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Rosenman's remaining holy grails
FILM SCORES
Countdown © 1968
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond © 1960
Pork Chop Hill © 1959
The Young Stranger © 1957
Rebel Without a Cause © 1955
East of Eden © 1955
TELEVISION SCORES
Combat! © 1962
Garrison's Gorillas © 1967
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Sean, I found your deliberate mistake in the final paragraph. Thanks for keeping this old man on his toes.
Interesting you say that you found THE CAR a bit too relentless. That's what I particularly love about that score. It's actually quite subdued and bitty for a lot of the first half and then just builds up the tension and explodes in the last few lengthy tacks into something quite grippingly relentless and breathtaking. Did you listen to it again to see if you changed your mind?
Good to hear that you enjoyed RACE's diverstity. I vaguely recall some chirpy travelling music, like the cartoony bits (tee hee) out of LORD OF THE RINGS.
Graham, I wish the error had been deliberate. Anyway, it's fixed now. 
I did listen again and do still find The Car relentless, but I mean more in tone than in lack of variety. I just watched the movie for the first time, and it's clear they really only wanted the music to build on suspense, action, and horror. It's quite varied, and I love it, but I get more exhausted with this one than with the new release, that's all I mean. Which means I don't play it as much. (Though Basil Wrathbone was right in the original thread that it seems like maybe the best-played Rosenman score ever.)
And you know, I'm glad you mentioned the Lord of the Rings connection - I really enjoy that lighter music (which was my first Rosenman-on-album exposure), so was glad to hear that same idiom here. (There is also some LOTR pre-figuring in the Car, but more of the high-velocity kind).
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Nope Sean, not fixed.
I can still see the Rozsa 
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Yikes - there were two mistakes! I've always had trouble with that, and it ain't getting any better. But now it's fixed.
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Rosenman's remaining holy grails
FILM SCORES
Countdown © 1968
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond © 1960
Pork Chop Hill © 1959
The Young Stranger © 1957
Rebel Without a Cause © 1955
East of Eden © 1955
TELEVISION SCORES
Combat! © 1962
Garrison's Gorillas © 1967
Robocop 2...complete!
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Robocop 2...complete!
Amen.
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Me too, (Member) - been enjoying Prophecy this afternoon. Especially enjoying the Flight to Maine cue - keep playing that one.
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Posted: |
May 27, 2017 - 10:30 AM
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By: |
Graham Watt
(Member)
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This arrived the other day (it was sitting waiting for the Tadlow THRILLER to be sent along with it - more on THRILLER later) and I've given it two spins, so these are still "first impressions".
Very happy with it overall. MAKING LOVE was the surprise for me, because it's the one I didn't buy the CD for and yet ended up (so far) liking a lot. It's really beautiful, heartfelt and wistful. There's something autumnal about it, and it's in the mostly tonal mode of his earliest scores for James Dean (ah yes, and for the previous year's HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT, as mentioned in another post). At first I was thinking, at the beginning of each track, "Oh no, not that theme again", because it does seem to rely on one theme repeated over and over, then I realised that there is of course more than one theme, plus the Bach variations, but when the same theme starts off three tracks in a row I began to think "Hmmm". Then I leapt forwards (or backwards) a billion years on the evolutionary scale and thought that if this were a 25-minute Michel Legrand score LP from 1976 I'd be going "Wow great! There's that theme again!" And that's what I ended up thinking.
It works really nicely as a 25-min "album". Curiously the first track seems to be actually a combination of seven different tracks organized into an opening suite called "Prelude". It's seven minutes long, so that's on average - let's get the calculator out - about seven different one-minute tracks stuck together. Flows nicely though.
The MAKING LOVE extras do have a slight touch of the Kenny Gs to some of them. Although the "Theme - Jazz Version" is named thus, it's no more "jazz" than the "Ballad Version". I think it's carried by a soprano sax (and at other times a tenor?), so we're almost into scary Vaseline-smeared Kenny G lovey-dovey smoochy territory. Same goes for the Bacharach-penned "Song Demo". It must be more than a coincidence that the opening few notes are the same as the principal Rosenman theme.
RACE WITH THE DEVIL was the one I really wanted this for. I said before that I would have been disappointed if he'd avoided tone pyramids and dum-dum-dum-dums. I was in luck - there are a lot of them. The "Main Title" is a thing of rasping genius, with the electric violin weirdness and some outrageous orchestral shrieks which make Les Baxter's opening for X- THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES seem subtle. It's followed by a few jaunty travel cues which I could just about take, although that constant, jovial pitter-patter percussion is a trifle annoying. Not as annoying however as the "Bike Race" circus music track, which at the moment I find horrendous to listen to, and can't imagine how it would have worked in the film. Oh, it didn't. It was cut out.
Thereafter it's... how you say in English... "all throttles go" (?) for a powerful aural pummeling. This is the Rosenman I love, the Rosenman that's exactly the same as all the other Rosenmans I love. The dum-dum-dum-dums, the tone pyramids, the overlapping chatter of the trumpet runs etc etc add nausea (tee hee). And yet it's got one or two things that make it different from his other exactly-the-same action music. And it's that it seems even more wild and freaked-put. I think it might be to do with the electric violin and other electronic effects mixed in. Some of it puts me in mind of the (unused) stuff that Jerry Fielding wrote for DEMON SEED (which had Ian Underwood and Lee Ritenour playing synth and guitar inside a switched-on aeroplane engine, and then re-recorded actually in the depths of an enormous toilet bowl built on-stage), whilst other parts recall bits of that other diabolical road movie DUEL, especially when Billy Goldenberg began to record himself shaking all his cutlery and fishing tackle inside his drawers, starting just with a mere shudder but building up to himself dropping everything over the microphone when an earthquake (9 on the Richter Scale) struck. Total devastation. And that's what RACE WITH THE DEVIL is like.
Great CD. I don't like absolutely everything on it, but I'm still glad I got it.
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Yes, it's good stuff. I remember seeing RACE WITH THE DEVIL at the Playhouse Cinema in Fort William (many rains ago) and it was a film that, once it got into it's stride, MOVED, as in, along at a relentless pace. Thrilling it was! And Lenny contributed to the excitement. So many years later the music is available, but by now, having been steeped in so much of Rosenman, it is almost "par-for-the-course". Like Graham, though, I still love it!
The real (and surprising) star of this disc is MAKING LOVE, very nice indeed. A bit monothematic, maybe, but the tune never outstays it's welcome. Great addition to the Rosenman discography.
JMM.
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I'm really fond of this release as it showcases the two primary modes Rosenman employed in his scores - a kind of intellectual lyricism in Making Love and his usual batty modernistic tropes with Race - but each distinctive enough they are worth having.
Anyone who is enjoying the Robocop 2 expansion and doesn't have this - I should think it would be right up your alley.
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