1979: THE YEAR IN FILM MUSIC

By Scott Bettencourt

This series is a followup to my Not Even Nominated series, which has looked at 21 years of film music year by year, from 1980 to 2000. This new series will look at nearly all the films and scores of 1979, beginning with the ten films on the Academy Music Branch's shortlist for Original Score as well as five additional outstanding scores. In my Not Even Nominated series I picked five additional scores as plausible shortlist entries, through the actual ten score shortlist was only in effect from 1950 to 1979. The actual shortlist from 1979 -- The Amityville Horror, The Champ, Escape from Alcatraz, The Frisco Kid, The Great Train Robbery, A Little Romance, Meteor, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 10, and Time After Time -- show how hard it is to predict a shortlist. It would have been hard to guess that the list would include one film with barely any incidental instrumental music (10), another with a brief, nearly ambient score (Escape from Alcatraz), two genre films from A.I.P. (Amityville, Meteor) and an unsuccessful comedy Western (Frisco Kid). It's equally strange to think that a horror score like Amityville would earn a nomination over such wonderful shortlisted scores like Great Train Robbery and Time After Time, especially since only a handful of horror scores have been nominated in the Academy's history, including The Omen, Interview with the Vampire and The Village.

A LITTLE ROMANCE - Georges Delerue

With the exception of his first rate film of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five, George Roy Hill's directorial output for the 1970s was dominated by star-driven vehicles -- the Oscar-winning Newman-Redford team-up The Sting, the unsuccessful Redford vehicle The Great Waldo Pepper, and the raunchy Newman hockey comedy Slap Shot -- and apparently the director felt the need to tackle a smaller, less star driven project. A Little Romance's script, based on Patrick Cauvin's novel EMC2 I Love You, was written by Allan Burns, whose greatest claim to fame was as co-creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (oddly enough, both Burns and his MTM Show partner James L. Brooks made their screenwriting debuts in 1979 -- Brooks with Starting Over, Burns with both Little Romance and another Hill-related project, the prequel Butch and Sundance: The Early Days).

A dramatic change from Slap Shot, A Little Romance's story of a romance between a young American girl (13-year-old Diane Lane in her first movie) and a French boy (Thelonious Bernard, who appeared in only one other film) in Paris and Venice is largely family friendly, though there are occasional sexual references, such as when Lane and her friend Ashby Semple (whose appealingly geeky non-actor performance calls back fond memories of Hill's The World of Henry Orient) study a naked male statue at a museum and when Bernard sneaks Lane into the projection booth of a porno theater -- apparently the young Frenchman learned his dating techniques from Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. The plot is fairly skimpy for a 108-minute film, with the teens running away to Venice to fulfill their dream of kissing under the Bridge of Sighs at sunset and thus making their love eternal, and though the film has plenty of charm, Hill was a bit indulgent with the editing. The pre-credits sequence of Bernard spending the day at a movie theater features clips from no less than four films, beginning with Hill's own Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and rather jarringly the clip from True Grit features original Delerue music rather than the Elmer Bernstein score (probably for music rights reasons, but especially odd since Bernstein was Hill's most frequent composer). Hill even works in a dubbed clip from his own The Sting later in the film, and one of the film's few antagonists is an obnoxious young American film director (David Dukes as "George DeMarco" -- the name suggests Lucas and DePalma but his appearance evokes Friedkin and especially Spielberg; he even wears a Boy Scout uniform in one scene), and Bernard trashes DeMarco's films while is clearly a fan of Hill's (five years earlier, Hill's Sting beat Friedkin's Exorcist for the Picture and Director Oscars). Amongst all the movie related references, Broderick Crawford has a few amusing scenes playing himself, but apart from the score and the film's importance in Diane Lane's career, the best remembered element is probably Laurence Olivier's supporting (but top-billed) performance as the garrulous old Frenchman who helps the young lovers. Olivier's performance is undeniably hammy (and fittingly so, since the character is revealed to be a complete fraud), but his joy in performing is utterly infectious, and he manages to make a potentially tiresome character delightful, paying homage to character greats like Maurice Chevalier and Felix Bressart.

As you would expect, Delerue's score is effortlessly charming, and his hiring was probably an attempt by Hill to recapture the atmosphere of Truffaut's films about young people -- he even hired Truffaut's Small Change DP, William Pierre Glenn. Except for its love theme, Delerue's score consists mainly of stand alone cues, with the perky main title theme a particular highlight. There are several pieces of original Delerue source music, also featured on the Varese score LP/CD, and his suspense music is suitably tongue-in-cheek, befitting the minimal drama of the story. In a surprising choice (which makes Delerue's Best Original Score Oscar win even more surprising), the love theme is not an original Delerue composition but the "Largo" movement from Vivaldi's Lute Concerto in D. Vivaldi has always seemed to be a major influence on Delerue's style, so the older composer's work meshes well with Delerue's. The delicate beauty of the Vivaldi piece does wonders to eliminate the potential cloyingness of the romance and give it a genuine layer of emotion, a far cry from the sappiness of so much of today's romantic comedy scoring (Debney, Shaiman, etc.). There is a tradition that filmmakers rarely receive the Oscar for the work that deserves it, and Delerue certainly wrote stronger and more memorable scores (including such nominees as the lyrical Day of the Dolphin and the moving Agnes of God), but it's still encouraging that Delerue did actually win one while he was around to appreciate it, as he was taken from us all too soon.

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR - Lalo Schifrin

Jay Anson's bestselling "non-fiction" book about the few weeks the Lutzes spent in a Long Island house allegedly haunted by a murdered family was turned into a high grossing film by director Stuart Rosenberg, whose more prestigious credits include Cool Hand Luke, Voyage of the Damned, and the following year's Brubaker. The film is entertaining in a campy guilty pleasure way (though there's one genuinely effective scare late in the film), but it's distressing that of all the stylish, intelligent haunting movies that have been made over the years (The Innocents, The Haunting, The Changeling), this one should be a boxoffice blockbuster. Margot Kidder brought the quirky charm she showed in Sisters and Superman as well as a surprising amount of conviction, but handsome, relaxed James Brolin simply doesn't have the acting chops for a slowly-going-mad role like this one (at times the film feels like a dry run for The Shining, which was filmed at roughly the same time but released a year later). The film is padded with pointless subplots involving priests and a police detective that feel like homages to The Exorcist (Rod Steiger's lengthy plotline adds nothing to the story, though his typically emotive performance is one of the film's best remembered elements), and the narrative is so choppy and random that we barely get to know the family's two little boys (though the child actors are refreshingly naturalistic in their brief appearances). Overall, Rosenberg's direction is unimpressive with too many moments of unintentional humor (the vomiting nun is a particular highlight), while Fred Koenekamp's overlit, TV-style cinematography hardly seem the work of the man who brought us the crisp vistas of Patton and the lovely seascapes of Islands in the Stream. The only really fresh thing about the movie (which Stephen King referred to in his discussion of the film in Danse Macabre) is the emphasis on the family's financial situation, a rare dose of reality in the genre. Kidder's character shows pride that she's the first in her family to actually own a house, and there's an uncomfortable sequence where the money for her brother's wedding caterer disappears from the room in mid-scene, causing a panic that's more gripping than any of the alleged scare scenes (a house that literally eats your money is ultimately more disturbing than the bleeding walls and the tar pit in the basement).

