly melodic counterpoints.  As I noted at the top, the orchestral elements are recognizably in Williams’ traditional style, bringing an impressive fullness to the music.  One of the most impressive examples of this is in the cue “Reflections (The Father’s Theme)” which opens with a lengthy solo saxophone section, before having the full orchestra join in to bring the piece to a finish.

Spielberg worked hard to clearly depict the film’s period settings and, thus, very effectively made us of period contemporary popular songs during several key sequences.  The soundtrack CD includes Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me”, Stan Getz’s “The Girl from Ipanema”, Judy Garland’s “Embraceable You”, Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” and Dusty Springfield’s "The Look of Love”.  All of these are the original recordings that are available elsewhere, but their inclusion does make the album an effective representation of the film’s overall musical identity.  Even with the songs, the CD still contains a pretty generous 44 minutes of Williams’ score.

Bolt (John Powell, 2008): Disney’s 2008 CGI animated feature was not a musical, thus the soundtrack album primarily features the orchestral score by composer John Powell, who has generally done some of his best work in animated features (including Shrek, the Ice Age sequels, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon).  This was his first score for Disney and it is well suited to the film.

The soundtrack album opens with the two songs from the film, both of which have a modern country style.  The first is “I Thought I Lost You”, the end-credits song performed by the film’s voice stars John Travolta and Miley Cyrus, which is a fairly interesting pairing for a duet.  The other song is “Barking at the Moon” performed by Jenny Lewis, which was used more prominently over a key montage sequence in the film.

Powell’s score has an interesting mix of styles, due to the somewhat dual nature of the film itself.  The main story of the lost dog trying to find its way home called for a fairly tender, emotionally driven score, which Powell builds around a piano-driven main theme.  This aspect of the score is quickly introduced during the first cue of the score portion of the soundtrack entitled “Meet Bolt”.  Powell also provides a fun, vaguely Godfather-inspired  theme for Mittens the cat, which is introduced in the cue “Meet Mittens”.  Other parts of the score have a bit more of a rural, country-inspired feel.

The other key aspect of the score is the very fast-paced, action music that is principally featured in the title character’s super-hero type TV series within the movie.  For these sequences, Powell provides an edgy, heavily synthesizer driven score.  On the soundtrack album, these cues feel a bit out of step with the rest of the score, although they fit perfectly in those sequences in the film.  This aspect of the score is heard early on with “Bolt Transforms” and “Scooter Chase” and Powell does occasionally re-introduce some of the TV series action music during appropriate, action-oriented sections of the main storyline.

Born Free (John Barry, 1966): Outside of his James Bond songs, the title song from Born Free is almost certainly the most recognizable and familiar composition of John Barry’s career.  The Matt Monro recording of the song (which features lyrics by Don Black) was a big hit and  became Monro’s signature song.  A cover version by Roger Williams was also a top-10 hit.

The title song is the best remembered aspect of the score and its melody is the dominant theme.  Like the song, the score is very lush and romantic and extremely melodic.  Fitting the family-oriented adventure film, the score has a definite playful quality to it and Barry also occasionally introduces some bits and pieces of African styling, such as some of the use of percussion in the cue “Elsa at Play”.  Some slightly darker tones come into play in “The Death of Pati”, while still maintaining the overall style of the score.

For the 1966 soundtrack album, Barry conducted a re-recording of the score’s highlights.  This re-recording plus the Monro version of the song runs just under 40 minutes in length.  The soundtrack album was released on CD by Film Score Monthly in 2004 in a, rare for the label, non limited-edition that was widely distributed to stores.  The CD doesn’t contain any additional music (or the original film tracks), but it is a solid representation of the score.

Born on the Fourth of July (John Williams and Various artists, 1989): This film featured John Williams first of the three scores (preceding JFK and Nixon) that he composed for director Oliver Stone.  Those scores were among the darkest and most somber that Williams composed.  This means that they weren’t among the most accessible to listen to separately from the films, but the scores were exceptionally effective within the films.  The Born on the Fourth of July score isn’t one that I return to very often, but it is a very impressive, serious composition that should be a part of any serious film music collection.

The soundtrack album for Born on the Fourth of July is a mix of a song and score album.  The film used contemporary to the era music pretty extensively to help establish the late 60s/early 70s setting and, particularly, the scenes involving the Vietnam War protest groups and the general counterculture of the era.  The album opens with cover versions of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” by Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians” and John Fogerty’s  “Born On the Bayou” recorded by The Broken Homes.  Both of these were recorded for the film.

The rest of the songs were original artists versions of “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison, “American Pie” by Don Mclean, “My Girl” by The Temptations, “Soldier Boy” by The Shirelles, “Venus” by Frankie Avalon, and  the familiar choral version of Henry Mancini’s “Moon River”.  All are good songs, of course, but they are also very widely available from other sources and it would have been vastly preferable to have had more of the score instead.

The score portion of the album opens with “Prologue”, a distinguished and somber theme for solo trumpet, extremely well performed by former Boston Pops lead trumpeter Tim Morrison, a frequent Williams collaborator.  This immediately establishes the very serious mood of the score.  This theme is re-visited quite a bit during the rest of the score cues and Morrison’s solo trumpet is also utilized to perform other themes within the score.

During the second cue, “The Early Days, Massapequa, 1957”, Williams establishes the other primary theme of the score, which is a fairly romantic Americana theme that reflects the all-American, small town origins of the film’s central character.  As the score progresses, this theme is re-visited frequently, but with darker, more downbeat shadings as the film’s very serious story arc plays out.  This is especially true of the last couple cues of the album, which score the last parts of the film after the injured main character has returned home from the war.  Especially effective is Williams use of a bit of a pop beat under the trumpet performance of his Americana theme during “Homecoming”, with a revisit of the “Prologue” theme interrupting it, causing a fairly abrupt shift from optimism to sadness.

The soundtrack also includes a couple cues that underscore the film’s war sequences.  The first of these, “The Shooting of Wilson” is mostly very dissonant in sound with harsh strings and bursts of percussion and brass underlining the tension and pain of the war.  It is the most difficult cue on the album to listen to, although it is still very expertly composed.  The cue ends with repeats of the score’s two main themes, providing a sort of release.  The second war cue, “Cua Viet River, Vietnam, 1968” is more melodic and interweaves more of the main themes, but in a very dark and foreboding style.  Williams’ use of vocal whispering (with unrecognizable words) is a particularly unsettling element of this cue.

Williams’ score only takes up about 25 minutes on the album, so this is obviously a very prime candidate for an expanded release.  Not counting Williams (mostly early) scores that have never been released outside of their films at all, this is almost certainly his most under-represented score out there.  The album does hit the top highlights of the score giving a solid taste for it, but there definitely is a need for more of it to be made available.

Boy On a Dolphin (Hugo Friedhofer, 1957): Intrada released a limited edition CD release of this interesting and fairly exotic Hugo Friedhofer score.  Previously, the score had been released on LP several times (including a release contemporary to the film) as well as on a Japanese-import CD, but the Intrada disc added a little over 10 minutes of additional music and was the first domestic CD release and the first time the score has been available in stereo.    The CD also includes a demo version of the title song.

The album opens with a title song, performed by singer Mary Kaye.  The song’s melody serves as a primary theme for the instrumental score as well.  It is a melodic, vaguely fantastical song that establishes the primary overall tone for the score.  The entire score has a somewhat exotic, vaguely Mediterranean sound to it.

Friedhofer also makes good use of slower paced string and woodwind centered melodies to help establish a mood fitting to the film’s underwater sequences.  Adding to the exotic, vaguely otherworldly quality are some wordless female vocals that overlay some of the cues.  The cue “Nocturnal Sea” is a particularly notable example of this aspect of the score.

The Boy Who Could Fly (Bruce Broughton, 1986): This is one of my favorite film scores and a soundtrack that I return to very often.  The CD that I have was a promotional release that was put out by Percepto Records in a limited edition of only 500 copies.  I purchased it when it originally became available, but it is now long sold out and used copies generally go for hundreds of dollars.  An earlier Varese Sarabande release contained a shorter, re-recording of the score, which was released on LP contemporary with the film and was also briefly available on CD, although it is now a bit hard to find.  The Varese album is still available from iTunes as a download.

The score is primarily built around an absolutely beautiful, sensitive and highly memorable main theme.  The theme is introduced right at the beginning of the soundtrack in the cue “Meeting Eric”.  The theme is initially presented in a very low key version played on piano, harp, flute and acoustic guitar, but the theme builds over the course of the score, eventually making it to soaring, fully orchestral presentations that primarily score the film’s flying sequences, particularly in the cue “The Hospital/Flying” and in the last portion of the spectacular finale cue “Milly and Eric Flee/Into the Air”.

While the main theme is repeated frequently throughout the score in a wide variety of orchestrations, Broughton does also provide some very effective secondary themes as well.  For the film’s soldier-obsessed younger brother character (who was played by a very young Fred Savage), Broughton provides a theme that manages to successfully sound military while still remaining gentle and playful.  A sensitive, somewhat melancholy theme is presented in the cue “Family”, which blends a piano theme with some short, very low key statements of the main theme.

Broughton also effectively brings the score into some darker places, when needed, with both some more subdued variations on the themes for some of the sadder sequences of the film as well as some occasionally tense music when needed.  This is especially noted in the cues “Eric Agitated/Louis Defeated” and “The Rainstorm/The Ring” as well as in the fairly abrupt strings that conclude “The Hospital/Flying”.

In the film itself, a pop song was selected to play over the film’s end credits, but the Percepto CD includes an unused end credits suite that Broughton wrote for the film.  This cue, simply entitled “The Boy Who Could Fly”, is the most complete presentation of the main theme, including its progression from the simple, lightly-orchestrated version into the fully orchestral theme.  It is a major shame that this wasn’t kept for the film as it would have been the ideal conclusion.

One bit of trivia about this score is that the main theme is likely to be very familiar to frequent movie-goers in Los Angeles, particularly Disney fans, even if they don’t remember or never saw the movie.  Before every show at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood, they do an elaborate light show as they open the curtains.  The music used during the curtain opening is the theme from The Boy Who Could Fly.  The exact music used at the theater starts at the 1:25 mark during the unused closing credits cue on the Percepto CD, although I strongly suspect that the recording used is actually taken from the re-recording that Erich Kunzel did with the Cincinnati Pops for the CD entitled Fantastic Journey.

