MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

The Fugitive is one of the best action thriller movies of the 1990s. It’s a big screen remake of the massively popular 1963 TV series, and sees Harrison Ford taking over from David Janssen in the title role as Dr Richard Kimble, an acclaimed Chicago vascular surgeon. One night, after coming home from a fundraiser, Kimble finds his beloved wife Helen (Sela Ward) fatally wounded, having been attacked by a one-armed man, who escapes after a fight. However, a mountain of misinterpreted circumstantial evidence leads to Kimble being wrongfully arrested and convicted of the murder. While on his way to death row, his prison transport bus crashes, and Kimble is able to escape. Enter US Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), a dogged and gruff but dedicated investigator, who is charged with re-capturing Kimble. So begins a terrific game of cat-and-mouse as Kimble tries to discover the identity of the real killer before Gerard catches up with him. The film was directed by Andrew Davis, and co-stars Joe Pantoliano, Andreas Katsulas, and Jeroen Krabbé, as well as Julianne Moore and Jane Lynch in early supporting roles.

As I said, The Fugitive is a terrific film, one of my all-time favorite thrillers. It has some outstanding set pieces – the bus/train crash, the chase through the dam and the leap from the spillway, the chase sequence through a Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and more – and Ford is perfectly cast as Kimble, a decent man caught in terrible circumstances who will do anything to clear his name. It has a clever plot, and it’s shot to really highlight the Chicago setting. However, the undoubted star of the show is Tommy Lee Jones as the wise-cracking, outwardly curt, but thoughtful and empathetic US marshal Gerard, who gradually comes to realize that Kimble is telling the truth. The performance earned Jones the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1992, and well deserved it was too, even leading to the character getting his own spinoff movie, U.S. Marshals in 1998. The Fugitive received several other Oscar nominations too, including Best Picture, Best Director, Cinematography, Editing, and for James Newton Howard’s original score.

The score for the original Fugitive TV series was a combination of original music by composer Pete Rugolo, plus tracked-in library music by a bevy of other composers, most notably Dominic Frontiere. What all this music had in common was its roots in the popular 1960s jazz style, and this also helped inform the music that James Newton Howard eventually wrote some three decades later. In an interview for the website Consequence of Sound, Howard recalls that he had a difficult time scoring the film, saying “When I was hired for it, I was terrified.” He became more despondent after listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s work, which he had been using as placeholders for scenes that needed music, and he wasn’t confident that he could match the quality of those temporary cues, but he refused to quit, eventually conceding that his score would be a “quasi-failure.” He was particularly dissatisfied with his work on the chase scenes, believing his string arrangements were too awkward. When he received an Academy Award nomination, Howard said he “was completely shocked. I just didn’t think [my score] was worthy of a nomination, but that’s often what happens. It worked, and the movie was so good. It makes everybody look better.”

In fact, in my opinion, Howard’s score was very worthy of its Oscar nomination; in the film it works like gangbusters, giving Kimble’s plight the jazzy, gloomy air of a Raymond Chandler gumshoe, while injecting a relentless energy into the action sequences. The score actually starts out quite slowly in the “Main Titles,” with suspenseful string passages, and glassy synth textures that eventually give way to a moody, darkly romantic elegy underscoring the attack on Kimble’s wife, his subsequent arrest, interrogation, and wrongful conviction, all in the film’s first few minutes. There are hints of the piece that eventually becomes the score’s main theme, but they are fragmented at this early stage, foreshadowings of what is to come.

Instead, the score immediately moves into the first of several outstanding action sequences in “The Storm Drain,” which sees Gerard chasing Kimble through the bowels of a hydro-electric dam, and eventually cornering him at the edge of a vertiginous spillway – from which Kimble leaps in a desperate bid for freedom. Howard scores the scene with a variety of impressionistic percussive ideas – staccato piano lines, an unusual huffing-and-puffing breathing idea, metallic clanking, and highly rhythmic orchestral outbursts in unusual time signatures – that really adds to the intensity of the sequence.

