CD Reviews 3/21/00

Edited by Jonathan Z. Kaplan

CARTER BURWELL

CDNOW

12 tracks - 40:01

Available exclusively from CDNOW, the Three Kings album allots its final five tracks (totaling 14 minutes) to Carter Burwell's underscore. Burwell's first cut on this album, "The Gold," is an ultra-rap-beat-ized Middle Eastern rock attack. The short and enthusiastic bursts are fun but they never go anywhere. It's possible that Burwell felt he had added enough foreign elements without forcing western harmonic movement or forward motion as well. "Things Explode" opens with a texture of ambient drones before starting up a labored, percussive ostinato. The music grows in speed and cacophony, but it's moment to moment as in the prior cut. This is a raucous effects piece with musicality replaced by an assault on the senses. The percussion is fun to listen to for a while but the aimless nature of the music doesn't hold up for repeated listenings. "The Drive to the Border" is more standard Burwell, employing a slow, long-lined melody over one of his stock, bass-heavy progressions. (He didn't have to step far out of line for this stuff, as his sound often comes off as eastern to begin with.) "The Truck" reprises material from "The Gold," while the final cue offers up the cathartic "Handing Out the Gold."

When director David O. Russell heard what Carter Burwell had composed for the climactic action scenes of Three Kings he became enraged, yelling things to the effect of "this is not the temp!" (Dramatic re-enactment; not necessarily the exact historical action.) The temp music from The Siege, by Graeme Revell, was purchased and used in the final version of the film. --Jesus Weinstein

FRANZ REIZENSTEIN

GDI GDICD006

28 tracks - 57:32

In a spoken introduction to The Mummy (the first of GDI Records' series of Hammer film scores), Christopher Lee calls it "one of the best films of its kind that the British cinema has made...the most beautiful looking film that Hammer ever made...the music...is greatly superior to all the music in any other Hammer film." I'm tempted to merely add "It's twoo! It's twoo!" since he has so succinctly stated what I'm now going to take several hundred words to express.

The opening titles are the most familiar to the film's many fans, both from their inclusion on GDI's first "Hammer Horror" anthology and also because the theme, heard naked under the credits, is repeated throughout the film (albeit with its orchestration subtly altered each time). This theme is a solemn and oddly exalting funeral dirge which starts with a brass fanfare before the theme proper picks up with soaring strings and doleful chorus. The melody, reminiscent of the music for Hollywood biblical films, is more responsible for the film's epic feel than are any of its physical components, especially as it's introduced at key times such as the opening of Ananka's tomb (where a muffled drum cadence adds greatly to its effect), the beginning of the first Egyptian flashback to Ananka's funeral procession, Kharis's illicit entry into the tomb and the flashback of Stephen Banning's examination of the tomb. In all cases it lends scope to sets that, while more than adequate, are far from expansive. Curiously, this dirge also puts in appearances when Kharis is buried alive and at the conclusion when, shot to pieces, he sinks into the swamp. Perhaps the theme here (since it otherwise appears in conjunction with the dead Ananka) is meant to suggest that, in death, Kharis is finally to be reunited with his loved one. Terence Fisher's handling of the material lends itself to a highly romantic reading of the film. The Mummy is one of several cases where he seems to have managed to subvert a horror product--if only intermittently--to that end.

The music is lush and romantic, although its stateliness is refreshed with 20th century colors that invigorate it with surprising touches (such as the almost puckish music which underlines the opening scene of the archaeological dig, the numerous examples of Herrmannesque minimalism and occasional flourishes that seem to come almost intact from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring). There's also an abstract cue late in the film where Kharis's encounter with the living image of his dead princess is hauntingly and delicately scored with strings, celesta and chorus in a manner that recalls Holst's The Planets. Still, Reizenstein seldom employs dissonance, which keeps the sound from becoming too modern, no matter how advanced the composition. It is these sections, however, which bear the most resemblance to Reizenstein's concert work, which is insouciant and evanescent. This actually makes the masterful main theme, which is the score's spine, all the more remarkable because it so atypical of his work. (It also makes it curious that the only two film scores he worked on before his relatively early death were both horror films. His normal style was more suited to an Ealing comedy.)

Hammer has never received the proper credit for keeping alive full-blown symphonic film music at a time when the industry was abandoning it (first as a result of Henry Mancini's success with Peter Gunn, and then with the move toward youth-oriented rock-scored films in the late '60s). Hammer's scores ran the gamut of styles from James Bernard's frantic modernism to Mario Nascimbene's abstract constructions, but the majority fell into a post-romantic symphonic mold during a period when Waxman, Steiner, Friedhofer and Herrmann could barely get arrested in Hollywood. With The Mummy, we have not only one of Hammer's greatest scores, but also a candidate for one of the great movie soundtracks of all time. We are fortunate to have the original tracks (even in mono they sound superb thanks to GDI's sound wizard, Peter J. Reynolds) in a nearly complete recording. --Harry H. Long

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