The Boys from Brazil (Jerry Goldsmith, 1978): For this thriller, Jerry Goldsmith made the somewhat unusual choice of crafting an original waltz that would serve as the score’s primary theme.  This impressive composition of soaring strings and triumphant brass is one of Goldsmith’s most popular compositions among film score enthusiasts.

The waltz is immediately introduced during the film’s “Main Title” cue and is re-visited pretty regularly.  The rest of the score includes some pretty impressive action music, which emphasizes percussion and brass.  Particularly notable is Goldsmith’s use of tuba and trombone to ramp up the intensity of some of the action cues.  The lengthy, early cue “The Killer’s Arrive” introduces the key action themes up front, before impressively segueing into the waltz.

The original soundtrack album produced at the time of the film’s release featured a 20 minute suite of the highlights from the score, edited into a single cue plus two shorter (relatively speaking) score cues that run another 15 minutes or so combined.   The album also included the song “We’re Home Again” performed by Elaine Page and written by Goldsmith with lyricist Hal Shaper.  While not complete or in film order, the album arrangements are a nice selection of music from the film, although the omitted portions do include some of the strongest action-oriented cues.  The original album also put a bit more emphasis on the waltz, placing it more front-and-center than it really was in the complete score.

In 2008, Intrada released a 2-CD limited edition (5,000 copies) containing the complete score in film order on disc 1 and the original soundtrack album tracks plus some source music and demo tracks on disc 2.  This release is no longer available from Intrada, but copies can generally be found in the $30-$40 range.  Intrada’s release really is a best-of-both-worlds release by including both the complete score and the album arrangements.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Wojciech Kilar, 1992): Francis Ford Coppola’s very stylish and very strange version of the Dracula story was one of those films that pretty heavily divided audiences.  I generally found it to be an interesting and absorbing film and I felt that Wojciech Kilar’s classically gothic score played a big role in helping to establish the film’s distinctive mood.

The score has a fairly old-fashioned, highly thematic sound.  The music is extremely atmospheric and really cranks up the tension with themes that heavily emphasize percussion, low brass, choral elements, and extremely active strings.  Kilar establishes the score’s most significant theme during the soundtrack’s second cue, entitled “Vampire Hunters”.  This theme features a simple repeating melody, played over the top of a progressive beat of brass and percussion.

A substantial portion of the soundtrack consists of action cues that tend to emphasize the building of tension over pure adrenaline-pumping themes.  Choral elements are frequently used in cues such as “The Storm” and “The Hunt Builds”, with lots of low-register brass and fairly relentless percussion.  The action cues are very dark, but constantly interesting and engaging.

Kilar also provides some quieter, more romantic melodies, primarily serving as themes for the major female characters.  The theme for the character of Mina is a primarily string melody that is first introduced during “Mina’s Photo” and more fully developed in “Love Remembered”, while the cue “Lucy’s Party” introduces a gentle, but vaguely ominous minor-key piano melody.  “The Brides” presents a more intense, violin-driven melody.

The one cue that seems pretty out of place on the soundtrack is “The Ring of Fire”, which seems to be made up more of sound effects from the film’s finale than actual musical material.  It does have a dissonant, rhythmic, mostly percussion musical element, but it still seems pretty out of place in the otherwise mostly melodic album.

The soundtrack album ends with a song entitled “Love Song for a Vampire” that is performed by Annie Lennox.  The melody is based on Mina’s theme.  The musical accompaniment is mostly electronic rather than orchestral, making it a bit of an odd fit with the rest of the album.

The Bravados (Alfred Newman, Hugo Friedhofer, 1958): This western featured a collaboration between two of the top golden age composers.  The resultant score is a blend of the two composers’ distinct, but still mostly compatible, styles.  Film Score monthly released an impressively complete soundtrack CD as part of their Golden Age Classics series.

The soundtrack opens with an exciting, brassy march that was composed by Newman, which gets the score off to a very rousing start and is further developed nicely in “The Posse Rides”.  Newman also contributes some of the film’s more romantic and contemplative melodies, including a fairly reverent theme heard in the cue “A Mother’s Prayer” and a romantic theme with some very impressive work for strings in the cue “The Dead Miner and Emma/Josefa”.

Friedhofer’s contributions are primarily the more dark and brooding aspect of the score.   His themes tend to have more of an emphasis on lower brass and strings, providing the score with some more tense passages such as in cues like “Jailbreak” and “Parral’s Ambush”.  I will say that I’ve never been a huge fan of Friedhofer’s style and this score kind of drives that home.  While I’m sure his compositions were appropriate to the darker parts of the film, I definitely prefer the Newman themes.

The program on the CD is in 3 parts.  The first half hour or so is a fairly complete version of the score presented in stereo.  This is followed by about 13 minutes of source cues.  The album ends with a little under 20 minutes of the score presented in its original monaural mix.

The Brave Little Toaster (David Newman, 1986): This film was an independently-produced animated feature that primarily played on television and home video here in the US after a few showings at film festivals.  David Newman scored the film, which also contains a few songs composed by Van Dyke Parks.

Percepto Records released a limited edition soundtrack CD for the film, but it is a pretty mixed bag.  The score on the album is complete, but it is covered with dialog and sound effects on quite a few tracks.  Newman provides an impressively melodic and fully orchestral score, but so much of the music is overwhelmed on the album that it is difficult to get a solid feel for the flavor of this score.

Still, there is some very good music on the disc and the passages that play uninterrupted are sometimes pretty impressive.  The film’s primary theme is introduced during a nicely presented “Main Title” cue and Newman has the opportunity to develop the themes pretty well during some of the lengthier cues such as “The Pond/Busby Berkley/The Meadow” (which has a lot of sound effects during the first part, but is mostly music-only after that) and the 7 minute “Finale” cue.

The songs are ok, but generally pretty forgettable.  I’m not exceptionally familiar with the movie (saw it once quite a while back), so perhaps the songs would connect with me more if I knew it better.  The most entertaining of the songs is the clever horror spoof “It’s a ‘B’ Movie”.

The Black Stallion (Carmine Coppola, 1978): Intrada’s 3-CD set of the score to The Black Stallion may simply be too much of a good thing, at least when attempting to listen to it all at once.  The first two discs essentially contain everything that was written for the film: the score as heard in the movie, numerous unused cues, and various source cues.  The 3rd disc contains the 35 minute LP program that was released with the film.  The total of the 3 discs comes out to over 2 hours of music.

Fortunately, there is nothing that says that one has to listen to the music all at one time.  Certainly the score is very good and it is certainly not a bad thing that all of it is available.  For the most part, I’ve found that the album version is probably the best choice for listening straight through, while the other parts  might be better suited to playing in parts or to occasionally include in broader “shuffle play” mixes.

While Carmine Coppola (father of Francis, who produced the film) is the primary credit composer, the film also contained contributions from composers Shirley Walker, Nyle Steiner, Kenneth Nash, George Marsh, and Dick Rosmini.   The Intrada set includes appropriate credits for all the composers, thus making it possible to identify who wrote what parts.

Much of the score is very guitar-centered, with generally simple orchestration.  The score includes a fairly distinctive primary theme melody (which opens and closes the original album presentation), which features a solo guitar backing a main melody played by the orchestra, particularly the strings.  This theme is used throughout the score and generally establishes the overall tone of the presentation.  Other parts of the score tend to have a bit of an ethnic flavor, with a number of different instruments in use.  Some of the unused cues on the Intrada complete score discs are more fully orchestral than is generally heard on the cues used in the film.

The Black Stallion Returns (Georges Delerue, 1983): Not too long after Intrada put out their CD release of The Black Stallion, they also put out a disc of Georges Delerue’s score to the film’s sequel.  While this score only required a single CD release, it still contains the complete score as heard in the movie as well as the original 1983 album presentation for a total running time of around an hour and 17 minutes.

Delerue doesn’t reuse the themes from the original film, but instead scores the film in his own distinctly melodic style.  His main theme for the sequel does have some similarity, at least in spirit, to Carmine Coppola’s theme for the original film, but it is significantly more fully orchestral, with an emphasis on strings and woodwinds.  The acoustic guitar that was fairly central to the first film’s score is not carried over to the sequel.  I overall think that Delerue’s score is an easier and more satisfying listen than Coppola’s outside of the film.  It tends to be more melodic and straightforward orchestral with a definite flare towards the adventurous.

A huge highlight on this soundtrack is the absolutely thrilling “Finale” cue, which runs for over 8 minutes in length and masterfully sums up all of the film’s themes on its way to an immensely satisfying conclusion.  Due to the discs format of presenting the complete score followed by the original album, this finale is presented twice on the disc.  It is good enough that I don’t really object to hearing it twice in one play through.

Black Sunday (John Williams, 1977): For many years, Black Sunday was arguably the most significant John Williams score that had never received a soundtrack release.  In early 2010, Film Score Monthly finally corrected this by releasing a CD containing over an hour of Williams’ music from the film.  The CD is part of their limited edition Silver Age Classics series, but they produced 10,000 copies which should keep it available for at least a little while.

This score was composed during possibly the most important phase of his career.  The two other scores that he composed for films released  the same year were Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  His Black Sunday score does resemble his other scores from that time period, but it is quite a bit darker in tone as required by the disturbing subject matter of the film.

Building of tension is Williams’ prime role here and he is very effective at  accomplishing that.  For a good example, the cue “Nurse Dahlia/Kabakov’s Card/The Hypodermic” primarily features some low, fairly repetitive notes that build up a great deal of tension until the cue finally ends with a burst of shrieking strings reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s famous Psycho music.   Another interesting cue is “The Test”, which features chimes, initially by themselves and then later joined by the orchestra’s string section, an effect that builds a notably tense and foreboding atmosphere.

Other cues do have a more melodic style, such as the fairly sad melody that Williams contributes for the cue “Moshevsky’s Dead” or the more active string and brass driven melody in “Preparations”.  Williams also provides a melancholy, brass melody for the end titles, which the CD includes both in the film version and in a version without the underlying pop-style percussion.

The score also includes some very good chase and action music, particularly late in the score.  It is in the action cues that the connections to his other scores of that time period are most evident.  In particular, there is some noticeable similarities to some of the action cues from Close Encounters in this score.