Amityville was the fifth of six films which Lalo Schifrin scored for director Rosenberg, having earned Oscar nominations for Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke and Voyage of the Damned. His Amityville score is dominated by a creepy main theme, a disturbing wordless lullaby performed by children's voices and orchestra. Most of the score is based on variations of this theme, though Schifrin does introduce a love theme for one sex scene, which is briefly reprised at the finale as the family escapes the haunted house. Schifrin incorporated a little bit of his rejected score for The Exorcist, and pays distracting homage to Herrmann's classic Psycho shower music at a couple points in the score -- when a window slams on one of the little boys' hands, and when the red eyes of the ghost "Jody" appear outside a window. While Schifrin's score is not one of his best works, it works well in context and is just about the only thing bringing coherence and tension to the film. American International Records released a soundtrack LP, featuring major cues from the score as well as a classical source piece and the inevitable "Amityville Horror Disco Frenzy." Schfirin's own Aleph label re-released the score on CD years later in a greatly expanded edition, but though the first pressings were plagued by some sound problems, the glitches have been reportedly been fixed in later pressings.

A fictionalized prequel followed 3 years later, Amityville II: The Possession, which was frequently over-the-top but benefited from a stronger, more fluid visual style than Rosenberg's film as well as some creepy familial undertones, in scenes like the abusive father pressuring his wife for sex and especially the incestuous relationship between possessed son Jack Magner and daughter Diane Franklin (a familiar face from '80s films like The Last American Virgin, Better Off Dead and the first Bill and Ted). Schifrin returned to score this prequel, largely using new variations of his original Amitivylle theme, though no soundtrack has ever been released. The third film in the series, Amityville 3D, featured an original score by British composer Howard Blake, an enjoyable orchestral-and-choral work reminiscent of Poltergeist, and several cues were included on a composer promo paired with Blake's incidental music for Flash Gordon. Additional TV and straight-to-video follow-ups have been made, including Amityville Dollhouse (score by Ray Colcord) and Amityville 1992: It's About Time and Amityville: A New Generation (both by Daniel Licht). The original Amityville was remade in 2005 with Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George as the Lutzes and Philip Baker Hall as the priest, and though Schifrin's popular theme was featured in the trailers, Steve Jablonsky's clanging score featured nothing nearly so memorable. The Schifrin theme did ultimately reappear in 1989, more or less, as Elliot Goldenthal provided a distractingly similar main theme for his first big studio project, Pet Sematary.

This remake of the classic 1932 tearjerker about a washed up prizefighter and his socialite ex-wife competing for the love of their adorable little boy was director Franco Zeffirelli's first film following his acclaimed, all-star miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, and is an odd project for the director, who specialized in period stories like his first-rate Shakespeare adaptations The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet (both scored by Nino Rota). Though the film is ostensibly updated to the present, the story remains surprisingly faithful to the original, and while the trappings are contemporary the film might as well be set in the '30s (the presence of Joan Blondell helps). Ricky Schroder's performance, appealing as it is, is much more like the peppy, precocious children of Golden Age Hollywood than our current Haley Joel Osment/Dakota Fanning era of amazingly naturalistic child actors. Schroder shows a real gift for crying on cue, but his sobbing during the finale would be a lot more affecting if the director didn't have him crying in practically every second scene. Whatever you may think of Schroder's performance, it's Oscar-caliber work compared to Jon Voight and Faye Dunaway as his separated parents. Following his Oscar win for Coming Home, Voight's acting became distractingly mannered in films like Lookin' to Get Out and Table for Five, and in The Champ he's similarly indulgent. Equally distractingly, he's much too youthful and healthy looking to be believable as a washed up drunk, and the tragic ending seems to come out of nowhere (luckily, his more recent performances in films like Ali, Holes and The Manchurian Candidate have been a terrific return to form). Similarly, Faye Dunaway acts as if she's in her own bizarre psychodrama, gazing at little Schroder in a way which doesn't so much suggest maternal longing as an audition for the John Huston role in a Chinatown prequel. The only way it feels like a Zeffirelli movie is in its bizarre distance from reality -- Pauline Kael said that he directed the film like he'd never met a human being -- though The Champ inexplicably continues the tradition of Zefirelli male nude scenes (Romeo and Juliet, Brother Sun Sister Moon, Endless Love) by featuring 8-year-old Schroder in a swimsuit changing scene.

Grusin's warm, sentimental score helps reinforce the film's Old Hollywood sensibility, though refreshingly the score is much more discreetly spotted (totaling about 33 minutes over the film's 121 running time) than your traditional Golden Age tearjerker. He provides two main themes, the "Theme From The Champ" first heard over the beautifully photographed main title sequence of the racetrack at dawn, and a secondary theme for Schroder's "T.J.," and Grusin works his main theme into the more pop-ish cues like the "Gym Montage," though there is no scoring for the climactic boxing match nor for Voight's final scene. The soundtrack LP (never released on CD) from Planet Records features the majority of the score, both the major orchestral cues and pieces of Grusin source music like "Nothing But a Groove" and "Salon Du Miami." Apparently because soundtrack albums of the late '70s couldn't feature only score pieces, the album also features an excerpt from Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik as well as a song, "If You Remember Me," written for the film but not ultimately included, by the then-husband-and-wife team of Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager.

As the first new live-action Star Trek in a decade (and a $40 million dollar Robert Wise film with non-stop effects by reigning effects masters Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra to boot), this was unquestionably the most highly anticipated film of the year (oh, yeah, I guess some people were waiting for Apocalypse Now too), and despite generally dreadful reviews (critics were much kinder to The Black Hole, and even preferred its uneven, frequently grainy effects) and the swelling budget, the film proved to be profitable, mostly due to the devotion of hardcore Trekkies (as a lifelong Trek fan, I refuse to use the term "Trekker").

