MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Despite Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven winning Best Picture at the 1992 Oscars, and despite the efforts of films like Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, the Western genre was still struggling to return to mainstream popularity in the 1990s. The 1994 film Bad Girls, directed by Jonathan Kaplan, was another attempt to reinvigorate the genre, albeit this time with a significantly feminist spin. The story is set in the 1860s and centers around four women – Cody (Madeleine Stowe), Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson), Eileen (Andie MacDowell), and Lilly (Drew Barrymore) – whose lives intersect after a harrowing incident at the home of a brutal brothel owner, where they are forced to defend themselves, and kill a would-be rapist. Following this event, the women decide to break away from their troubled pasts and set out on a journey of freedom across the American frontier – all while being pursued by Pinkerton agents determined to bring the ‘bad girls’ to justice. The film co-starred James Russo, James LeGros, Robert Loggia, and Dermot Mulroney, and boasted handsome and authentic production values, but unfortunately was a box office flop and critical misfire, with many people pointing to fact that original director Tamra Davis was fired a few weeks into production, and that her more serious intentions for the film were changed in order to make it more action-packed and mainstream.

The score for Bad Girls was written by Jerry Goldsmith, who was re-teaming with director Kaplan after they worked together on Love Field in 1992. Goldsmith was no stranger to the western genre; his first ever theatrical score, Black Patch from 1957, was a western, and some of his most popular scores include classic titles such as Rio Conchos, Rio Lobo, Wild Rovers, and my personal favorite, Take a Hard Ride from 1975, among many others. However, what Goldsmith was doing on the westerns he scored in the 1960s and 70s is quite different from what he was asked to do on Bad Girls. Whereas Wild Rovers and others were ‘revisionist’ westerns which sought to remove a lot of the romanticism and glamor in favor of gritty realism, Bad Girls is much more in the vein of the classic westerns of Elmer Bernstein and Jerome Moross – bold, sweeping, thematic, and filled with action and adventure.

It may come as something as a surprise to contemporary readers, but in the 1990s during the fledgling days of the internet and the various film music message boards, Jerry Goldsmith received a lot of criticism, and I distinctly remember Bad Girls being the recipient of a great deal of ire and vitriol from many quarters, all of whom dismissed it in favor of his more serious, more challenging work from the 1960s and 70s. At the time I never understood this, and with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight I understand it even less now – personally, I think Bad Girls is an excellent score, a fun and enjoyable western adventure built around an excellent and memorable main theme. Sure, it doesn’t have the sophistication and intellectual depth of some of those classic genre works, but that doesn’t mean one has to dismiss it out of hand entirely.

The aforementioned excellent and memorable main theme is the score’s centerpiece, a bold and rambunctious motif that accompanies the quartet of bad girls on their numerous adventures, and which is malleable enough to be adapted into several distinct emotional settings.

In the opening cue “The John,” for example, Goldsmith presents the theme in a soft, pastoral arrangement for keyboards and guitars backed by soft strings, giving the ‘old life’ of the girls something of a lovely, romantic edge, in that inimitable Goldsmith style. However, in the first half of the subsequent “The Hanging,” Goldsmith opens the theme up in a broad, energetic action style, the melody carried by bright horns backed by swirling, heroic strings and tambourine-led percussive rhythms. Then, in the cue’s second half, the theme becomes reflective and a little poignant, stripped down to a simple arrangement for oboe and guitar, before returning to its action setting for a final flourish. The action writing here is pure 1990s Goldsmith – there are echoes of the stylistics of everything from Total Recall and The Shadow to First Knight and others – and, personally, I love it.

There’s a brief Mexican arrangement of the theme for Spanish guitars and more florid accented strings that runs through the otherwise gritty “Bank Job,” which is also the cue that establishes a snarling six-note phrase that quickly reveals itself to be a recurring identity for James Russo’s character Kid Jarrett, a former lover of Cody’s, now an outlaw, who eventually emerges as the film’s primary antagonist. Goldsmith uses an array of percussive textures, both live and electronic, to bolster the dark orchestral lines and urgent guitars, which makes Jarrett’s theme something of a cousin to the music he wrote for the 1987 neo-western Extreme Prejudice.

The subsequent “Jail Break” is one of the score’s few concessions to comedy and lightheartedness, in which Goldsmith offers yet another variation on the main theme’s underlying action rhythm, comprising a honky-tonk piano, wood blocks, triangles, and quirky writing for strings and woodwinds. I especially appreciated the cascading guitar texture towards the end of the cue, a nice throwback to the score for Under Fire. Then, in “No Money,” Goldsmith gives the main theme the Rudy treatment, a beautiful and sentimental arrangement for strings and guitar that adds emotional depth and sensitivity to the plight of the girls as they try to maintain their freedom.