Black Widow (Leigh Harline, 1954): Intrada released this classic Leigh Harline score on a limited edition CD paired with Harline’s score to Good Morning, Miss Dove.  The score is very piano-centric, although with strings and horns also featured in some of the settings.  As is typical for this genre of music from the era, it sometimes reflects a fairly dark setting while still maintaining a primarily melodic style.

While the presentation of Harline’s score on the CD is only around 20 minutes in length, there are some very impressive cues.  The cue “New York Skyline” opens with a fanfare before transitioning into a very melodic theme performed by solo piano. A later cue entitled “Iris Bolieres” essentially reverses that format by primarily featuring the solo piano before bringing in the full orchestra for its conclusion.

Impressive examples of more fully orchestral cues include “West Ninth Street”, which features a pretty lushly romantic melody that kind of serves as a central theme to the score as well as “Salome’s Dance”, an impressive waltz.  The score shifts in a darker direction during its later segments, introducing some more brooding, but still melodic, themes in cues such as “The Letter” and “Confession”.

Blazing Saddles (John Morris, 1974): The western parody Blazing Saddles is arguably Mel Brooks’ most famous film.  It featured a score by Brooks’ most frequent musical collaborator, John Morris, who provided an interesting mix of fairly traditional western motifs, including instruments such as the harmonica and acoustic guitar, as well as some more cartoonish, slapstick music.  In the later category, he occasionally incorporates samples of such songs as the Looney Toons theme and the Mexican Hat Dance.

The most familiar piece of music from the movie was Morris’ title song, which was performed by Frankie Lane.  The song is actually performed fairly straight and the melody is so evocative of the old west that it sometimes shows up in other contexts, including as part of the music loop in Frontierland at Disneyland.  The song’s melody, of course, serves as the primary theme for the film’s score and it is very effective at keeping the film rooted in western traditions.

The movie also included a handful of original songs written by Brooks.  The first is “The Ballad of Rock Ridge”, which sounds like a traditional western ballad, but with fairly ridiculous (and occasionally profane) lyrics.  “I’m Tired” is a demented and funny lounge song performed by Madeline Kahn.  Finally, “The French Mistake” is a brief and odd dance song.

No soundtrack was released for the film during its original release.  For a long time, the only availability of music from the film was a 1978 LP, released in conjunction with Brooks’ High Anxiety, that contained the songs from several of Brooks’ films.  La-La-Land Records finally released a CD in 2008 containing 40 minutes of the songs and score from the film.  This includes both vocal and instrumental versions of the songs as well as several source music tracks.

Blizzard (Mark McKenzie, 2003): This is one of the best, truly hidden gems in my collection.  When Intrada put out their 1000 copy limited edition in 2006, I’d never heard of this film before, and still really know basically nothing about it other than it was a winter-themed film directed by Levar Burton.  On Intrada’s online forums, they really were strongly encouraging their regular customers to at least listen to the samples if they didn’t know the music.  I did and was instantly hooked by it and placed an order.

The score is simply beautiful, with soaring melodies and lots of exciting, brassy fanfares.  The score also has some extremely nice, quietly tender moments such as the cue “The Best Friend Ever”, which features some solo piano as well as a nice, woodwind statement of the film’s main theme.  McKenzie also makes very effective use of wordless choir.  This, along with the occasional use of bells, helps to lend the score a wintery feeling at times.

The soundtrack CD opens with a tremendously enjoyable 8 minute “Blizzard Suite”, which basically serves as an overture to the album and a greater summary of the entire score.  I really wish that suites like this were more common on soundtrack albums.  A lot of movies have this kind of suite over the end credits (assuming a pop song hasn’t been used), but those suites often don’t make it onto the CD.  Note that suite did get some wider exposure when used during the opening montage for the 75th Academy Awards.

The Blue and the Gray (Bruce Broughton, 1982): This popular, heavily promoted early 1980s TV mini-series about the Civil War was one of the earliest, really prominent scoring assignments for Bruce Broughton after having previously mainly worked as a composer-for-hire on various TV series episodes.  The project called for a pretty big in scope orchestral score and Broughton delivered a strong, Americana-style score that was a clear predecessor to the style he would use a few years later in his best-known score for Silverado.

The old-fashioned rural Americana style is emphasized by Broughton’s frequent use of instruments such as the acoustic guitar, harmonica, and fiddle for the more intimate portions of the score, while the full orchestra comes into play for the broader in scope sequences, particularly the battle scenes.  For the battles, Broughton provides especially stirring action music, sometimes impressively built around some of the same themes that he introduced in more subtle orchestrations during the quieter parts of the scores.

Intrada has had a very long-standing relationship with Broughton and has been responsible for the release of many of his scores.  They released a limited edition (2,000 copies) 2-CD set containing just over 2 hours of Broughton’s score.  This set is still available from their website and is very much worth getting for fans of Broughton and/or of this style of Americana orchestral music.

Blue Denim (Bernard Herrmann, 1959): Film Score Monthly released this score on a limited edition Golden Age Classics CD where it is paired with Elmer Bernstein’s score to The View from Pompey’s Head (the connection between the two films was director Philip Dunne).  The CD contains a little under a half hour of Herrmann’s score.  While this is a fairly minor score in Herrmann’s impressive career, it still is nice that it is available and definitely worth getting for fans of the composer’s work.

The score brings to mind the type of music that Herrmann typically wrote for Alfred Hitchcock around that era.  It has a melodic, but darkly romantic quality with a strong emphasis on strings.  The music actually bears a pretty close resemblance to the composer’s very famous score to Vertigo, including a primary theme that definitely sounds like a close cousin to the theme from that film.

The Blue Max (Jerry Goldsmith, 1966): This war movie score was one of Jerry Goldsmith’s most famous and popular scores.  The score is particularly well known among film score enthusiasts for its exciting main theme, which features a great brass fanfare leading into a fully orchestral melody characterized by soaring strings.  The theme fits perfectly with the fighter pilot storyline of the film, with a melody that simply feels aeronautical.   This type of soaring theme that brings to mind flight became something of a Goldsmith trademark throughout his career with several later scores also having a similar feel.  His main theme from Air Force One nearly 2 decades later particularly seems to owe a lot to The Blue Max.

The main theme is given a full-length presentation during the “Main Title” cue and then is presented in numerous variations throughout the score.  It is given a number of different orchestrations and is frequently surrounded by other similarly flight-driven and militaristic themes.  Brass, percussion, and very active strings are dominant throughout the majority of the score.  One very nice respite is the tender and melodic “Love Theme from The Blue Max”, which prominently features a solo piano, although bookended by orchestral segments.

There have been a few releases of this score, including two that were reasonably complete.  The best and most recent is Intrada’s limited edition from early 2010, which is now sold out and fairly expensive to purchase on the secondary market.  The previous Legacy Records release from 1995 (linked to at the top of this entry) is much more readily available and is still a good representation of the score.  The Intrada release only includes a small amount of additional music compared to the Legacy release, but it has been remastered for better sound quality and also includes some improvements in score assembly and presentation order.  The Intrada is the best choice if you can get it, but it probably isn’t worth paying the substantially higher prices that release fetches over the Legacy release.

Varese Sarabande also previously released a 50 minute re-recording of the score back in 1985.  While not the original soundtrack recordings, Goldsmith still conducted the orchestra.  This was the best and most complete available recording of the score (and the only on CD) until the Legacy release.  It is now out of print and probably not worth the effort to track down.

The Blues Brothers (Various, 1980): The Blues Brothers is still the best film based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, admittedly a questionable distinction considering how bad most have been.  This was a genuinely good film, though, and a huge part of the reason for that was the music.  The movie was made as a full-blown musical, using classic blues and soul songs (as well as a bit of rock and roll) and an all-star guest cast of musicians.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt at all that stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were themselves skilled blues musicians.

All the major songs from the film are here and so familiar that there isn’t a lot of elaboration needed other than to give the titles.  Belushi and Aykroyd provide lead vocals on 7 of the 11 songs on the soundtrack, including “She Caught the Caty”, “Gimme Some Lovin’”, “Shake Your Tailfeather” (Ray Charles joins them on this one), “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”, “Theme from Rawhide” (from the film’s country western bar scene), “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Jailhouse Rock”.  All are played with great energy by the stars as well as the distinguished blues band that they put together for the film.

In addition to Ray Charles’ vocals on “Shake Your Tailfeather”, the other star turns on the album include James Brown with “The Old Landmark”, Aretha Franklin performing “Think”, and Cab Calloway’s “Minnie The Moocher”.  Of course, all three songs are available elsewhere too, but the versions performed for the film are great arrangements.

The only instrumental on the album is an arrangement of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme” that was used in the film.  Elmer Bernstein provided a very small amount of original score for the film (mainly what was commonly called the “God Music”), but it is unfortunately not present on the CD.

Blues Brothers 2000 (Various, 1998): The much-belated sequel to The Blues Brothers definitely isn’t as good  a film as the first one, and was a fairly famous box-office bomb, but both the film and the soundtrack album contains darned good music.  While the first soundtrack may be a bit more accessible due to its use of very familiar songs, the sequel’s soundtrack is perhaps richer.  For one thing, the original film’s soundtrack came out in the LP/cassette era while the sequel soundtrack originated on CD.  Because of this, the sequel album runs 20 minutes longer and contains 7 more songs than the original.

Of course, the obvious gap in the sequel is the absence of the late John Belushi.  Replacing Belushi as Dan Aykroyd’s new partner in the sequel was John Goodman, who certainly does bring quite a bit to the role.  Even still, Belushi’s deadpan delivery and surprisingly strong vocal skills are missed on the sequel soundtrack.  Goodman’s best showcase on the album is his lead vocals on “Ghost Riders In the Sky”, performed during a scene that paralleled the “Rawhide” scene from the first film.  Joe Morton also appears as a lost brother.  He is the villain during the first part of the film, but eventually joins the band and participates in the last few songs.

On the sequel, Paul Shaffer serves as the music director, reprising the role he played on the original SNL sketches and late 70s tour, although he was unavailable to work on the first film.  Shaffer really leverages the musical contacts that he has made over the course of his long career, particularly his very long run as David Letterman’s band leader, and manages to bring in an extremely impressive, all-star cast of musicians.