Jerry Goldsmith had only scored one previous film for Robert Wise, earning his third Oscar nomination for his stunning, epic score for The Sand Pebbles, and Star Trek was poised to show that he could work as impressively in the interstellar adventure genre as John Williams had on Star Wars (and even with Williams' Irwin Allen TV work, Goldsmith had had a lot more experience in sci-fi). The scoring experience was a difficult one for the composer -- Wise rejected Goldsmith's original version of the main theme, which Goldsmith ultimately reworked into one of his most famous pieces, and despite the six months Goldsmith had in which to write the score, the post-production difficulties (Trumbull and Dykstra were a late hire after the original effects house didn't work out) and etched-in-stone release date necessitated bringing in Fred Steiner and Alexander Courage to rework individual cues (Courage adapted his original TV theme for a few "Captain's Log" cues), and the opening "Klingon Battle" was recorded shortly before the film's opening.

Despite all the difficulties, the score would prove to be one of Goldsmith's most popular and one of the genuine masterpieces of his career (along with Planet of the Apes, Patton and Chinatown). It was arguably the best and most memorable score of the year, which makes its failure to win the Oscar even more disappointing (though it was unlikely that such a critically panned film would ever win, and Delerue was definitely deserving of an Oscar, if not especially for Little Romance).

Like its competitor The Black Hole, Star Trek began with a pre-film overture, an old-fashioned, roadshow-style method of opening a film that had been little used in recent years (Friedkin tried it with Sorcerer) as far as I know not used since 1979. The curtain music was Goldsmith's lovely Ilia's theme, one of his finest love themes, not heard much in the course of the film but given a soaring version for the overture. The main title introduced Goldsmith's classic Star Trek march in a fast paced, stirring rendition (the piano sheet music for the theme says it should be played as a "Power Rock Shuffle") which begins the score with a sense of excitement and adventure that the film never manages to live up to, despite the striking visual effects and Goldsmith's masterful music.

Goldsmith's score is a musical feast, full of dazzling orchestrations, striking motifs, and major setpieces. The credits are followed by the stunning "Klingon Battle," wherein Goldsmith introduces his inventive Klingon theme, which he would use in his later Star Trek scores, and pitting it against the distinctive sound of Craig Huxley's Blaster Beam, used to evoke the mysterious, initially menacing V'Ger, characterized by a two-note motif. After a dramatic cue introducing Spock on his home planet Vulcan (with a matte painting depicting a moon-laden sky, despite his long ago retort to a flirtatious Uhura "Vulcan has no moons"), the next major cues accompany Trumbull's elaborate spaceship effects, including the lovely, lilting "Floating Office" (finally heard on CD in the decades-later expanded version of the soundtrack) and, most memorably, "The Enterprise," where Goldsmith takes a seemingly endless sequence (albeit with first rate effects) of Captain Kirk touring the exterior of his rebuilt ship in a shuttle, and turns into a magical reunion between the captain and the love of his life.

The lengthy effects sequences of the Enterprise flying through and over V'ger may try a non-nerd audience's patience, but Goldsmith's music is consistently varied and imaginative, culminating in the dazzling "Spock Walk," accompanying an arguably pointless but lively effects scene of Spock floating through a barrage of striking visuals. The dramatically weak finale, where Captain Dekker touches the V'ger ship so that machine and man can merge (or at least turn into your typical effects light show), is almost redeemed by Goldsmith's rapturous scoring which expands the two-note V'ger motif into a musically satisfying apotheosis, and the end title features Goldsmith's march for the final time (at least until Star Trek: The Next Generation made the theme a TV perennial eight years later) as well as a lovely version of Ilia's Theme.

The original soundtrack LP was a well chosen 40 minutes of cues, but Goldsmith wrote so much wonderful music that many beautifully scored secondary scenes -- especially the delicate, lilting scenes of spaceships in flight, like "Floating Office" and "Spock's Arrival," were omitted. (One additional treat of the soundtrack LP was an inadvertently hilarious album sleeve, featuring color photos of some of the less impressive costumes for alien extras like the "Amarazzite Ambassador" and "Kamarazite Ambassador.") An expanded CD reissue was announced in the mid-'90s but didn't ultimately appear until the end of the decade, adding six new cues but still leaving out many fine pieces, especially Courage's brief adaptations of the TV theme.

Goldsmith skipped the next few films in the series, as the wonderful Wrath of Khan and the underrated Search For Spock were scored by one of the next generation of composers, James Horner (who had strongly evoked Goldsmith's Star Trek style in his Battle Beyond the Stars), while the hugely successful but overrated The Voyage Home was scored by a Goldsmith peer, Leonard Rosenman, whose wildly uneven music managed to earn a Best Score nomination. Goldsmith returned for the hugely disappointing Final Frontier, reusing his Enterprise and Klingon themes while adding several new themes for an exciting and satisfying score. Skipping the final classic Trek film The Undiscovered Country and the transitional Generations, he returned for the final three Next Generation features, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis, and though he made fine contributions to these films (especially his First Contact theme), none of these scores approached the musical greatness of his first Trek.

Writer-director Blake Edwards' career hit a speed bump in 1970 with the release of his flop World War I romantic musical Darling Lili. Though he worked steadily through the early '70s, his next two projects for MGM, Wild Rovers and The Carey Treatment, were trouble-plagued largely thanks to the studio's controversial head, James Aubrey, and Edwards' romantic spy thriller The Tamarind Seed was also a failure. Edwards and Henry Mancini, his usual composer, had a falling out after Darling Lili, and though Mancini implies in his memoir Did They Mention the Music? that the split was short-lived, Edwards used other composers for his three successive films -- Goldsmith for Rovers, Roy Budd for Carey, and Barry for Tamarind. When Edwards resumed the Inspector Clouseau series in 1975 with the hit The Return of the Pink Panther, Mancini was the inevitable choice for the score, and the pair collaborated on the next two sequels, each weaker but more commercially successful than the previous.

The success of the Pink Panther sequels allowed Edwards to make a more ambitious comedy, 10, for the fledgling Orion studio. Dudley Moore (a last minute replacement for George Segal) played a hugely successful Hollywood songwriter in the Mancini mold (a four-time Oscar winner, we're told -- Mancini only had three at that point, all for Edwards' films, and would win his fourth and final Oscar three years later for Edwards' Victor/Victoria), who undergoes a mid-life crisis upon his 42nd birthday and endangers his relationship with his actress-singer girlfriend (Julie Andrews, of course) when he becomes obsessed with a beautiful young bride (Bo Derek in her defining role). The film is a highly enjoyable if overlong mix of character study and slapstick, helped enormously by Moore's performance. The character seems conceived as a welcome tribute to Mancini, with the other characters constantly commenting on his great talents (though one young woman does use the dreaded phrase "elevator music"), while at one point Moore lauds praise on Raksin's "Laura." Moore's offbeat charm (comedy partner Peter Cook once remarked of Moore "If I'd been a club-footed dwarf from Dagenham, then I'd be that ambitious too") allows us to care about an extremely successful and wealthy Hollywood celebrity who might not normally earn any of our sympathy (though it is odd that both leads in this quintessentially L.A. movie are English). Robert Webber is wonderfully cast against type as Moore's gay lyricist, looking like a more ruggedly handsome, clean shaven Stephen Sondheim, and Derek herself is very effective and relaxed in her few major scenes. Though some of the dialogue scenes drag the movie down (like a lengthy argument between Moore and Andrews over the acceptable use of the word "broad"), the slapstick scenes are handled with Edwards' usual skill, especially Moore's (or at least, his stuntman's) memorable tumble down a hillside.

