Archive
FIRST KNIGHT – Jerry Goldsmith
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
First Knight is a retelling of the classic legendary tale “The Knight of the Cart” first penned in the late 12th century by Chrétien de Troyes. Screenwriter William Nicholson stripped the tale of its magic and mythos of the Grail quest, instead focusing his lens on an intimate exploration of the passions, foibles and tragedy borne of intimate human relationships. Sean Connery succeeds in providing a sympathy and gravitas to the role of King Arthur with solid performances provided by Richard Gere as Lancelot, Julia Ormond as Guinevere and Ben Cross as the evil villain Malagant. The film was a critical failure but achieved commercial success taking in 134 million, more than sufficient to cover its 55 million production costs. Read more…
THE HOMECOMING: A CHRISTMAS STORY/RASCALS AND ROBBERS: THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER AND HUCK FINN – Jerry Goldsmith/James Horner
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The Homecoming: A Christmas Story is an iconic television movie that was adapted from an Earl Hamner Jr. story starred Patricia Neal and Richard Thomas in a traditional heart-warming story of a poor rural family’s Christmas. The story takes place on Christmas Eve in 1933 during the Great Depression with the children awaiting, with great anticipation, the miracle in the barn when at the stroke of midnight all off the animals speak. The family is also awaiting the homecoming of their beloved father who had to seek employment in the city and is returning home. A snowstorm places Mr. Walton’s return in peril and the family struggles to remain optimistic as the night wears on. But this is a happy tale and when he returns with a bag of gifts all is made right as the family celebrates the joy and warmth of Christmas. The film was made on a very modest budget, but it was an immediate hit, spawned The Waltons – a highly successful television series and remains an enduring classic holiday favorite. Read more…
STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER – Jerry Goldsmith
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Star Trek V is at its heart a mystical quest film concerned with a question that has aroused humanity’s curiosity for millennia. It explores our search for that sacred omphalos from whence we arose – the Garden of Eden. In metaphysics Eden symbolizes primordial perfection, the source of all life and the state of perfect communion between humanity and God. It is from this inner longing, this yearning that the saga which is Star Trek V unfolds. William Shatner lobbied very hard to direct the film and although he managed to win the directorship, he regretfully would not enjoy critical success. Production and financing problems forced a dramatic scaling back of the movie’s climactic scene where he had planned a dramatic display of immense stone gollums and the earth opening up to reveal scenes of Dante’s ten levels of Hell. It suffices to say that the lack of resources served to mortally wound the story’s narrative and resulted in what many believe to be the weakest film in the Star Trek franchise. Read more…
Jerry Goldsmith, 1929-2004
Composer Jerry Goldsmith died on July 21, 2004 at his home in Beverly Hills, California, after a battle with cancer. He was 75.
One of the most prolific, versatile and influential film composers of the twentieth century, Goldsmith wrote music for more than 200 film and television productions during a career spanning half a century. He received 18 Academy Award nominations, winning for The Omen, and created landmark scores including Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Poltergeist, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and L.A. Confidential.
Jerrald King Goldsmith was born in Los Angeles on February 10, 1929. He began playing piano as a child, later studying with pianist Jakob Gimpel and composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. At the University of Southern California he attended classes taught by Miklós Rózsa, whose score for Spellbound had helped inspire Goldsmith’s ambition to write for films. He later studied at Los Angeles City College before joining CBS as a clerk-typist in its music department.
At CBS, Goldsmith progressed from selecting library music to composing for radio and live television. His early credits included Climax!, Playhouse 90, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and The Twilight Zone, an extraordinarily demanding training ground in which music often had to be written and recorded at great speed. His first credited feature score was the western Black Patch in 1957, although television remained an important part of his career throughout the following decade.