Aretha Franklin once again appears on this album, this time performing “Respect”, which is possibly her best known song.  James Brown appeared in the film again, but does not have a song on the album.  Some of the other big name musicians to appear include Shaffer, John Popper and Blues Traveler, Wilson Pickett, Sam Moore, Erykah Badu, and Dr. John.

For the film’s big “Battle of the Bands” finale, the Blues Brothers face off against a group named The Louisiana Gator Boys, which is an all-star band including such performers as B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Clarence Clemons, Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes, Lou Rawls, Steve Winwood, Travis Tritt, Grover Washington, Jr., and others.  This super group performs the song “How Blue Can You Get?” and then joins the Blues Brothers and their band for “New Orleans”, which closes the album.

24 (Sean Callery, 2001-2006): I have never actually watched the TV series 24, although I think I would probably like it and expect to eventually catch up with it on video.  The CD soundtracks for the series were given to me as a gift and I’m not sure I had actually listened to them before this.  I have two separate volumes of music from the series, one that covers seasons 1-3 and another that covers seasons 4-5.  All of the music is by composer Sean Callery, who I presume has done all the scoring for the show.

The series main title opens with some general beeps and other sound effects (only on the version on the season 1-3 disc) followed by some fairly atonal electronic music.  It then segues into a much more fully-orchestral and melodic theme than I was expecting.  Much more electronics are used in the rest of the scoring for the episodes, although there are orchestral areas as well.  Parts of the scores also include some rock elements (particularly electric guitars) and some techno beats.  A wordless choir is also used occasionally as well as some more chant-like vocals.  The music includes slower elements too, including some gentle piano melodies and some string-oriented pieces.

Without being familiar with the show itself, I don’t know what these various elements are meant to underscore, but the music is highly varied and a fairly unpredictable listening experience from my perspective as a non-viewer.  The track titles (for example, “’Copter Chase Over L.A.”) and the style of music do sometimes provide a pretty clear picture of what kind of scene is being scored and these clues suggest that Callery usually doesn’t stray too far from the conventions of how to score an action/thriller series.  The music is good, though, and I appreciate the fairly singular voice to the scoring of this series.  In recent years, it has become more common for a single composer to do all the scoring for a series and it is a trend that I very much like.

The 25th Hour (Georges Delerue, 1967): This score was released on CD by Film Score Monthly as part of their “Silver Age Classics” series and is paired on the disc with Delerue’s score to Our Mother’s House.  I’m not very familiar with the film, except to know that it was a drama that centered around the Holocaust.  As that subject-matter suggests, the music is pretty somber in tone, with a dirge-like main theme.  The dark mood is further enhanced by use of a wordless male choir.  Delerue’s scores are known for being extremely melodic and that is true of this one, although the melodies are definitely darker in character than is typical with his scores.  The whole album isn’t downbeat, though.  In particular “Johann in Budapest” and “Gathering of the Flowers” are very pleasant, almost waltz-like melodies and are very recognizably Delerue.

36 Hours (Dimitri Tiomkin, 1964): Film Score Monthly released this score as part of their “Golden Age Classics” series.  The CD opens with the song “A Heart Must Learn to Cry”, which is a fairly typical early 60s romantic ballad.  Tiomkin uses the melody from the song at various points throughout the rest of the score as well.  The score is generally melodic, with a strong emphasis on piano melodies.  The movie was a World War II dramatic thriller and the score does have some tense moments, although the majority of the score seems to put more emphasis on dramatic and romantic elements.

633 Squadron (Ron Goodwin, 1964): This is another Film Score Monthly “Silver Age Classics” release.  I don’t know why they considered this one “Silver Age” while 36 Hours from the same year was “Golden Age”.  I’m guessing it had to do either with the era the composer is more associated with and/or with the fact that 633 Squadron is paired on a 2-disc set with Goodwin’s Submarine X-1 score from 1969.

The score is a very rousing, brassy war movie score with quite a few fanfares and soaring strings.  The sound quality is not the greatest, unfortunately.  This is certainly a reflection of the condition of the source tapes, but the music tends to have a fairly harsh sound to it.  The music is great and this recording is worth having, but it is a shame that higher quality elements weren’t available.  The majority of the album is a remastered stereo version of the original LP soundtrack program, but the disc ends with an 8 minute suite of additional material (in mono) taken from tapes provided by Goodwin.  There is also a fun suite of jazz source music.

7 Women (Elmer Bernstein, 1966): This score for John Ford’s final film was released as a Film Score Monthly “Silver Age Classics” series entry paired on a single CD with Hugo Friedhofer’s score to Never So Few.  The film is set in China and Bernstein introduces a bit of an Asian flavor to the music.  The score has a lot of fairly quiet, sensitive passages, generally dominated by saxophone and flute.  There is also some fun action music that would sound very much at home in a western.

The 7th Dawn (Riz Ortolani, 1964): This score was included as part of Film Score Monthly’s now out-of-print MGM Soundtrack Treasury, which was a boxed set of 12 CDs containing 20 different scores from the MGM library.  I’m not really familiar with Riz Ortolani outside of this score, but this score is very enjoyable and easy to listen to on CD.  The majority of the music is very lushly romantic and strongly melodic, largely built around a main theme that shares the film’s title.  Several tracks are different album arrangements of that theme, including one with vocals.  The film apparently has a war element to it and the score includes some energetic battle music as well.

84 Charing Cross Road (George Fenton, 1987): Varese Sarabande released this score as part of their limited edition CD Club series.  Fenton provided a gentle, up-beat score, appropriate for a film that was a fairly small, character-oriented drama.  One particularly notable track is “Dear Speed”, a very sweet melody that is entirely performed on a solo piano.  The album does include a few tracks that were not composed by Fenton (although he did the arrangements), including the traditional “Sussex Carol” for a Christmas sequence, “Auld Lang Syne” for a New Year’s sequence and an excerpt from Correli’s “Church Sonata in A”.

9 to 5 (Charles Fox, 1980): The soundtrack to this hit comedy, which was released by Intrada Records as a limited edition last year, opens and closes with Dolly Parton’s extremely familiar and popular title song. The song isn’t incorporated into the score, although a few passages call it to mind without really directly quoting it. The score is by Charles Fox, who did quite a few comedy scores during the late 70s and early 80s as well as writing a number of popular TV themes, including those for Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and The Love Boat.

Fox’s score for this film is light and up-beat and occasionally even a bit silly.  The silliness is most notable in the track titled “Violet’s Fantasy”, which includes a lot of cartoonish-style music and even some wordless female vocals that sound like they are right out of an early Disney movie and ending with a chorus singing “Halleluiah”.    Bits of the score, particularly the track “Dora Lee’s Fantasy”, have a bit of a country feel, obviously connecting with Parton’s starring role.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (John Williams, 2001): I believe that this score is John Williams’ best of the 2000s and, in fact, I’m inclined to pick this score as the best of its decade.  The soundtrack runs a little over an hour and covers the most important parts of the score, although I definitely think this title should be a prime candidate for an expanded, complete release.  Some longer promo CDs (I’ve never managed to get a hold of one) were distributed for Academy Award consideration, but a longer commercial release would be extremely welcome.

The film is a very controversial one that generated pretty polarized responses (I was very much on the positive side), but the score was pretty universally acclaimed for its complexity and beauty.  The highlight of the score is a theme fully realized in the track “Where Dreams are Born”, which is one of Williams’ most distinctive and powerful melodies.  This theme represents the film’s central relationship, between the robotic boy David and the adoptive mother that abandons him.  The theme is first introduced in the impressive 10 minute long track “Stored Memories and Monica’s Theme”, which introduces it along side some gentle choral segments.

While the highly-melodic main theme is vital to the more dream-like last portion of the film, the earlier parts of the score tend to be darker in tone with less distinctive melodies.  Especially notable is some unusual instrumentation choices during “The Moon Rising”, including some electronics, strong percussion and wordless vocal chanting.  These definitely put some emphasis on the strangeness of the world depicted in the film’s second act.

The music adapts as the tone of the movie changes, ranging from very dark, percussive music during the mid-section of the film all the way to more traditional fantasy-style scoring, including female chorus, for later parts of the film.  Finally, the concluding scenes are scored with piano-focused versions of the main theme along with some gentle woodwind melodies.

Particularly during the early parts of the film, some of the score does bring to mind some of the musical choices Stanley Kubrick made for 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly a few segments that somewhat resemble the Gayane Ballet.  Of course, A.I. was a planned collaboration between Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, who ended up writing and directing the film after Kubrick’s death.

The soundtrack also includes two versions of the song “For Always”, one performed by Lara Fabian alone and another that is a duet between Fabian and Josh Groban.  The song is not used in the film at all, but the melody is based on the theme featured in “Where Dreams are Born”.  The vocals lend it a fairly haunting quality that fits well with the overall tone of the score.  The solo version seemed a bit more effective to me, with the duet having a bit more of a pop style.  The duet was probably intended as a possible single from the film (perhaps originally intended for the end credits?), although I don’t think it was ever released as one.

The Abyss (Alan Silvestri, 1989): For James Cameron’s first underwater adventure film, Alan Silvestri composed my pick for the best score in any of Cameron’s films to date.  The film crossed several dramas, causing Silvestri to really exercise his flexibility as a composer.  The movie is part military/submarine thriller, part romance, and then concludes with a purely fantasy-driven finale that is more than a little bit inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Silvestri is very successful at providing the right music for each segment, while still making it all sound like part of the same score.

After a short, otherworldly choral “Main Title” cue, the military-thriller component of the score quickly comes into play with the highly percussion-focused “Search the Montana”.  Other strong action-oriented cues include “The Crane”, “The Fight”, and “Sub Battle”.  Silvestri’s tension-filled music for "Lindsay Drowns” added tremendously to the effectiveness of one of the film’s most intense sequences.  The film’s main theme then makes its first really fully-formed appearance in “Resurrection”, the follow-up to that scene.

One of the most interesting cues in the score is “The Pseudopod”, which underscores the film’s much talked about “water tentacle” sequence.  The cue starts off with pretty intense, almost horror movie style music.  Eventually it segues into the more fantasy-oriented music as the characters discover the nature of the visitor and start examining it more closely.  In the end, the music turns sinister as the military commander that served as the film’s antagonist comes into the scene.