Despite Mancini's popularity with the Academy, his score nomination was a surprise, as his contribution consists largely of songs, source music, and only a few pieces of traditional background scoring. Among the several songs Mancini composed for the film, three are given the most prominence. The film's opening titles feature a piano solo of Mancini's bittersweet "Don't Call It Love," whose lyrics we later see Moore and Webber collaborating on. Julie Andrews sings the wry "He Pleases Me" over a leisurely sequence of Moore driving from Webber's Malibu home to Beverly Hills, culminating in Moore's first glimpse of Derek, and the song cuts off abruptly (and appropriately) with Andrews singing "He's a child..." as Moore, stunned by the sight of Derek, drives his car head-on into a police car. The third major song, "Song From 10 (It's Easy to Say)" is also "composed" onscreen and is sung over the end titles by Andrews and Moore (whose attempt at singing a traditional ballad is a little disconcerting). Apart from the main title, there's a piece of traditional background scoring in the middle of the film, as Moore impulsively flies to Mexico to pursue Derek while Andrews sits alone at home; orchestral versions of "It's Easy to Say" are used for two fantasy sequences of Moore and Derek on the beach, and later for a sequence of the pair walking at the beach at night; and there's a mild but distinctly Mancini-ish suspense cue as Moore rescues Derek's fiance (future Flash Gordon star Sam Jones) from a shark.

Warner Bros. released the film's soundtrack LP, which has only been available on CD as an import from Japan. Not surprisingly, the album is dominated by songs (including the deliberately bad "I've Got an Ear for Love," performed by Max Showalter) and source cues as well as the inevitable inclusion of Ravel's Bolero, featured as background for fornication in the film's most famous scene. However, the LP's excerpt from Bolero is only 4:59 long, suggesting the label had little faith in the average record buyer's sexual stamina.

ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ - Jerry Fielding

This Clint Eastwood vehicle, based on the true story of the only successful escape from "The Rock", was one of director Don Siegel's final films and certainly his last good one (strangely, his two final films, Rough Cut and Jinxed, were essentially comedies, a genre one would not normally associate with the director of Dirty Harry and Invasion of the Body Snatchers), helped by Bruce Surtees' typically stark photography. The script by Richard Tuggle (who later wrote and directed Tightrope for Eastwood) is low-key and believable, Patrick McGoohan makes a formidable warden, and overall the quiet, dark mood of the film foretells Eastwood's own developing style as a director, even to the extremely sparse use of music.

Lalo Schifrin was normally Siegel's composer of choice, but he was presumably unavailable (possibly busy with Amityville Horror, Escape to Athena, Boulevard Nights or Love and Bullets) or overridden by Eastwood (whose production company made the film), who worked with Fielding on four pictures including The Enforcer, the only Dirty Harry film which Schifrin didn't score. An offbeat score even by Fielding standards, Alcatraz was a surprising pick for the Academy's aesthetically conservative Music Branch. After a stark main title, dominated by militaristic drums, most of the first half of the film is unscored, the music only starting to really kick in when Eastwood begins to plot his escape, but even then Fielding's unsettling music is largely unmelodic, often resembling the experimental, ambient sounding cues Howard Shore went on to write for films such as Silence of the Lambs and Seven. Even the end title offered no sense of relief, with Fielding's unnerving sounds playing over a disturbing closeup of the papier-mache head Eastwood used in his escape. Not surprisingly, no soundtrack was ever released, though it would make a fascinating if difficult listening experience.

The fifteenth of sixteen collaborations between De Vol and director Robert Aldrich, this was an unusually warmhearted project for the director, whose more famous films include such brutal works as I the Jury, The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard. The film, originally titled No Knife, is a comedy about the misadventures of a Polish rabbi (Gene Wilder) making his way across the Wild West with the help of a friendly bank robber (Harrison Ford), much in the vein of 2000's Shanghai Noon but with countless Jewish jokes (many of which are lost on a gentile audience) taking the place of Owen Wilson's anachronistic humor in the latter. Though it's a minor effort, the chemistry of Ford and Wilder make it work, with the film coming at the end of the most inspired period in Wilder's performing career.

DeVol's old fashioned comedy Western score was a surprising Oscar finalist, as the film garnered little attention at the time, and his lively music emphasized the film's Hassidic elements (and even included the cimbalom in the orchestrations) while providing the expected Western place setting. DeVol himself has a bit part as a piano player in a bar towards the end of the film. No soundtrack was ever released.

Novelist Michael Crichton first made his name with The Andromeda Strain (turned into a faithful and excellent film by screenwriter Nelson Gidding and director Robert Wise), and though virtually all of his bestsellers in the '90s and the new century also fall into the "techno-thriller" genre, his work in the 1970s was much more eclectic. Along with Eaters of the Dead, a re-imagining of Beowulf (later filmed as The 13th Warrior), Crichton wrote this fact-based adventure novel about the first major heist on a moving train. It is arguably his best novel, mixing his storytelling gifts with a convincing portrait of its setting, 19th century England (though Crichton admitted he was less than faithful to the facts of the crime), and his film adaptation was his most lavish and stylish work as a director, helped greatly by Geoffrey Unsworth's lovely cinematography (Unsworth's penultimate work, as he died during the filming of Polanski's Tess and posthumously shared the Oscar for Tess) and Maurice Carter's elegant art direction.

Crichton made his directorial debut with the TV movie Pursuit (based on his novel Binary, written under the pseudonym "John Lange"), which was scored by Jerry Goldsmith. While Fred Karlin was hired for Crichton's first feature, Westworld, Crichton and Goldsmith reunited for Coma, and Great Train Robbery, their third project together, inspired Goldsmith's best score for a Crichton project.

