Buy it... if you delight in Jerry Goldsmith's darkly dissonant and richly textured Western action scores that test you with their often harsh and brutal tones.

Avoid it... if you'd prefer to be entertained by the score without feeling the need to study its multi-cultural intricacies.

Goldsmith

100 Rifles: (Jerry Goldsmith) Attempting to utilize the same basic elements as The Wild Bunch, 1969's 100 Rifles was a predictable failure. Stagnant direction by Tom Gries, worn action concepts in the Western genre, and a cast of stereotypically supporting stars thrown into prominent roles doomed the film. The Indian versus Mexican versus lawman concept prompted significant spaghetti Western action scenes, but they were shot with such a fixed, unengaging technique that nobody could ever have expected audiences to stay interested in them. Trying valiantly to compensate for this bland direction was composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose score for 100 Rifles could most easily be described as overachieving. Goldsmith was already well established in the Western genre at the time, with most of his classics already on film, and he was clearly defining the style of his sound as an alternative to Elmer Bernstein's more heroically fluid sense of Americana for 60's Westerns. Goldsmith would walk into 100 Rifles after having finished the highly acclaimed Planet of the Apes, and while the quality of projects represented a significant decline, the composer would maintain much of the instrumental creativity from that famous score in this undeserving Western. The complex, highly-layered music that Goldsmith would provide for 100 Rifles saves the film from total mediocrity and embarrassment. It's an interesting paragraph in Goldsmith's career story, but isn't of the caliber of his classic Western scores. He utilizes, perhaps moreso here than in any of his other genre scores, a creative array of traditional Latin instruments, along with a usual, moderately sized orchestra. His energetic Latin rhythms are mixed directly with his bombastic, brassy style of theme, making 100 Rifles a more intelligent multi-cultural listening experience than some of his other Westerns. At the same time, though, Goldsmith also infuses a significant sense of dissonant darkness into the score as necessary for some of the film's brutal scenes of killings.

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Goldsmith establishes the primary themes for 100 Rifles in succession over the first five or six minutes of the score. His title theme will perhaps sound a bit stock-oriented for Goldsmith collectors, though its staggered progression represents the brash attitude of the film quite well. This theme is reprised several times by the full ensemble throughout, including a climactic finale in "I'll Go Back." For enthusiasts of Goldsmith's bold Western themes, the opening and closing cues, along with the ambitious "Escape and Pursuit," will provide the seven best minutes of material on the album. The middle portions of the score are more interesting than they are enjoyable, with "Cliff Fight" being completely intolerable. Goldsmith's diversity of Mexican instruments is employed in staggered rhythms concurrently with the orchestra, creating a truly odd crossover effect in parts. From marimbas and castanets to electric and acoustic guitar, the score's sound is isn't as difficult to grasp as the dissonant layers with which Goldsmith applies those instruments. The only respite in the middle of 100 Rifles is "Lydecker and Sarita," a romantic variant of the title theme which, after some mariachi movements at the opening, yields a combination of instrumentation and counterpoint that will well foreshadow his later Under Fire. The two different mixes of the original recordings available on the Film Score Monthly album bring out differing accentuations in the Latin instrumentation. The album was arranged to include the maximum amount of music from 100 Rifles, and due to the varying quality of the sources, the entire score is included in mono (which was the original presentation of the film) while others have been alternately mixed into stereo. The stereo tracks do better justice to the large-scale opening and closing themes (the mono version of the finale is greatly muddled), however some of the mono tracks bring out the best of the marimbas, flutes, gourds, and other featured instruments. The outstanding presentation of music on the FSM product (including two tracks of source music) will appeal to the most studied Goldsmith collectors, but the mass majority of it will fall short of stirring the interest of casual listeners. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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