The score goes into full fantasy mode with lots of brass and strings accompanied by soaring choral music for the last 3 cues of the CD: “Bud on the Ledge”, “Back On the Air” and “Finale”.  The nearly 7 minute final cue is particularly strong and exciting music and quickly became one of my favorites after I first got the CD back in 1989.  It is still a track that I like to re-play fairly often.

The Accidental Tourist (John Williams, 1989): While John Williams is best known for big, brassy scores for blockbuster action/adventure films, throughout his career he has also been periodically brought in to score much smaller, more dramatic films as well.  His compositions for these projects has typically been very sensitive and often quite beautiful music.

Williams’ score for Lawrence Kasdan’s late 80s drama is primarily built around variations of a distinctive primary melody.  This primary theme is introduced in the Main Title in a version that focuses primarily on piano, but later tracks do provide variations on other instruments, including full orchestra.  Williams does an interesting job of varying the pacing and instrumentation on the theme in order to reflect the changing moods of the main character.

While scores built predominantly around a single theme like this can sometimes feel very repetitive, that really isn’t the case with this one.  The theme is varied sufficiently at various points during the score and Williams does include additional material bridge and counterpoint the main melody as needed.  The relatively short 40 minute running time of the soundtrack also helps.

John Williams’ annual concert of film music with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl has been an annual tradition for me as long as I have lived in Southern California.  I’ve been a huge fan of Williams’ music since I was a kid and I love these regular opportunities to hear his music live, particularly with Williams conducting it himself.

Even though I have continued to attend, and thoroughly enjoy, the concerts every year, my last review was of the 2005 concert.  The concerts are great fun, but the content is basically similar from year to year.  The concerts tend to be targeted more towards the fans of Williams’ mainstream blockbusters than at film score enthusiasts, which results in the selections usually being drawn from a somewhat limited subset of Williams’ exceptional repertoire of compositions.

Williams typically includes a section featuring additional material besides his own during his concerts, sometimes including guest performers.  My interest in those parts has varied from year to year.  Generally, I have most enjoyed those segments when they have been very focused on classic film music that clearly influenced or otherwise connected strongly with Williams.  The second half of this year’s concert featured a lengthy tribute to musicals directed by Stanley Donen, with each piece introduced (in person) by Donen himself.  This was easily my favorite "extra" yet from the Williams’ Hollywood Bowl concerts I have attended.

As is traditional at the Hollywood Bowl, the concert opened with The Star-Spangled Banner, which is always great to hear performed by a full orchestra. I honestly kind of feel bad even complaining about it, but it was hurt a bit this time by someone behind me that was singing along very loudly and very off-key.  Obviously, it is perfectly normal and expected to sing along with the national anthem and I even admire the show of patriotism, but it was still a bit hard to be right in front of rather loud, off-key singing like that.

I wasn’t too surprised that the regular program started with three of Williams’ Olympic themes, considering that the concert was just a week after the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  First was Bugler’s Dream / Olympic Fanfare and Theme, Williams’ very familiar arrangement of the well-known Leo Arnaud piece that has long been the Olympic theme, which then transitions directly into Williams’ popular theme for the 1984 Summer Olympics.  This was followed by Song for World Peace, which Williams didn’t actually write for the Olympics (it was actually written as a tribute to a friend), but which initially was recorded on the American Journey CD that was released in conjunction with the 2002 Winter Olympics.  Although I have that CD and, I think, have even heard the piece at least once before in concert, it isn’t among Williams’ most familiar works and I doubt I would have recognized it without looking in the concert program.  The segment then concluded with Olympic Spirit, Williams’ composition for the 1988 Summer Olympics.  This last piece was accompanied by a video montage from the 2008 games, shown on the Bowl’s large screens.

The next selection was a suite from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is my favorite of John Williams’ film scores.  Even though I’ve heard his standard concert suite performed live quite a few times before, I always am glad when it is included in the program at one of his concerts.  For this performance, it was accompanied by a somewhat oddly chosen video montage that implied that the primary story arc of the film was the progression from the abduction to the eventual return of Barry, the little boy played in the film by Cary Guffey.  In fact, Williams’ spoken introduction to the piece also pretty much explained it that way.  I think this is a somewhat odd interpretation of the film, although I guess it makes a certain amount of sense as the concert suite most prominently features the abduction music and the finale music from the landing of the mothership.

This was followed by "Flight to Neverland" from Hook, one of Williams’ more rousing and soaring themes.  This isn’t one of his best known scores (I noticed a few people around me searching their programs to identify it), but I’ve noticed that this theme seems to have become one of his favorite concert pieces.  I thought the placement was particularly good here, providing a somewhat more melodic and upbeat interlude after the somewhat darker and very complex Close Encounters music.

The first half of the concert ended with a suite of music from Williams’ newest score, this summer’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  The suite included two of the main themes from the film, "The Adventures of Mutt", which accompanied portions of the big truck chase and sword fight late in the film, and "Irina’s Theme", the primary theme for the film’s villain.  These were then followed by a full performance of the familiar "Raiders March", which is essentially a concert version of the end-title suite from Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Williams opened the segment with a short introduction that talked a little bit about how the themes fit into the film as well as a bit about how they were going to be presented.  Surprisingly, he also gave away one fairly major spoiler from the new film, but it was one that has been discussed enough that I suspect even those in the audience that hadn’t seen the film probably already knew it.

During the first selection the video screens only showed various close-ups of the orchestra, but film clips were used during both "Irina’s Theme" and "Raiders March".  The former has a musical style that somewhat brings to mind the scoring of classic film noir, which was underscored by the use of a montage of images of femme fatales from classic films.  The montage did include quite a few images of Cate Blanchett as Irina as well as a few quick shots of the other major female characters from the Indiana Jones films (I especially thought the inclusion of Kate Capshaw in this montage was a bit of a stretch), but most of the clips really were pretty disconnected from what was playing and the montage seemed pretty unnecessary.  The film clips over the "Raiders March" were all from the first three Indiana Jones films, so they obviously were a much better fit.  I did find it a bit unusual that they didn’t use any clips from the new film in that montage, though.

After the intermission, the orchestra opened the second half with Williams’ arrangement of "Hooray for Hollywood!", which also incorporates bits of "There’s No Business Like Show Business".  I’ve heard this arrangement many times before (I think it was originally done for The Boston Pops) and it made a good introduction for the tribute to MGM musicals that dominated the second half.  It is a very peppy, upbeat arrangement that effectively got the audience into the right mood for what was to come.

Williams then introduced Stanley Donen, the famed director/choreographer of numerous musicals for MGM during the 1950s and 1960s.  The orchestra provided live accompaniment to a series of dance numbers from Donen’s films (with the video portion shown on the Bowl’s giant screens), each introduced in a semi-interview by Donen and Williams.  At age 84, Donen is still very spry and sharp and proved himself a charming and amusing storyteller.  Right at the beginning, Williams noted that his own early career had included playing piano on the scores to some of Donen’s films and the two definitely had the rapport that suggested a long-time association.  This led to Williams showing very genuine admiration for Donen, but without ever coming off as fawning or awe-struck. 

The first featured number was "You’re All the World To Me" from Royal Wedding, which accompanies Fred Estaire’s famous gravity-defying dance on the walls and ceiling of the room.  Donen wisely introduced the number by simply describing it and how it fit into the film, holding off on the explanation of how it was filmed (a statically-mounted camera in a room that was inside a giant wheel) for after the audience had already seen the sequence.  It was particularly interesting hearing the explanation for how this was accomplished with 1950s technology, with Donen noting that one of the biggest challenges being that there were no remote-operated cameras in that time, meaning that they had to figure out how to strap down a camera operator in such a way that he could still run the camera and not get overly sick.  A short computer simulation video was used to demonstrate the technique used for the filming, although Donen seemed a bit irritated that they showed it before he was ready for them to do so.

The next number was "Bless Your Beautiful Hide", which accompanies the elaborate barnyard dance sequence from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  This is the only one of the featured numbers that featured more than one or two dancers, basically showcasing choreography of a larger scope than the other featured numbers.  Donen’s introduction to this sequence talked a bit about the decision to use dance to illustrate the country brothers’ challenge against the townsmen for the girls’ affections.  He mentioned that it was a tough sell to convince the producers that dance could be a very athletic and manly activity.  He was pretty blunt as he explained that the producers had told him outright that they feared audiences would assume the brothers were gay.  The basic implication was that Donen saw this as a pretty key film in its role of changing some of the public viewpoint towards dance.

This number, in particular, really emphasized both the skills of the orchestra and Williams’ skill as a conductor as they were able to make the synchronization of live music to filmed dance appear almost effortless.  Even Donen made a point of specifically calling attention to the sheer difficulty of what was being accomplished.  I’ve seen orchestras play film scores live to scenes before, but it is hard to even imagine the precise amount of timing needed to synchronize to dance and still have it work.  Williams commented that he had to watch the scenes pretty much frame-by-frame in order to work plan out the performances.

The next three numbers all came from Donen’s fairly extensive collaboration with Gene Kelly.  The first, and probably least well-known, was "I Like Myself" from It’s Always Fair Weather.  This dance number is especially notable because Kelly performs it entirely on roller skates.  Donen explained that Kelly was already an accomplished skater and that Donen had been searching for an excuse to let him use that skill in a film.  He finally decided that it would work ok here since they could basically suggest that Kelly’s character was in such a happy mood that he just forgot that he was wearing the skates.  Donen admitted that was a stretch, but it was a fun sequence.

Next was "The Worry Song" from Anchors Away, the well-known dance sequence featuring Kelly and Jerry the mouse from the Tom & Jerry cartoons.  Donen’s introduction for this one was a story I had heard before, but it was still fun to hear him tell it.  He talked about how the original idea was for the cartoon character to be Mickey Mouse instead of Jerry.  Louis Mayer was able to arrange a meeting with Donen and Walt Disney, but the answer ultimately was that Mickey doesn’t appear in movies for MGM.  One other interesting tidbit from the intro was that Donen himself danced Jerry’s part as the live-action model for the animators to use.  He said that the sequence ultimately took about a year to complete, which was something of a point of contention with MGM as the executives were not too happy to be sitting on an otherwise completed film that they couldn’t release.