Train Robbery is an unusual work in Goldsmith's career, one of his few monothematic scores, but what's especially unusual is that it's a lighthearted Goldsmith score that really works -- Goldsmith's gifts are generally best used on darker subject matter, while his energetic Train Robbery theme, introduced in the fast paced main title cue (over a sequence of an boched train robbery which demonstrates the difficulties the film's hero faces) is one of the most infectious and exuberant works in the entire Goldsmith canon, irresistibly exciting. The score alternates between fast paced cues for the deftly staged action scenes -- several scenes of Connery and his fellow thieves copying the keys needed for the heist, culminating in the thrilling "The Train Arrives" for the final part of the robbery (the bulk of the robbery, featuring remarkable stunt work of Connery himself running atop the moving train and ducking under low bridges, is unscored) -- and slow, genteel versions of the theme for the comedic and plot scenes. There is also a brief but wonderfully evocative -- and rather Alien-ish -- cue for "Street Attack, " a scene when Connery ventures into a bad neighborhood at night. A few months after the film's release, a score LP unexpectedly appeared from United Artists, with most of the best cues, and in 2004 Varese Sarabande released a welcome expanded edition on CD with first-rate sound, though unfortunately the tense and exciting cue where a traitorous cohort is chased and killed was still omitted.

John Williams was originally signed to score Meteor, which would have reunited him with Poseidon Adventure director Ronald Neame at the tail end of the disaster boom their 1972 film helped to inspire, but it is not known if he left the project because of scheduling problems or because of his seemingly unerring instinct for bailing on an imminent disaster (The Sentinel, Quintet, Heaven's Gate, Inchon, Bicentennial Man). Though the film was clearly intended to capitalize on the disaster craze, the actual disaster sequences take up relatively little screen time, with much of the story concentrating on the attempts of the American and Russian scientists to get their governments and militaries to join forces (and orbiting missile platforms) to fend off the five-mile chunk of asteroid heading toward Earth.

The emphasis on humanity over spectacle gives the film a pleasantly George Pal-ish quality (the original script was written by The Day the Earth Stood Still's Edmund H. North and rewritten by Stanley Mann, and both Mann and Neame have cameos), but the endless scenes of bureaucratic squabbling quickly become tiresome. Sean Connery and Natalie Wood head the quasi-all-star cast, and though Connery doesn't seem to be having a great time his immense natural charisma makes his presence welcome, while Wood looks lovely in one of her final roles and her Russian is impressively fluent -- she was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko -- though her Russian accent for her English speaking scenes sounds oddly British. Brian Keith is a standout as the cuddly Russian scientist, whose only line in English is "F**k the Dodgers!," which single-handedly nearly earned the film an R-rating.

The film is in odd ways a companion piece to Star Trek -- The Motion Picture -- both films feature long sequences of characters staring at monitors as effects scenes play out, but unlike Star Trek's dazzling, state-of-the-art effects by Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra, Meteor's effects are for the most part shockingly primitive (though the tidal wave destruction of Japan has some decent shots), with bad matte work and endless scenes of shiny, tiny looking miniature missiles realigning themselves in space. The low quality of the effects is particularly shocking considering the film's release was delayed because of a need to re-do the effects scenes -- it's hard to imagine how much worse the original effects would have been. (It's indicative that there were a record five nominees in the visual effects Oscar category in '79 and Meteor was not one of them, though it was nominated for Sound). The scene where a hurtling meteor fragment, on its way to demolishing Manhattan, causes the World Trade Center to explode in flames would be nearly unwatchable today if not for the primitive quality of the effects work, and overall the laughs are unintentional, especially when British scientist Trevor Howard warns the NY based heroes that a meteor fragment is heading their way -- "Due when?" "Just about...now!."

Laurence Rosenthal's energetic, old-fashioned score has its own resemblance to Goldsmith's Star Trek score (the composers were actually neighbors at one point during the '70s), though Meteor beat Trek to the screen by two months. Craig Hundley gets credit for "Electronic Effects" and the Blaster Beam is used to score shots of the meteor similar to the way it's used for scenes of Trek's V'Ger, and an early cue has moments that evoke Goldsmith's "Spock Walk" (Trek's Arthur Morton orchestrated Meteor along with two of Hollywood's other finest orchestrators, Herbert Spencer and Jack Hayes). The meteor is musically characterized with growling orchestral sounds and various electronic stings, especially the Blaster Beam, while the score features three main melodies -- a romantic, distinctively Rosenthal-esque main title theme (possibly representing humanity) and marches for the Americans and the Russians, which are used leitmotifically for the sequences involving the orbiting missiles. Though it's not one of Rosenthal's best scores it has its modest pleasures, and the "Siberia" cue is a highlight, a striking mixture of a haunting motif plus electronic effects. No soundtrack album was released in the U.S. though the Japanese label Nippon Herald put out a well sequenced LP featuring the major score cues, and Rosenthal expanded it slightly in 1997 when he released the score as a composer promo CD.

Though it was not Nicholas Meyer's first book, The Seven-Per-Cent-Solution put the writer on the map, and Meyer was later Oscar-nominated for his screenplay based on his mystery novel about Sherlock Holmes visiting Sigmund Freud for treatment for his cocaine addiction. Meyer did not come up with the idea for his feature directing debut, Time After Time, but the clever premise -- H.G. Wells uses his own time machine to pursue Jack the Ripper to present-day San Francisco -- was clearly in the Solution vein, and the film was an impressive and extremely satisfying debut, holding up well over a quarter century later. Meyer makes good use of a relatively limited budget (though the few visual effects are pretty chintzy looking), and the San Francisco locations are charming and well used if an odd choice -- since an integral part of the premise is how contemporary society is far from the utopia the young Wells had envisioned, a grittier urban location like Manhattan would seem a more logical choice, though it's a joy to see the San Francisco of my youth on the screen. Meyer's script is genuinely clever, and most importantly, his casting is expert. While Malcolm McDowell's previous roles (If..., A Clockwork Orange) made him a strange choice to play the shy, bookish Wells, the actor gave a delightful performance, and showed genuine chemistry with Mary Steenburgen, who played his Annie Hall-ish love interest Amy (the pair married in 1980 but divorced ten years later). David Warner proved an equally inspired choice as Wells' friend Dr. John Leslie Stevenson (aka Jack the Ripper), giving the role unexpected dimension especially in his final scenes. The film bears some similarities to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which Meyer co-wrote (including the San Francisco setting and one Marina District location, which Voyage Home bizarrely places outside of San Francisco), but while Voyage Home was a commercial blockbuster, the only modestly grossing Time After Time is hugely superior.

