MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughan do like making film and TV projects about ‘gentlemen,’ don’t they? After the 2019 film The Gentlemen, and the spinoff TV series of the same from earlier this year, we now have The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a comic-book style action adventure set during World War II. Unexpectedly, the film is based on a mostly true story; it stars Henry Cavill as Major Gus March-Phillips, who in 1942 was recruited by Winston Churchill himself to carry out a dangerous secret mission codenamed Operation Postmaster, which required March-Phillips and his team to travel to the island of Fernando Po off the coast of west Africa and destroy the Italian ship Duquesa d’Aosta, thereby cutting off the supply chain to Nazi U-Boats in the north Atlantic. What follows is an unexpectedly violent but also tongue-in-cheek boys own adventure full of exotic locations, evil Nazis, spectacular action sequences, and lots of witty banter between March-Phillips and his men. Interestingly, one of the supporting characters in the movie is a young British officer named Ian Fleming; the real life Fleming supposedly based his character James Bond in part on March-Phillips and his exploits.

One of the other links between the Gentlemen movie, the Gentlemen TV series, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, is music, because all three scores were written by the same composer, Yorkshire-born Chris Benstead. He is one of a small group of composers who has won an Oscar for something other than writing music – he took home the gong for Best Sound Mixing for Gravity in 2014 – but he has worked as a music editor on numerous major scores for composers like Clint Mansell, Dario Marianelli, Harry Gregson-Williams, and Patrick Doyle, going all the way back to 2004. He wrote his first score in 2019 for the aforementioned Gentlemen movie, and in the years since then he has impressed me enormously with his work on a number of interesting films for Ritchie and/or Vaughan, including Wrath of Man, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and The Covenant. Now, with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Benstead has impressed me again.

For this score Benstead challenged himself musically by writing a score which pays homage two of the all-time greats of film music: Ennio Morricone and John Barry. The Morricone aspect is deeply influenced by his spaghetti westerns; not any one specifically, but more in terms of tone and orchestration. Benstead uses a vast array of Morricone-style specialist instruments and vocal inflections to complement his orchestra, including whistlers, strummed guitars, sampled analog electric textures, and unconventional percussion items. Meanwhile the Barry aspect is, as one might expect, influenced by his 1960s spy movie sound, but interestingly it’s not James Bond who is the keystone; instead, Benstead uses the cimbalom sound that Barry used prominently in scores like The Quiller Memorandum. These two styles are then combined with a not insignificant amount of jazz percussion, and some lush and vivacious big band arrangements that often erupt into exciting action cues, and that’s basically the score in a nutshell. It’s a ton of fun.

The opening cue “A Team of Misfits” introduces the score’s primary identity, an evocative march that starts out as a lonely whistle backed by guitar strums and idiosyncratic percussion textures, but slowly builds into a stately, whimsical, memorable theme enlivened by a cimbalom. This main theme recurs frequently, but to Benstead’s credit he plays around with the instrumental combinations in a variety of interesting ways.

Cues like “Fernando Po,” the smoother “Resist the Gravitational Pull,” the wonderfully aggressive “Absconding with the Duquesa,” and “Items of Interest” are often enlivened by various permutations involving gruff chanted vocals and esoteric bird-like woodwinds, each giving the already-masculine sound for March-Phillips’s men another layer of testosterone. “Absconding with the Duquesa” is probably the crowd-pleasing highlight of the score proper, a real showstopper.

“Operation Postmaster” is the first of the score’s several action cues, almost all of which use a staccato electric bass guitar rhythm overlaid with rattling percussion and a wordless male voice choir to create a sense of relentless tension and forward motion. Later action cues build on this style in a variety of ways. “Apple Rescue” is more intense and orchestral, with notably powerful throbbing brasses and vicious outbursts of trumpet-led chaos. “U-Boat Contretemps” adds yet another layer of instrumental interest via the inclusion of a shrill church organ. “Corned Beef Out of Tin” features the most prominent vocals, while “A Bag Full of Nazi Hearts” is dark and menacing, with huge, unnerving sonic outbursts that sound like a distorted klaxon.

There are also a couple of more nervous, agitated suspense cues that make excellent use of spiky, restless instrumental touches that move between the cimbalom, the guitars, the electronics, and the vocals, notably “Trick Up Sleeve,” “The First Domino Falls,” and “Yeah But No”.

Then there are the ‘caper’ cues which tend to involve the film’s secondary plot, which follows undercover spies Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) and Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) on a mission to hoodwink Fernando Po’s resident Nazis in anticipation of March-Phillips’s arrival. The music for their escapades is a raft of groovy 1940s jazz, all brushed snares, hi-hat cymbals, bass guitars, and finger snaps. Cues like “Train Game,” “Heron’s Casino Bar,” “Kamp Billy with AK,” and the more dissonant and feverish “Admiral Pound Circumvented” lean into this style heavily, and often give González’s seductive femme fatale character a cool accompaniment.

There are also a couple of standalone standouts, including “Officers Fancy Dress” and “Heron’s Hop” which are a terrific pair of riotous toe-tapping big band jazz pieces that just sizzle, as well as the more sultry “Beer Bossa”.

After the low-key guitar-led warmth and pathos of “Churchill’s Gratitude” the final cue, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” reprises all the score’s main thematic and instrumental content for one impressive final time. The vibrant thrum of the John Barry cimbalom is especially prominent here, as are the Ennio Morricone guitars, whistles, and grunts, making the whole thing a wonderfully satisfying piece of film music nostalgia. Benstead even found time to include an occasional ‘Morricone boing,’ to my absolute delight.

Anyone who has ever enjoyed a classic Ennio Morricone western, a John Barry spy caper, or the high-energy sound of 1940s jazz and swing, will find The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to be a wonderful piece of musical retrospective. It’s plainly obvious what Chris Benstead’s inspirations are – he doesn’t try to hide them one iota – but the fact that he does it all with such panache, good humor, and musicality, is no mean feat in and of itself. Many people have tried to emulate Morricone and failed miserably, so it’s to Benstead’s credit that this score is as good as it is.

Buy the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• A Team of Misfits (3:45)
• Operation Postmaster (1:30)
• Train Game (3:20)
• Fernando Po (2:34)
• Apple Rescue (2:45)
• Heron’s Casino Bar (0:59)
• Resist the Gravitational Pull (1:50)
• U-Boat Contretemps (1:32)
• Kamp Billy with A K (1:01)
• Corned Beef Out of Tin (2:43)
• Officers Fancy Dress (2:26)
• Trick Up Sleeve (1:53)
• Admiral Pound Circumvented (4:06)
• A Bag Full of Nazi Hearts (4:56)
• Beer Bossa (1:33)
• The First Domino Falls (3:05)
• Heron’s Hop (1:32)
• Absconding with the Duquesa (3:21)
• Yeah But No (2:41)
• Items of Interest (1:39)
• Churchill’s Gratitude (2:19)
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (3:08)

Filmtrax (2024)

Running Time: 54 minutes 38 seconds

Music composed by Chris Benstead. Conducted by Giles Thornton. Orchestrations by Giles Thornton. Recorded and mixed by Fiona Cruickshank. Edited by Al Green. Album produced by Chris Benstead.