The last number of Donen tribute was the title song from Singin’ In the Rain, almost certainly the most famous sequence that he ever directed.  In his introduction, Donen said that he very frequently is asked what town the sequence was shot in and always has to explain that it was actually filmed on the backlot at MGM Studios (which is now Sony Studios) in Culver City.  The sequence was shot during daylight hours (cheaper to light that way) during a typically dry and warm August.  One complication was that they would typically lose water pressure for the rain-generating machinery by early-afternoon as local residents started watering their lawns.  Donen also talked about the overall complexity of the sequence, including the fact that they had to even carefully measure the depth and positioning of every pothole in order to ensure that every splash was just right.  He did give me some new appreciation for an already very familiar scene.

After the performance of Singin’ In the Rain, Donen left the stage, but quickly returned for a curtain call after the enthusiastic ovation from the audience.  At that point, Williams then stated that he had received a call from Warren Beatty telling him that it would be wrong to have Donen there without asking him to dance.  That was a sufficiently odd bit of name dropping that I can’t help but assume it was true.  The orchestra then played a bit more of the tune to Singin’ In the Rain as Donen danced a few steps.  It wasn’t an awful lot, but it was a pretty impressive performance for someone Donen’s age and the audience certainly got a huge kick out of it.  After that, Donen left the stage again and that part of the program was over.

Williams has long had an obvious affection for solo violin in his music (at least dating back to his work on the film version of Fiddler on the Roof) and, in recent years, his concerts have pretty consistently included at least one piece intended to showcase that instrument.  This year’s concert included a performance of the violin arrangement of Williams’ theme for the remake of Sabrina, with concertmaster Bing Wang expertly playing the solo.  For the film, this piece was actually written to feature a solo piano instead of a violin, but Williams had created this arrangement for the "Cinematic Serenade" CD that he did with Itzhak Perlman a few years back.  It was nice hearing this somewhat less-common arrangement of a piece that isn’t heard all that often anyway.  A little bit of added poignancy came from the recent death of Sabrina director Sydney Pollack, which Williams alluded to but wisely didn’t dwell on in his introduction.

The main program ended with a tribute to the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with the orchestra accompanying a film that Williams indicated had been created for a recent tribute event (I don’t recall what organization).  This medley included the most familiar themes from Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  In his introduction, Williams noted that the film clips (and music) for Raiders would be at least partially a repeat of the performance that closed the first half of the concert, but he felt the audience would still enjoy the tribute.  Since these are probably his most popular works, the sequence was certainly a crowd pleaser.

I may seem like a bit of a party-pooper here, but I did have one big complaint about this segment.  As has now become commonplace during these concerts, a sizeable number of people in the audience started waving around toy lightsabers during the Star Wars portion of this medley.  I know that is something of a crowd pleaser, but I think it ends up being a serious distraction from the music and I’d, quite honestly, be really happy if the Hollywood Bowl would start banning them at the concert.  Basically, when they start up, so many people start focusing on them that it causes a lot of stirring and chatter.  At one point, I was even blinded for a bit when someone across the aisle took a flash photo.  I realize that there are a fair percentage of people at these concerts that are there because they are Star Wars fans, but I would really like to get back to where the fan-behavior takes a backseat to the music.

The Lucas/Spielberg tribute was the last of several segments of the concert that included film clips on the video screens.  This has become a pretty common element to the concerts since the screens were added during the refurbishment of the Bowl a couple years ago, but it is something that I have mixed feelings about.  Unquestionably, the screens were essential to the wonderful Stanley Donen sequence and I also felt that the Olympic clips used during "Olympic Spirit" were very welcome.  I also definitely appreciated the screens during Williams introductions and the interview segments with Donen as well as various solo performances.  Before the screens were there, use of binoculars was usually necessary to see those types of things effectively and the screens work much better.

I’m less enthusiastic about the use of film clips during the various movie score performances.  While film scores are obviously originally written to go along with the film’s visuals, these are typically concert suites and the clips shown on the screen aren’t generally the exact ones that were intended to be synchronized to the music that is playing.  I suppose that the use of clips might make the performances a bit more accessible to the casual fans, but as someone that is used to listening to film scores separate from the films, I find the clips to sometimes be a bit of a distraction.  As a specific example, I particularly enjoy listening to the music from Close Encounters in concert as the music can provide a particularly emotional experience for me when I am fully focused on the performance with minimal distractions.  I found that to be lessened quite a bit due to the film clips, which are extremely difficult to ignore and take some of the attention away from the music. 

Williams usually includes a few encores after the end of the announced program.  The specific encores have generally gotten a bit predictable, but were less so this year since the usual ones (E.T., Raiders, and Star Wars) had already been performed as part of the main program.  He still didn’t have a hard time coming up with familiar pieces from well-known scores for this year’s encores, though. 

The first was "The Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back, which is probably the 2nd most recognizable Star Wars theme after the Main Title music.  The second encore was an extended arrangement of "Marion’s Theme" from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  In his introduction, Williams indicated that the arrangement used was done for Crystal Skull, although it still seemed to be pretty clearly a concert arrangement and this version wasn’t on the soundtrack CD either.  While portions of the theme had been heard as part of the earlier "Raiders March" performances, it was still fun to hear this extended version.  Finally, the concert ended with a performance of the very familiar march from Superman: The Movie.

While I always leave these concerts with a bit of a wish that Williams would dip a bit deeper into his rich history of film scores, I still do thoroughly enjoy hearing the familiar works and the Stanley Donen appearance and tribute was an absolute treat.  This was one of the best of the many John Williams concerts I have attended.

By the time the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out in 1984, the dominance of the multiplex was really starting to take hold.  The sequel opened both at the big single-screen Flint Cinema where Raiders played, but it also opened at a suburban multiplex (the Genesee Valley Theaters) that was much closer to our family’s home.  This was the same release pattern that was used for Return of the Jedi the year before.  My sister and I saw Jedi at the first after-school matinee at the multiplex and then saw the film again that weekend in the better 70mm 6-track Dolby presentation at the Flint Cinema.

We had expected to follow the same basic pattern with Temple of Doom, which was also opening the Wednesday before Memorial Day, a week or so before school let out for the summer.  Much to our surprise, my father had other ideas.  At the time, the local newspaper in Flint came fairly late in the afternoon.  After work, my father was looking through the paper and called my sister and I into the room.  He then showed us the full-page ad for the movie that announced a midnight showing that night at Flint Cinema and asked us if we could promise to still get up and make it to school the next day if we all went to see it.  Of course, our answer was a definite "yes". 

Not being a night person at all, my mother again opted out of the first showing (another good excuse to see the film again soon…), but my father, sister, and I headed out to the theater late that evening.  This was my first experience seeing a midnight movie.  It wasn’t a sold-out show, but the enthusiasm level of the audience was about as high as it could get.  The crowd cheered and applauded at all the right moments and clearly was having a great time.  I particularly got a kick out of the reaction to Indy’s entrance.  The first time we see the character in this film, he is well-groomed and dressed in a white tuxedo.  The audience reacted with applause, although it was a bit restrained and even a little delayed as it took a moment for it to register that it was him.  At the end of the prologue, Indy makes a second entrance dressed in his traditional leather jacket, fedora, bullwhip, etc. and that prompted cheers and wild applause.

I obviously had a much better idea of what to expect than I did prior to the release of the first film, which led to quite a bit more heightened excitement about the film, but also a lot less mystery and surprise.  What I actually liked a lot about the film (and I’m a bigger fan of it than many people are) was that I felt that Lucas and Spielberg really did find some surprising and unexpected directions to take the movie.  Right at the very start, I certainly wasn’t expecting the movie to open with an entire Busby Berkley style musical number.  I even recall momentarily wondering if they were running the wrong movie.  A lot of people were also put off by the darker tone and overall modified structure compared to the first film, but I felt that it made the movie seem a bit fresher than most sequels.  The film was, if anything, even faster paced than the first and, even with the ultra-late showtime, I certainly had no trouble staying awake for the movie.  Yes, I did make it through the school day the next day as well.

I liked the film a lot and did see it several times in the theater that summer, but not as many times as the first film.  In fact, it wasn’t even really the movie that most dominated my attention that summer.  As a 14-year-old boy, I was right in the primary target audience for Ghostbusters, which became my favorite movie of that summer and the one that I gave the most repeat viewing.  The Indiana Jones films have overall likely withstood the test of time better over the last 24 years and I suspect most people might even be a bit surprised to learn that Ghostbusters was actually a bigger box-office hit overall that summer.  Still, it did play through the whole summer and I do recall several return trips to see it again.

In my post on Raiders, I mentioned that the John Williams score was something of a milestone.  While the sequel score wasn’t as much of one, it did come as something of a surprise to me and still remains one of my favorites.  The big surprise was Williams’ decision to abandon all of the themes that he had written for the first film with the exception of the iconic Raiders March.  At that point, I never really had conceived of a sequel score that would essentially start from scratch instead of further developing the first film’s music.  It caught me a bit off-guard, but also appealed to me very much.

I will close with probably the silliest and oddest personal story that relates to this movie.  At the very end of the credits is a somewhat cryptic credit that simply says "Thanks to Reed Smoot".  Being a couple teenagers, my sister and I both thought that was kind of a funny name and were also intrigued by the mysterious credit.  It then became a running joke for the two of us for quite some time, with us often joking about being the only members of the "Reed Smoot Fan Club".  Without the vast information available online today, we didn’t have any success finding any information on Mr. Smoot.  We were pretty sure he wasn’t the early-20th century Utah Senator that was the only reference we found to the name.  I now know that Mr. Smoot is actually a respected cinematographer that is best known for his work on a variety of IMAX features.  He apparently did some second-unit photography work on the film, which was the basis of the credit.  If Mr. Smoot ever stumbles on this, I hope he doesn’t mind that a couple silly teenagers had some goofy fun with his credit.

With 19 years having past since we last saw Indy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and 27 years since the character was first introduced in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I’m part of a likely pretty large group of adults who will be going into this new movie with a hope of recapturing a little bit of magic from my childhood.  I was only 11-years-old when the first movie came out and was 14 and 18 when the previous sequels came out.  As a long-time movie enthusiast, I probably would list other films (including others by Spielberg and Lucas) as somewhat higher on both my lists of favorites and bests, but I can think of very few that invoke more fond memories or that had quite as much influence on my love of movies and my cinematic preferences.