Though the scale of the film is small (even the time travel sequence is modest, forsaking the elaborate time-lapse effects of George Pal's Time Machine for abstract 2001-style visuals and a clever sonic montage of radio broadcasts), it gains scope from Miklos Rozsa's wonderful score, the use of his full-blooded and old-fashioned romantic music in a contemporary setting reinforcing Wells' alienation from modern society. The film begins with an exciting main title (even starting with Max Steiner's familiar Warner Bros. logo theme) and is dominated by three main themes -- a searching motif for Wells, a typically Rozsa-ish villain theme for the Ripper, and a lovely melody for Amy the bank teller, which is first heard when Amy and Wells take a scenic walk through Marin County's Muir Woods (a familiar location from Vertigo) and which dominates much of the second half of the score. Rozsa also composed a lovely source cue "The Time Traveler's Waltz," heard as background in a restaurant scene, and wrote a music box theme for the Ripper's pocket watch, which is incorporated into the score in later scenes. Rozsa's action cues are invigorating, often based on the Ripper and Wells themes, and he even wrote a short motif for the time machine's "Vaporizing Equalizer." Rozsa concludes the score with one of his typically glorious end titles, featuring a triumphant version of the love theme. Entr'acte released a fine re-recording of the score (a well-sequenced 39 minutes) at the time of the film's release which was duplicated for the CD version, though the original tracks (totaling roughly 43 minutes) have never been released.

ALIEN - Jerry Goldsmith

This Ridley Scott-directed sci-fi horror film about a murderous alien stalking the seven-person crew of a deep space freighter was the most important genre film of the year, a boxoffice hit which not only earned the Visual Effects Oscar (against such tough competition as The Black Hole, 1941 and Star Trek) but proved to be a seminal work in imaginative cinema despite its rudimentary plotline. H.R. Geiger's alien designs were unlike anything previously seen in movies, and the gritty, lived-in atmosphere of the spaceship Nostromo, combined with the outstanding cast (Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Skeritt, and Sigourney Weaver in her starring debut), presented the most believable vision of space travel since Kubrick's 2001, and one much more grounded in identifiable human behavior.

Goldsmith's score begins with a main title version of his "Nostromo" theme, a haunting and stirring melody, reminiscent of Holst, which (like the casting) adds much needed humanity and emotional resonance to this essentially cold film. The cue ends with a gentle, echoing "Hypersleep" motif as the camera prowls around the ship, its crew in suspended animation as the Nostromo makes its way back to Earth. As the crew is revived, the "Hypersleep" motif returns in a delicately beautiful rendition, climaxing in a restrained version of "Nostromo." "Nostromo" returns as the crew, after intercepting a distress call (which forced the interruption of their journey), lands the smaller ship on an inhospitable planet surface. Goldsmith's spooky, three-note "Alien Planet" theme dominates as three of the crew make their way across a forbidding landscape, reaching an immense, deserted ship. Unnerving cues accompany their exploration of the ship, occupied only by an immense alien corpse (the "Space Jockey"), but they soon find an immense chamber of alien eggs, leading to one of the film's many effectively startling moments as crewman Kane (Hurt) has an egg erupt in his face, a spidery alien creature implanting itself on him. While the "Nostromo" theme returns in later cues, especially a moving version for Kane's funeral, the remainder of the score is dominated by Goldsmith's dazzling cues for the alien attacks, the remarkable orchestrations (from Arthur Morton) providing a striking aural equivalent to the Geiger alien designs. The score closes with a full-bodied rendition of the "Nostromo" theme for the end title, reasserting humanity over the terror that has dominated the previous two hours.

But though this is the score that Goldsmith composed and recorded for the film, this is not the score which moviegoers have heard in the film for the last 27 years. First off, Goldsmith had to rewrite the main title (possibly because Scott reconceived the title sequence, using the graphics in the film's well regarded trailer). His new version eschewed the "Nostromo" theme, basing the new cue on the creepy "Alien Planet" theme. For the first act or so, the score in the film remains relatively faithful to Goldsmith's original approach, but after the alien "face hugger" is brought onto the ship, Scott (and editor Terry Rawlings, whom Goldsmith felt was a major factor in the deconstructing of his score) wield a heavier hand on the music. Goldsmith's original cue for the scene where the face hugger's blood leaks acid was replaced by a piece he wrote 17 years earlier, the opening title to his first Oscar-nominated score, Freud (the sound editing is so sloppy here that you can actually hear Goldsmith's original cue faintly bleeding through at times). Several scenes later, his cue for Dallas' ill-fated pursuit of the alien through the air ducts was replaced by another Freud cue. For the rest of the film, Goldsmith's Alien music is severely recut and retracked, until the film's climactic moments -- as Ripley turns on the shuttle's engines and blasts the alien into space, Goldsmith's music is replaced by Howard Hanson's "Romantic" Symphony, which plays on the soundtrack to the end of the final credits. Fortunately, the soundtrack album (released by 20th Century Fox Records on LP and later by Silva on CD) featured Goldsmith's original conception of the score, though lacking some key moments like the waking scene and Ripley discovering the alien in the shuttle (both featured in the Alien suite on Varese Sarabande's out of print, limited edition Jerry Goldsmith at 20th Century Fox six-disc set). Fans have desperately wanted a complete/expanded edition for years, and while a DVD was released with the full score on a separate track (not the version featured in the Alien Quadrilogy set), no such expansion has yet reached stores.

While there were no boxoffice blockbusters in the directing career of the late Hal Ashby, he had a remarkable run of critical successes during the 1970s. Following the cult favorite Harold and Maude, he directed The Last Detail (3 Oscar nominations), Shampoo (1 Oscar, 4 nominations), Bound for Glory (2 Oscars, 6 nominations including Picture), Coming Home (3 Oscars, 8 nominations including Picture) and Being There (1 Oscar, 2 nominations). Being There was a faithful adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's novel (scripted by Kosinski himself) about a simple minded gardener who is mistaken by a group of Washington elites (a dying tycoon, his younger wife, the President himself) as a fount of wisdom and accidentally becomes a public figure and potentially a Presidential candidate. The film was a dream project of star Peter Sellers, whose deft, inspired performance as Chance the gardener (accidentally redubbed "Chauncey Gardiner") is the film's most popular element. While arguably a one-joke movie, it is a joke well told and expertly filmed, with subtle, burnished cinematography by Caleb Deschanel (the same year that his work on The Black Stallion put him on the A-list) and exemplary work from the lead actors. Melvyn Douglas deservedly won the Oscar for his restrained performance as the dying Ben; Shirley MacLaine was witty and equally restrained as the younger wife, even maintaining her dignity in a comical masturbation scene (a startling occurrence in a PG movie), and Richard Dysart probably never had a better feature role than as the doctor who is the only one to deduce Chance's real identity.