With Kimble having resolutely now become a fugitive from law, Howard properly introduces his main Fugitive theme in “Kimble Dyes His Hair”. It’s a languid, brooding, darkly heroic theme arranged initially for high violins layered over ground basses, but which then gives way to a moody oboe variation that has some echoes of Howard Shore and The Silence of the Lambs. The second half of the cue is more determined and resolute, blending the theme with contemporary percussion and electronic textures, as well as saxophone improvisations courtesy of Howard’s old friend Wayne Shorter – they worked together on the score for Glengarry Glen Ross in 1992. This ‘determination motif’ is actually very prominent in the film itself, usually accompanying scenes or montages of Kimble making some new discovery, coming closer to identifying the one-armed man, or lifting the veil on the conspiracy that lies at the heart of the entire story.

The second main action sequence is the “Helicopter Chase,” which in film context actually occurs before the hydro-electric dam sequence, when Gerard is tracking Kimble from the air as he tries to escape from them in a stolen ambulance. The cue is a knockout; it is filled with dense, complicated rhythmic ideas that shift aggressively between strings, jazzy pianos, low brass, and energetic percussion, occasionally erupting into bold dark fanfares. It’s a quintessential James Newton Howard action sequence, the stylistics of which later inform several of his influential mid-90s action scores, including Wyatt Earp, Waterworld, and The Postman, among others. I love the intricacy of the orchestrations here – how the rhythms move so fluidly between different sections of the orchestra, French horns to cellos to xylophones to cymbals to violins and beyond – but how it all feels so natural. It’s just outstanding.

“The Fugitive Theme” is actually a jazz trio concert arrangement of the main theme, and was intentionally included on the album as a way to showcase Shorter’s performance; in the film, many of the cues that were intended to feature him were excised from the final cut by the film’s producer Peter MacGregor-Scott, who gave director Davis clear instructions to favor sound effects over score. The piece is superb, and captures perfectly the loneliness and weariness of Kimble’s life on the run as he fights to clear his name. The piano performance in the cue is by James Newton Howard himself, while Chuck Domanico plays acoustic bass.

The subsequent “Subway Fight” and “Stairway Chase” continue on with the action stylistics to excellent effect; the former has a much more violent attitude, while the latter accompanies Kimble as he escapes from Gerard and his team at the Chicago city courthouse on foot, and eventually vanishes into a handily-placed St. Patrick’s Day parade. Those brilliantly jazzy piano runs, combined with frantic strings and wild percussion hits, ratchet up the tension enormously. On the other hand, “Kimble Returns” and “No Press” are more low-key cues of orchestral suspense and drama, and are filled with low string passages, electronic textures, and undulating woodwind figures, which occasionally rise to present brooding revelatory crescendos, references to the ‘determination motif,’ or more of that impressionistic Wayne Shorter saxophone jazz.

“Sykes’ Apt.” is the album’s penultimate cue, underscoring the scene where Kimble finally discovers the identity of the one-armed man who murdered his wife. Howard scores the scene with more of that understated suspense and light dissonance, keening strings and bubbling electronic textures, and some more references to the ‘determination motif’. This all leads to the conclusive “It’s Over,” which underscores the film’s climactic scene in which Kimble – having revealed the real killer, and the mastermind of the entire plot, to Gerrard – is symbolically arrested and led away, safe in the knowledge that he has finally been exonerated. Here, Howard allows his main theme to emerge into something approaching a heroic sweep, albeit one which is filled with a palpable sense of relief. The strings lead the melodic line into a Hollywood sweep as the end credits roll, justice having finally been served.