When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out back in 1981, I was already a fan of the Star Wars films (The Empire Strikes Back came out one year earlier) and, not surprisingly, was immediately very receptive to the promotion of a new George Lucas movie starring Harrison Ford.  My older sister (who was 14 at the time) also had a definite movie-star crush on Ford, which also helped to build our family’s interest in the movie.

The first that I ever heard about the film remains my pick for possibly the most amusingly wrong magazine article I’ve ever seen about a movie.  I don’t remember the specific publication (although my sister may still have the clipping somewhere in her files), but it was a movie rumors column in either a teen magazine or a general entertainment magazine of some sort.  The short article ran right around the time that The Empire Strikes Back was released and announced that the 3rd film in the Star Wars series would be coming out only one year later and would center around the character of Han Solo.  The title of this new film would be "Lost Raiders of the Ark".  I’m sure that whoever wrote that is very proud…

Back in 1981, I didn’t really follow the movies very closely and certainly didn’t have access to the kind of ready information on the topic that is out there today.  For the most part, the first real awareness of Raiders came primarily when the ads started hitting.  Back then, George Lucas and, especially, Steven Spielberg were not really household names, so the ads heavily promoted the movie as "From the creator of Star Wars and the director of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind".  As I said, the Star Wars connections were the big draw for me, although I had seen and enjoyed Close Encounters (but only on TV).  I didn’t see Jaws until a few years later.  After seeing Raiders, I quickly became a Spielberg fan, something that really solidified a year later when our family went out to see a sneak preview of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial without knowing much of anything about the film other than that it was from the same director.

My father took my sister, my best friend, and me to see the first evening showing of Raiders on its opening night.  We were living in Flint, Michigan at the time and saw the movie at The Flint Cinema, an old-fashioned single-screen theater.  Built in the late 60s shortly after the end of the movie palace era, it wasn’t anything overly fancy but was mainly known for a large screen and 70mm, 6-track Dolby presentation.  I think Raiders was actually the first film we saw there as the first two Star Wars films had opened at the nearby Eastland Mall Cinemas instead.  The movie pretty much blew us all away.  We knew it was supposed to be a fast-paced adventure movie, but I don’t think any of us really were prepared for the scope of the film or the sheer level of adrenaline it would pump.

My Mom wasn’t originally sure she was that interested in the movie (she hadn’t really liked Star Wars) and decided that she didn’t feel like dealing with the opening night crowds for the movie.  We, of course, all came home and told her that she needed to see the movie as soon as possible and we all went out to see it with her the next weekend.   As a joke, we all conspired ahead of time to repeatedly warn her that the movie started out very slowly, but promising her that it got better as it went along.  As you might expect, the very exciting opening sequence in the idol cave caught her very much off-guard.  She really loved the movie, although the intensity did get to her a bit at times.  She was holding my Dad’s hand during much of the movie and afterwards they laughed that she instinctively pulled her hand to her mouth, thus biting my Dad, during the Well-of-Souls sequence when the snake climbed out of the skeleton’s mouth.

Over the course of that summer, this became the first movie that my sister and I went to see multiple times in the theaters during its initial release (we had seen Star Wars and a few Disney films more than once due to re-releases).  By the end of the film’s run, I saw it a total of 13 times.  My father absolutely fell in love with the movie as well and went along with us to many of those showings.  Prior to that, he had never been much of a movie fan and didn’t typically see anything more than once.

John Williams score to the movie also represented a bit of a milestone for me.  I had started to become interested in movie scores a couple years earlier.  My interest was first sparked by John Barry’s orchestral score to Disney’s The Black Hole, which ended up being the first score soundtrack that I purchased.  My interest expanded dramatically after getting first The Empire Strikes Back and then the original Star Wars soundtracks and I then started a collection of movie score LP’s from movies involving outer space.  Over a year or so, I bought a bunch of albums including Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Superman, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc.  After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark and hearing Williams amazing music for the film, I immediately wanted that soundtrack.  It was at that point, that my interest really broadened to film scores in general instead of just to souvenirs of space movies.  This really established my musical tastes for the long term as film scores remain the dominant part of my collection and my music purchases today.

I loved the sequels and have certainly been very impressed and excited by other action/adventure movies over the years as well.  I think Raiders will always hold a very special place in my memory, though, and I don’t really believe any other movie will ever quite match the surprise and excitement that surrounded this one.

A concert review by Jeffrey Graebner

John Williams conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in a film music concert at the Hollywood Bowl has been an annual summer tradition for me ever since I moved to Southern California in 1996. The Friday, September 2, 2005 concert featured a good mix of selections from Williams’ own film scores as well as a few selections from other celebrated film composers.

Including a couple summers where Williams conducted multiple concerts, this was the 11th concert of his that I have attended at the Bowl. Adding a couple earlier concerts with the Boston Pops as well as one concert of mainly non-film compositions at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, this was the 14th time that I have seen Williams conduct a live concert. I’ve been a film score enthusiast since I was around 10-years-old, with Williams’ compositions being important to establishing and continuing that preference.

As is typical of Williams’ Hollywood Bowl concerts, this one featured a good mix of his extremely well-known selections as well as a few that will be very familiar to film score enthusiasts, but probably not to the more mainstream audiences that make up the bulk of the attendees. It came as no surprise that the program was dominated by his scores to films by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, but there were a few less widely recognized selections, including the welcome inclusion of some works by other film composers.

As with most concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, this one got off to a patriotic start with a performance of The Star-Spangled Banner, which was then well complemented by a performance of The Liberty Fanfare, the concert piece that Williams wrote to commemorate the re-dedication of The Statue of Liberty following its refurbishment in the late 1980s. Either this piece and/or one of Williams’ Olympic themes are usually included even when the remainder of the concert is all film music. This is a very rousing and inspirational piece that helps to quickly pull the audience into the concert. These two opening pieces were the only non-film compositions included in the concert.

A definite shift in tone came next as, without any commentary, Williams transitioned into a pair of suites illustrating opposite views of alien visitation. First was a suite from Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that featured one of the most famous, and my personal favorite, Williams’ scores. While this was definitely not the first time I had heard a suite of music from this film performed at one of the concerts, it is always a very welcome inclusion.

The highly melodic, almost magical tones of the Close Encounters theme were then followed by the much darker and foreboding music from Spielberg’s film of War of the Worlds, which was released earlier this summer. This was Williams’ first time conducting music from this score in concert and, while it was very interesting to hear, I tend to doubt that it is going to become a concert staple. The exciting, action-oriented cue “Escape from the City” seems more likely to be used as an occasional change-of-pace interlude in future concerts than the very dark, downright mournful “Epilogue”, which was also featured.

After this segment, Williams addressed the audience for the first time during the concert giving a brief acknowledgement and expression of sympathy regarding the tragic impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and other areas of the gulf coast. In a well-chosen turn of phrase, he brought a little bit of musical context to the tribute by expressing a hope that “the saints would soon go marching home again.”

He then introduced a tribute to the great film composers Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin, and Elmer Bernstein, all of whom passed away in 2004. He very effectively personalized his relationship to all of them by telling how, early in his career, he had played piano under each of them. The orchestra then performed Goldsmith’s theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Raksin’s theme from Laura, and Bernstein’s theme from The Magnificant Seven. These pieces are easily the most familiar compositions by each composer and that they are so instantly recognizable likely helped the non-enthusiasts in the audience to connect immediately with the music, even if they had not previously been familiar with the composers. Of course, each is also an outstanding work and it is always a pleasure to hear them performed.

Continuing with the tribute to great composers of the past, the first half of the concert concluded with Miklos Rozsa’s “Parade of the Charioteers” from Ben Hur, another familiar piece that many in the audience had likely never heard performed live before. Williams’ Hollywood Bowl concerts attract a lot of casual fans that are coming primarily to hear his most famous works and I have always admired his usual inclusion of at least one or two classic works from other composers in order to expose fine works of film music to a somewhat different audience.

After the intermission, the second half of the concert opened with a fun medley called “Monsters, Beauties, Heroes”, arranged by Williams. This medley opened with Max Steiner’s King Kong and Williams’ theme from Jaws. In one of the strangest transitions imaginable (which somehow worked), it then continued into the next segment with music from Casablanca by Max Steiner and Hugo Friedhofer’s music from An Affair to Remember. The final segment of the three-part medley then featured Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood and then closed with Williams’ fanfare from Superman.

During a major refurbishment of the facility prior to the 2003 season, the Hollywood Bowl added large video screens. For most of the concert, it was used for close-ups of Williams and the orchestra, using a similar visual style to televised concerts such as PBS’ Evening at Pops. For “Monsters, Romance, and Heroes”, the screens instead featured a montage of movie stills appropriate to each segment. For “monsters”, the screens showed movie villains ranging from Lon Cheney’s Phantom and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula to Freddie Kruger and Hannibal Lecter. The “beauties” segment showed leading ladies from Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe to Nicole Kidman and Meg Ryan. Finally the “heroes” were as wide ranging as Errol Flynn as Robin Hood to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. The segment closed with an image of Christopher Reeve as Superman as Williams’ famous fanfare concluded, bringing a thunderous ovation from the crowd.

After this amusing opening, Williams next led the orchestra in a lengthy suite from his score to Far and Away. While the film, which I consider to be somewhat underappreciated, was not the hit that was expected from a big-budget epic directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the score holds up very well and has remained a staple of Williams’ concerts. The Irish-inspired melodies and sweeping orchestral passages provide for very energetic live performances.

In several recent concerts, Williams has used a somewhat more sedate arrangement of the Far and Away themes featuring solo violin, which was created for the “Cinema Serenade” album that Williams recorded with Yo Yo Ma. While that arrangement is very well-done, I was pleased that Williams chose to return to the original film’s full orchestra arrangements for this concert. For live performances at a venue the size of the Hollywood Bowl, I simply believe that the film’s arrangements are more effective.

During the second half of the concert, the orchestra was joined on stage by a full choir, identified in the program as the Cal State Fullerton University Singers. The choir first joined into the performance with the next selection, “Dry Your Tears, Afrika” from Williams’ score to Spielberg’s Amistad. This stirring work features the choir singing lyrics in the African Mende language accompanied by a full orchestral accompaniment. This is a very powerful piece even in the film and on the soundtrack CD and it is really quite remarkable performed live. While the film is not one of Spielberg’s most popular or best-reviewed efforts, it is a very good thing that this piece has remained in Williams’ concert repertoire.