Being There was one of three Ashby films scored by Mandel -- he wrote a comedic military score for The Last Detail and also scored one of Ashby's '80s flops, the Vegas-set Lookin' to Get Out -- and is one of this underapprecated composer's finest works, ranking with Point Blank in its subtlety and effectiveness. The score consists of ten cues totaling roughly 25 minutes, and is dominated by two main themes. The principal theme, heard mostly on piano and harp, evokes Chance's enigmatic, almost unearthly quality, while the second theme (also heard on the DVD's menu) has a relaxed quality suggesting the ease with which the eternally innocent Chance fits into his surroundings, whether in the house where he's spent his entire life or walking with Eve (MacLaine) through the greenhouse of Ben's estate. The score overall has a gently classical feeling, suggesting the old money luxury of Chance's surroundings as well as his distance from contemporary life, though two major early sequences are scored with found pieces -- a classical source cue (from a television set) plays over the opening credits, while Chance's journey into the outside world is scored with Emiur Deodato's pop version of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Deodato scored 1979's The Onion Field).

The unsatisfying, ambiguous coda, with Chance appearing to walk on water, is scored with a final version of the main theme, while the secondary theme plays over the end credits -- when I saw the film in its original San Francisco run, the end credits sequence (which gives nicely descriptive credits for each of the supporting players) consisted merely of titles over a colorful static pattern, but early in its release this was replaced with lengthy outtakes of Sellers unable to complete a speech (cut from the film) without laughing. This end sequence was popular with audiences (though of course the lines and the laughter virtually drown out Mandel's music) but ended the film on an inappropriately broad and comedic note. Ashby referenced one of his earlier projects in an amusing in-joke scene -- Sellers gets inspiration on how to kiss MacLaine by watching the swirling camera love scene from The Thomas Crown Affair, which Ashby edited for director Norman Jewison. Unfortunately, none of Mandel's score has received an LP or CD release, and Ashby's impressive '70s output is overdue a revisit.

The Hamilton Deane-John L. Balderston stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was the official basis of the classic Tod Browning-Bela Lugosi film version, received a commercially successful Broadway revival in the 1979 (running for 935 performances), with stylized designs by the gothic cartoonist Edward Gorey (he was Tony-nominated for his sets and won for his costumes) and a popular performance by Frank Langella in the title role. W.D. Richter, fresh off his acclaimed screenplay for the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, was hired to re-adapt the play for the screen as a vehicle for Langela, with John Badham helming it as his first film following the blockbuster success of Saturday Night Fever, and eschewing the campy style of the stage revival for a lush and romantic approach to the story.

Though the film was a boxoffice failure and not especially well reviewed, it's actually one of the most purely enjoyable vampire films of the last several decades -- much more satisfying than Coppola's stylish but disappointing 1992 version -- with a fine cast and outstanding production values. Langella made a charismatic Dracula, Kate Nelligan was a strong and beautiful love interest (in this version, the names of the female leads, Lucy and Mina, have been traded), Donald Pleasance an entertainingly eccentric Dr. Seward (here Lucy's father), and Tony Haygarth a memorable working class Renfield, balancing humor and pathos expertly. Laurence Olivier must be the finest actor to ever play Van Helsing, falling in the middle of his querulous-old-man period (echoing his roles in Boys from Brazil and A Little Romance). His theatricality is a joy to behold -- he heavily emphasizes Van Helsing's Dutch accent -- and his grief at Mina's death (in this version, Mina is Van Helsing's daughter) is moving and impressive. The scope cinematography by Gilbert Taylor (never Oscar-nominated, despite such outstanding credits as Dr. Strangelove, Repulsion, Polanski's MacBeth, The Omen and Star Wars) is gorgeous (though slightly dimmed by the recent video transfers, partly desaturated at Badham's insistence since he originally wanted to shoot the film in black and white), and Albert Whitlock's matte paintings are as atmospheric and striking as ever. Production designer Peter Murton, probably best known to film fans for his inventive work on The Man with the Golden Gun (his sets for the intelligence office inside a titled, sunken ship were a highlight), was one of several Ken Adam proteges/art directors to design a Bond film, but the only one with Adam's imaginative grandeur ,and his over-the-top work on Dracula added to the visual richness. As a James Bond obsessive, I even like Maurice Binder's laser-laden effects for the Dracula/Lucy love scene, like a vampire version of a Bond title sequence, though I can certainly understand why many viewers find the scene ludicrous.

Dracula provided John Williams with one of his few horror projects (I don't really count Jaws, though reminiscent of Jaws's opening whale sounds, Dracula begins with wolf howls, but much less subtly and effectively), and is somewhat reminiscent of his masterful score for The Fury. The score is dominated by the Dracula theme, first introduced in the main title sequence, an exciting and romantic melody which also doubles as the film's love theme -- logically, since the film is a romance as much as it is a horror film, with the film's villain also serving as its romantic hero (Trevor Eve's Jonathan Harker is no match for Langella's charismatic count). The only other major melody is a somber theme for the ill-fated Mina, which helps to musically emphasize the tragic cost of Dracula's centuries-long reign of terror. There are exciting action cues, especially the stand-alone "To Scarborough," and while the MCA soundtrack LP (later released on CD by Varese Sarabande) features 36:40 of the score including most of the highlights, there are many fine shorter pieces omitted, including a lovely brief cue for a scene of the village at dawn and the first kiss between Dracula and Mina. Williams hasn't scored anything similar since, though he was at one point attached to Mike Nichols' Wolf -- it's nice to imagine a Williams werewolf score to pair with his vampire romance.

The Hitchockian thriller Last Embrace, largely forgotten except by Miklos Rozsa fans, is an odd footnote in director Jonathan Demme's career, falling between his critically acclaimed but commercially ignored comedy Citizens' Band (aka Handle With Care), and his double Oscar-winner Melvin and Howard. In David Shaber's screenplay based on the novel The 13th Man by Murray Teigh Bloom, Roy Scheider plays a government agent, suffering a breakdown after the murder of his wife during an assignment, who falls for a neurotic graduate student (Janet Margolin) while being pursued by a killer. The film is an enjoyable but unsatisfying mixture of old-fashioned thriller, modern sensibility (the killer's identity is revealed during an R-rated sex scene), Demme's loose directorial style (including an early example of his signature actors-looking-at-the-camera visual tic) and an impressive supporting cast, courtesy of casting-director-turned-A-list producer Scott Rudin -- John Glover, Charles Napier, Sam Levene, Jacqueline Brookes, David Margulies, Andrew Duncan (with A Little Romance and Firepower, he was oddly ubiquitous in 1979), Mandy Patinkin (with huge hair), Max Wright, and some early eccentricity from Christopher Walken as Scheider's Agency superior. Scheider would seem to be adroitly cast, but the film suffers from an overabundance of relooped lines, and as with too many of his films, Scheider's delivery in looping sessions tends to be overly arch (as opposed to, say, Sigourney Weaver, whose loop readings tend to be distractingly flat). Janet Margolin's performance in a difficult role also suffers from the looping, which takes the spontaneity out of many of her scenes. The film is entertaining in its unambitious way but is at its weakest when it tries for big movie thrills, such as a badly directed confrontation between Scheider and Napier in a Princeton belfry, and the painfully protracted chase finale set around Niagara Falls.