The original album of The Fugitive ran for just over 40 minutes, and is an enjoyable listening experience in its own right, but it was missing some significant passages of music, notably the entire opening bus/train crash sequence that allows Kimble to escape in the first place, the entire conclusive confrontation between Kimble and Nichols in the laundry room of a luxury hotel, and several additional action and suspense scenes along the way. Thankfully, in 2009, La-La Land Records and producers Dan Goldwasser, MV Gerhard, and Matt Verboys released a 2-CD 3000-copy limited edition of the complete score, expanded to more than two hours of music, including alternate cues and bonus tracks; it’s definitely worth picking up for fans of the film.

Although James Newton Howard himself didn’t think his score was Academy Award material, The Fugitive has nevertheless gone on to be regarded as one of the quintessential action scores of the composer’s career. It’s a superb work that blends languid jazz and blues with aggressive, complicated, intricate action music – a perfect combination of his own developing stylistics, and appropriate acknowledgements of the film’s own 1960s TV roots. If you have to conduct a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in your area to find a copy – well, then you need to do that.

Buy the Fugitive soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• ORIGINAL RELEASE
• Main Titles (3:51)
• The Storm Drain (4:25)
• Kimble Dyes His Hair (4:24)
• Helicopter Chase (4:50)
• The Fugitive Theme (3:05)
• Subway Fight (2:26)
• Kimble Returns (3:07)
• No Press (4:56)
• Stairway Chase (2:32)
• Sykes’ Apt. (4:19)
• It’s Over (3:43)

• LA-LA LAND EXPANDED RELEASE
• Main Title (3:50)
• The Trial (4:31)
• The Bus (4:56)
• The Hand/The Hunt/The Tow Truck (4:04)
• The Hospital (4:06)
• Helicopter Chase/ (4:49)
• The Sewer (4:24)
• Kimble in the River (1:52)
• The Dream/Kimble Dyes His Hair (2:45)
• Copeland Bust (1:59)
• Kimble Calls His Lawyer/No Press (1:57)
• Kimble Returns to Hospital (3:06)
• The Montage/Cops Bust the Boys/Computer Search (6:50)
• Kimble Saves the Boy (2:54)
• Gerard Computes (1:49)
• The Courthouse/Stairway Chase (6:13)
• Cheap Hotel/Sykes’ Apartment (4:37)
• Kimble Calls Gerard (2:37)
• Memorial Hospital/It’s Not Over Yet (3:03)
• See a Friend/Sykes Marks Kimble (2:12)
• This is My Stop/El Train Fight (4:02)
• The Hotel (2:42)
• Roof Fight Pt. 1/Roof Fight Pt. 2/Nichols Reappears (3:52)
• The Elevator/The Laundry Room (4:58)
• It’s Over/End Credits (5:40)
• The Fugitive Theme (3:04) – Original Album Suite
• Kimble Dyes His Hair (4:23) – Original Album Suite
• No Press (4:57) – Original Album Suite
• No Press (Alternate) (0:45) – Bonus
• No Press (No Sax) (1:31) – Bonus
• Cops Bust the Boys (Alternate) (1:09) – Bonus
• Computer Search (No Sax) (2:49) – Bonus
• Roof Fight Pt. 1 (Less Percussion) (1:57) – Bonus
• Roof Fight Pt. 2 (Less Orch Verb) (1:17) – Bonus
• Helicopter Chase/The Sewer (Synth Demos) (7:44) – Bonus
• Piano End Credits (2:47) – Bonus

Running Time: 41 minutes 38 seconds – Original
Running Time: 126 minutes 11 seconds – Expanded

Elektra 8-61592-2 (1993)
La-La Land Records LLLCD-1112 (1993/2009)

Music composed by James Newton Howard. Conducted by Marty Paich. Orchestrations by Chris Boardman, Brad Dechter and James Newton Howard. Featured musical soloist Wayne Shorter. Recorded and mixed by Dan Wallin. Edited by Jim Weidman. Score produced by James Newton Howard and Michael Mason. La-La Land album produced by Dan Goldwasser, MV Gerhard and Matt Verboys.