The next selection was the theme from Williams’ Oscar-winning score to Spielberg’s highly-acclaimed film Schindler’s List. The orchestra’s first-chair violinist, Bing Wang, was the soloist. While a large, outdoor venue like the Hollywood Bowl isn’t the perfect venue for this sad, reverent piece, it still managed to retain a very large portion of its power. More any other of Williams’ compositions, this one seems to hold a very strong connection to the film and its subject, which is reflected in the generally highly respectful reaction of the audience during live performances. The nature of the venue does result in a bit of background noise (whispering, people moving around, rustling of food and beverage containers, etc.) that pretty much completely came to a halt during this portion of the concert.

After a couple heavier, more serious pieces, the concert then shifted to a series of pieces from the Star Wars films. Not surprisingly, this portion of the concert opened with “Battle of the Heroes”, the concert arrangement of the music that Williams wrote for the lightsaber duel at the climax of Revenge of the Sith, released earlier this summer. This dark, but exciting work very effectively uses the full orchestra and choir. It played very well live and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it shows up pretty regularly at film music concerts that include a choir.

Williams next went back to the original Star Wars trilogy for a performance of “Luke and Leia” from Return of the Jedi. This is one of the tenderest pieces from Williams’ scores for the series and it provided an effective bridge to the next selection, “Duel of the Fates” from The Phantom Menace, another dark, choral piece. “Duel of the Fates” has become one of the most familiar pieces in the series and I noticed that this was the point when some of the Star Wars fans in the audience pulled out toy lightsabers. This led me wonder, rather amusedly, if those fans had even realized that the previous two selections had also been from the series. While “Duel of the Fates” was the end of the announced program for the evening, Williams continued the Star Wars segment by featuring “Yoda’s Theme” from The Empire Strikes Back as the evening’s first encore.

For the past several years, the majority of Williams’ concerts have ended with encores of what are probably his three most famous pieces: “Raiders March” from Raiders of the Lost Ark, “Main Title” from Star Wars, and “Flying” from E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial. The order sometimes varies from concert to concert, but the encores usually feature those three selections, which are always received very appreciatively by the audience. I do sometimes wonder if Williams could get away with varying the performance a bit by using the main title from one of the other Star Wars films and/or the end title from one of the Indiana Jones sequels, since the most familiar themes would still be included. It is amusing that “Raiders March” always generates two separate sets of applause, first from the portion of the audience that recognizes it from the beginning and then a second set from those that recognize the familiar melody, but not the introduction. Williams does have a tendency to milk the audience for as much applause as possible, through numerous curtain calls. That is pretty forgivable, though, since it is rather unusual for an orchestral conductor/composer to ever have the opportunity to generate that kind of audience response.

Overall, I think that Williams does a pretty effective job accommodating the desire of the mainstream audience to hear his most familiar music while also performing some of his less-known pieces and even exposing the audience to some classic works by other composers. I do wish that the Hollywood Bowl would start providing every patron with a free program (currently they charge $1) or Williams would identify each piece ahead of time in order to cut back on the whispering of “what is this from?” that typically can be heard whenever a less-familiar piece is performed.

As a film score enthusiast, I would love for these performances to dig even deeper into his vast catalog, but I also can easily understand the need to keep these concerts accessible to the audience. Other than the brand-new music from War of the Worlds and Revenge of the Sith, I had previously heard live performances of all of Williams’ compositions included in the concert, but obviously most attendees would not have been to as many of his concerts as I had been. Certainly, the music is good enough to warrant hearing it again and again.

Copyright 2005, Jeffrey Graebner

Steven Spielberg’s new adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel War of the Worlds contains many of the conventional elements of the mainstream disaster movie and adds an unusual layer of realism, both in style and characterizations. The result is a genuinely scary film that maintains a very high level of tension and excitement.

The film, which was adapted by screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp (the latter also adapted Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World for Spielberg) pretty closely follows the structure of Wells’ novel, but transports the setting from 19th century London to present day New York. The central character of an absentee father (Tom Cruise) trying to escort his children to safety is created for the film, a smart decision as Wells novel was told through the eyes of an undeveloped first-person observer, an approach that wouldn’t likely work as well on film.

Cruise gives a good performance as Ray, a man who initially is not very sympathetic or heroic, but is ultimately forced to find some maturity and parental instincts by the extreme circumstances of the alien invasion. The character is a variation of the charming, cocky, but irresponsible persona that Cruise has frequently portrayed in past films and it is interesting seeing those traits treated more as negatives that need to be overcome instead of strengths, a somewhat natural progression as Cruise has become older and is naturally going to be playing characters with greater responsibilities. Ray is likable, but clearly a lousy parent who has to struggle to gain enough trust from his children to provide any chance that he can keep them safe.

Dakota Fanning gives a very convincing performance as Rachel, Ray’s 10-year-old daughter, continuing the tradition of very strong child performances in Spielberg’s films. I was particularly impressed by the realism of the character. Rachel does not act like a typically precocious movie child, but instead her reactions seem very realistic for a 10-year-old placed into horrifying circumstances. Instead of being a pillar of strength, as movie kids sometimes are, she truly seems like a frightened child. I particularly appreciated the inclusion of several scenes where Ray and the older son put a great deal of effort into trying to shield her from some of the horrors going on all around.

The teenage son, Robbie, played by Justin Chatwin, is also more realistically portrayed than I initially expected. At first, it seems like the character is going to be the typically morose and disinterested movie teen, but there is more complexity there as the character reveals some unexpected heroism and strength. Some of the film’s most effective character moments come from the conflicts between Robbie’s youthful impulse to get involved and fight back and Ray’s parental instinct to keep his child safe.

Of course, this film isn’t primarily a character-oriented film and the main attraction is going to be the special effects and action. Spielberg wastes no time getting into the core of the alien invasion story and the tension rarely lets up throughout the nearly 2-hour running time. It very effectively builds up a powerful overriding sense of dread and hopelessness that is very unusual for this type of mainstream disaster movie. Unlike the more traditional recent genre efforts (such as Independence Day or Armageddon), there is an unexpected sense of authenticity to the emotions prompted by the unfolding events. I suspect this more authentic portrayal of events in a disaster movie was part of Spielberg’s motivation for making this film, particularly in an era in which recent real world events make it a bit harder to accept this kind of destruction being taken lightly. While the film is overall probably the most downbeat of Spielberg’s mainstream blockbusters, he still is able to recognize the points where a little bit of humor is needed. Generally, these bits of humor come from the character dialog and never seem out-of-place or out-of-character.

Stylistically, this film does not have the slickness that you might expect from a big-budget blockbuster in this genre. Visually, the previous Spielberg film that this most resembles is Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg and his long-time cinematographer Janusz Kaminski forgo the use of a widescreen format and use handheld photography and muted colors and lighting to generate a gritty, somewhat dirty, often first-person look to the proceedings. The grainy, 35mm photography makes for an interesting contrast to the slick, widescreen digital approach that Spielberg’s friend and sometimes collaborator George Lucas used on his recently-released final Star Wars film.

There are some very spectacular set pieces showing death and destruction, but they aren’t gleeful or exploitative and instead inspire a realistic sense of horror in the viewer. Spielberg also shows his skill for building a great deal of tension with some smaller sequences, including an intensely frightening sequence involving a panicked crowd and a very tense, extended sequence featuring Tim Robbins in a strong supporting performance as a man whom the circumstances have pushed over the edge of sanity. This sequence concludes with a final confrontation that is made exceptionally powerful by Spielberg’s decision to keep it off-screen.

If you are looking for a movie that revels in the destruction, this probably isn’t the right movie to see. A number of sequences and images in this film leave a lingering impression that may be a bit hard to shake. While the film is sufficiently restrained to have achieved a PG-13 rating, the overall intensity of this film is such that parents should give careful consideration (and possibly pre-screen the film) before taking their kids.

The visual design of the alien tri-pods very convincingly realizes the descriptions that are included in Wells’ novel. The film also includes a few visual nods to George Pal’s previous film version as well. Spielberg shows great restraint by holding of on showing the aliens themselves until very late in the film and even then the sequence is fairly short. Again the visual design is faithful to Wells’ descriptions.

With his 21st score for a Spielberg directed feature film, composer John Williams once again adds a very important element to the film’s success. The music is among William’s darkest and most intense compositions, often adding immeasurably to the sense of dread. This score does not have the distinctive melodic themes common to most of Williams’ other scores, instead having a more abstract, even atonal, quality. It probably isn’t a soundtrack album that I will listen to very often, but the score is absolutely right for the film.

The sound design on the film is also very good, with some extremely skillful use of surround sound. Very distinctive sounds are used to signal the arrival of the alien tri-pods (much the same way that the booming footsteps were used to signal the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) and sound is also often used to convey off-screen events, basically allowing your hearing and your imagination to generate the images. There is even one very effective scene in which the screen is completely black while a key event is conveyed entirely through sound.

Of course, this is the third theatrical film that Spielberg has directed about aliens visiting the Earth. While this film really has little in common with E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (although there is one short bit that I think was an intentional, but subtle reference), there actually are some stylistic similarities to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, despite the obvious difference in the intent and nature of the aliens. The earlier film had some rather tense sequences prior to the point where we learned the aliens intentions and some of that is echoed in this film. The previously-mentioned panicked crowd sequence, in particular, has some echoes of a similar sequence in the earlier film.

The one small complaint that I had about the film is that the ending, while appropriate and generally faithful to Wells’ novel, seems to come a bit abruptly. It is generally the right ending for this movie (although there is one character-oriented decision that I found a bit questionable), but it felt like it could have used a bit more build-up than it received. There seems to be a bit of a leap in time and place that could have used a bit more connecting material. It isn’t a fatal flaw, by any means, but it does cause the film to ultimately fall a bit short of the potential suggested during the first 3/4 of its running time.

Despite this slight flaw, this is still a fine addition to Spielberg’s impressive body of work and an overall very satisfying adaptation of one of the true classic works of science fiction.

Copyright 2005, Jeffrey Graebner