Last Embrace was the second of three Rozsa-scored films released in 1979, his most prolific year since 1957 (though Fedora had spent a while on the shelf before its minimal theatrical release). Fittingly, for a composer whose style was remarkably old-fashioned by '70s movie standards, all three of his 1979 films involve a clash of eras, with Last Embrace both the story of a man obsessed with his loss and an homage to thrillers of another time. There are two principal themes in the Last Embrace score -- the love theme for Scheider and Margolin, introduced in a brooding thriller version at the start of the main title (with Pablo Ferro designed credits moving across the screen in mild homage to Saul Bass) which gives way to a sweepingly romantic rendition, and another theme for Scheider's memory of his dead wife, first heard in the opening sequence in which Scheider sees her murdered in front of his eyes, and later prominently featured in the sequence when he visits her grave at the "Dreamland" cemetery. The final act is dominated by typical Rozsa action music, with a distinctive rhythmic theme as Scheider drives Margolin to Niagara Falls, and though some film music fans find Rozsa's scoring in the film to be overblown, it's practically the only thing giving the finale any energy and momentum. The score concludes with an impassioned version of the love theme, followed by one last version of "Dreamland."

No soundtrack album was released concurrently with the film -- not surprisingly, since the film received so little notice and the first major soundtrack label, Varese Sarabande, had only just started, but in 1983, Varese released an LP featuring a re-recording of 25:09 of the 47 minute score, including the main title, the confrontation in the belfry, the "Dreamland" cemetery scene and the finale, and in their original CD Club series they paired it with the Eye of the Needle soundtrack re-recording.

Director Steven Spielberg managed to score a home run with his second film, with Jaws topping The Sound of Music as the highest grossing film of all time, and his third film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind managed to overcome an out-of-control budget and bad advance reviews to become one of 1977's highest grossers, receiving multiple Oscar nominations including Spielberg's first for Best Director. At that point (as at many points since), Spielberg could do whatever he wanted, and he chose to move into comedy with a screenplay by rising writers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who had first met as USC students when they bonded over Elmer Bernstein's score to The Great Escape.

Spielberg apparently saw the 1941 script, a raucous farce in the It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World vein set in Los Angeles shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, as his chance to make a comedy in the Animal House mold (he cast John Belushi and Tim Matheson in roles similar to their Animal House parts, and even gave Animal director John Landis a small role) as well as to indulge his fondness for World War II subject matter (later displayed in Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and the first and third Indiana Jones films). Spielberg shortened his lengthy comedy just before the film's release after unsatisfying previews, and though the film received largely terrible reviews and was (and is) considered a flop, its grosses were actually comparable to its budget. While hardly a Jaws or Close Encounters-sized success, it was far from a Heaven's Gate-scaled disaster.

The biggest problem with 1941 is that it's simply not all that funny. It's not horribly unfunny -- it's not Date Movie -- but like its spiritual predecessor, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, it too frequently substitutes noise and spectacle for genuine humor, but like Mad Mad World it's also a lively and entertaining movie. 1941 especially benefits from a gorgeous production -- William Fraker's hazy yet colorful cinematography is some of his finest work ever, Dean Edward Mitzner's production design is wonderfully evocative of the era, and the visual effects -- largely Greg Jein miniatures, lit by Fraker himself (he was nominated both for Cinematography and Visual Effects, losing out to Apocalypse Now and Alien, respectively) are absolutely wonderful. Spielberg released his original, longer cut on laserdisc and DVD, and though it's fascinating to see the deleted scenes (and all the motifs they set up, like Dan Aykroyd's hatred of seeing "Americans fighting Americans"), they don't add all that much -- the comedic storylines are clear even in the shorter version -- and the extended length diminishes the energy and momentum which, along with the production values, are the film's strongest assets.

It's either a coincidence or a surprising bit of subtlety on the composer's part, but John Williams' lighthearted 1941 march, the central theme of the score, sounds like an extrapolation of a motif from Elmer Bernstein's score for The Great Escape, whose soundtrack album was what brought 1941 screenwriters Zemeckis and Gale together in college. The score, which manages to provide the film with tremendous energy without oppressing the humor, is dominated by five main themes. Along with the march, which also used as a motif for Belushi's crazed pilot "Wild Bill" Kelso, there is a comic theme for "The Sentries," the ordinary citizens played by Murray Hamilton and Eddie Deezen, who watch for enemy ships atop a Ferris wheel; a stirring motif for the tank crew; and two love themes, one for young Betty and Wally, and another for Donna and Loomis which is often heard with a dreamy, trilling motif to evoke Donna's sexual infatuation with airplanes. The score features plenty of interpolations -- Williams reuses his Jaws theme for the opening parody of the classic "Chrissie's Death" scene (featuring Jaws victim Susan Blacklinie as another imperiled swimmer), as well as "Deutschland Uber Alles," "Anchors Aweigh," "Deep in the Heart of Texas," "By the Beautiful Sea," and, for the U.S.O. brawl, "The Rakes of Mallow," probably as an homage to its similar use in Victor Young's score for The Quiet Man. The end title features a wonderful musical montage of motific snippets for the curtain call-type montage of the actors, and is dominated by an encore of the main march, including a terrifically Americana-ish version which evokes early Williams like The Reivers and The Cowboys.

Amidst all the score cues, the most memorable Williams piece is actually an original source piece, "Swing, Swing, Swing," an homage to Benny Goodman's classic "Sing Sing Sing," which accompanies the big U.S.O. dance number. This rousing dance sequence is a masterpiece of filmmaking, choreography and scoring, the highlight of the film and one of the greatest sequences in the Spielberg oeuvre. If the rest of the film had been this good, the film would be a classic.

Arista released an LP of Williams' score with many of the major cues including the rousing "Battle of Hollywood" but lacking a lot of the exciting music from the film's third act. This LP has since been released on CD by Bay Cities and Varese Sarabande but an expanded release would be more than welcome. The film's DVD features the score on a separate audio track, and this expanded version of the film even features scored scenes cut from the release version, such as the fake air raid in the department store and the Japanese sailors disguising themselves as Christmas trees.

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