Goldsmith’s breakthrough in cinema came during the early 1960s. Lonely Are the Brave (1962) displayed his gift for western Americana, while John Huston’s Freud (1962) brought his first Academy Award nomination with a dark, psychologically unsettling score. He followed with The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), A Patch of Blue (1965), In Harm’s Way (1965), The Blue Max (1966) and The Sand Pebbles (1966), rapidly establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most inventive dramatic composers. Read more…
STAR TREK: NEMESIS – Jerry Goldsmith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Jerry Goldsmith’s involvement with Star Trek now stretches back almost 25 years. He is as associated with the franchise as the USS Enterprise, “Beam me up, Scotty” and “Make it so”, and with the possible exceptions of James Horner and Alexander Courage, is the only composer to truly get to the heart of the Star Trek universe – even though he himself has said that he does not fully understand the phenomenon, or why his work is so well-loved. Having written so much classic music over the years, it is therefore somewhat disappointing to report that his work on Star Trek: Nemesis is pretty standard, uninspiring stuff. A few snatches of thematic familiarity, some exciting action material, and echoes of Total Recall aside, it’s actually a rather predictable, albeit enjoyable, sci-fi score. Read more…
HOLLOW MAN – Jerry Goldsmith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Throughout cinema history, the story of the invisible man has been invented and re-invented by each subsequent generation. From James Whale’s 1933 classic with Claude Rains in the title role, to the popular 1970s TV series starring David McCallum, man’s fascination with making himself diaphanous has made for compelling viewing. In Hollow Man, director Paul Verhoeven has taken this principle one step further, by making his invisible man not just invisible, but also psychotic and murderous: driven insane by the scientific methods that gave him his power. Gory, and more than a little gratuitous (inspect the rear of the insert card for proof!), Hollow Man stars Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Caine, a brilliant but slightly deranged scientist who has perfected a serum that will render whoever uses it invisible. Despite the protestations of his loyal assistant Karen (Elisabeth Shue), and the remainder of his staff, Sebastian tests the drug on himself, with horrific results. Read more…
THE 13th WARRIOR – Jerry Goldsmith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In my opinion, the last two sword and sorcery movies to have truly great scores were Basil Poledouris’s Conan the Barbarian in 1981 and James Horner’s Krull in 1983 – the enduring legacy of a genre which, in recent years, has virtually died out in Hollywood. Although there is not very much sorcery in The 13th Warrior, there are plenty of flashing blades, and Jerry Goldsmith has conjured up a rousing, magnificent musical work to accompany them, the first “medieval epic” score for quite a few years that can be compared on equal terms to those earlier classics. Read more…
THE HAUNTING – Jerry Goldsmith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Although I personally enjoyed it immensely, Jan De Bont’s modern reworking of Robert Wise’s 1963 classic The Haunting was one of the more high-profile casualties in the summer of 1999’s blockbuster stakes. Despite a headline cast including Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and boasting some truly marvelous special effects, audiences complained that the film concentrated far too much on the visual side of the film and less on actually scaring the audience. To be fair, both visually and aurally, the film was absolutely magnificent, with Eugenio Zanetti’s Gaudi-inspired architecture teeming with cherubic faces and Gothic opulence, and Gary Rydstrom’s resonant sound design echoing majestically through the cinema’s surround sound stereo system. In terms of plot and acting, however, the film performed pretty badly, with several unrealistic contrivances and unconvincing performances from all the leads sealing its critical fate. Read more…
THE MUMMY – Jerry Goldsmith
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Jerry Goldsmith’s first effort of 1999 is a barnstorming action score of epic proportions. The density of the orchestrations and the complexity of the melodic lines put you in mind of vibrant works such as First Knight, Deep Rising, and especially The Wind and the Lion with its intoxicating ethnic percussion and pervading sense of Arabic mystique. A loose remake of Boris Karloff’s 1932 horror classic, The Mummy is an old-fashioned, tongue-in-cheek Saturday matinee flick with more than a few passing resemblances to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Universal Pictures and director Stephen Sommers hope it will be the first big action movie to smash the box office in a summer market already dominated by the imminent release of The Phantom Menace. It stars Brendan Fraser as a treasure-seeker who travels to 1930s Egypt searching for lost artefacts. What he finds, though, is far worse – the mummified body of the ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep, who was buried alive in disgrace by the then Pharaoh, and who unleashes a terrible vengeful power on those who disturbed him from his slumber. Read more…
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