“Ambush” is perhaps the pick of the action cues; it’s a tense exercise in suspense-building that makes excellent use of dark brass writing, insistent and nervous percussion patterns backed by edgy guitar strums and low piano clusters, and almost subliminal references to both the main theme and Jarrett’s theme, which eventually explodes into a spectacular moment of trumpet-led power and kinetic energy. Goldsmith was so good at this type of music – ratcheting up the tension to almost unbearable proportions, putting the listener/viewer on edge, anticipating, waiting for something to happen, and then releasing all that tension in a flood of musical exhilaration. It’s just superb. “I Shot Him” revisits several of the same ideas, and then “Josh’s Death” features both the most tortured and emotional, and the most heroic, statements of the main theme in the score, the latter packing a wonderfully dynamic punch full of trilling, pulsating strings and clattering percussion behind the rousing brass.

The final cue, “My Land,” is an almost 7-minute summation of the score’s primary ideas, offering multiple versions of the main theme, including the pastoral guitar-and-woodwind variation, a lightly comedic version in which a slower statement of the theme is backed by tambourines, and a more romantic and sweeping statement for the full orchestra that ends the album, underlines the redemption of the ‘bad girls,’ and looks forward to their new life free of persecution with a sense of satisfaction and optimism.

The original album for Bad Girls, released by Fox Records in 1994 when the film came out, had a concise but enjoyable 40-minute presentation of the score’s most important selections, which I always enjoyed. Unfortunately the Fox Records label ceased to exist shortly thereafter, and as such for many years the Bad Girls CD was a scarce and valuable collectible. In 2011 producer Nick Redman and La-La Land Records released a re-mastered and expanded 3,000-unit limited edition version of the score, with more than 20 minutes of additional music, presented in an excellent package featuring in-depth liner notes by Jeff Bond and comments from director Jonathan Kaplan. Highlights of the expanded release include two outstanding statements of the main theme (“Which Way?” and “Keep Moving”) in full-throated western glory, a short waltz-time version of the main theme in “The Pleasure of Your Company,” and a more in-depth exploration of the villains’ material in “The Gang/The Posse.”

Time is a funny thing. I wonder how many of those early internet commenters, who so vehemently hated Bad Girls back then, now look back on it fondly, reminiscing about the time when we could expect three or four high quality Jerry Goldsmith scores in a calendar year? I at least take some personal satisfaction in the fact that I never disliked this score in the first place, and anyone who has ever wanted to hear Jerry Goldsmith’s western sensibility combined with his kinetic 1990s action style will want to explore it too.

Buy the Bad Girls soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• ORIGINAL 1994 FOX RELEASE
• The John (2:18)
• The Hanging (3:17)
• Bank Job (4:54)
• Jail Break (3:26)
• No Money (2:08)
• Ambush (5:45)
• I Shot Him (2:35)
• Josh’s Death (3:42)
• No Bullets (3:51)
• My Land (6:50)

• EXPANDED 2011 LA-LA LAND RELEASE
• The John (2:19)
• The Hanging (2:06)
• Which Way? (0:42)
• The Snake (1:20)
• The Saw Mill (1:56)
• Keep Moving (0:57)
• Bank Job (5:16)
• The Gang / The Posse (0:56)
• Return to The Fold (4:06)
• Don’t Hurt Me (1:45)
• Jail Break (3:27)
• No Money (2:09)
• The Guests (0:36)
• Welcome to My Home (1:20)
• The Pleasure of Your Company (0:48)
• Ambush (5:45)
• What’s Your Name? (1:18)
• The Claim (0:25)
• Together (0:39)
• I Shot Him (2:46)
• Put It On (1:32)
• River Crossing (0:34)
• Rescued (3:03)
• Josh’s Death (3:41)
• No Bullets (3:53)
• My Land / End Credits (6:53)

Fox Records 72445-11084-2 (1994) – Original
La-La Land Records LLLCD 1169 (1994/2011) – Expanded

Running Time: 38 minutes 46 seconds – Original
Running Time: 60 minutes 12 seconds – Expanded

Music composed and conducted by Jerry Goldsmith. Orchestrations by Alexander Courage. Recorded and mixed by Bruce Botnick. Edited by Ken Hall. Score produced by Jerry Goldsmith. Expanded album produced by Nick Redman, MV Gerhard and Matt Verboys.