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The Black Stallion/The Black Stallion Returns:
(Carmine Coppola/Shirley Walker/Georges Delerue) The films based on "The
Black Stallion" fantasy story written by Walter Farley in 1941 were a
fixture of the early 1980's, offering the topic of the
human/animal/nature relationship that had been short in quantity until
that time. Both the highly acclaimed original film and its redundant
sequel culminated in predictable horse races; though the second film
didn't take many steps to diminish stereotypes about Arab cultures, it
did provide much spectacular location photography. While the first film
retains the most attention in the mainstream for its classic storyline,
the second film was a notable failure, remembered most often for its
aforementioned cinematography and a remarkable score by romance master
Georges Delerue. Both films were produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and
it was because of this connection that Coppola's father, Carmine
Coppola, ultimately achieved the assignment to score the first film. To
say that the scoring process of 1979's
The Black Stallion was a
mess is generously worded. The film was originally to be scored by
William Russo, but immediate disagreements with first-time director
Carroll Ballard about the musical approach caused the composer to walk
away without writing a note. Working with Carmine Coppola yielded a
decent score for the director, though Ballard was determined to cut it
to pieces and demand significant re-writes of that material. The
difficulty of working with Ballard's precise musical vision of how the
film should sound eventually caused Coppola to become alienated with the
project in its last weeks of rewrites, and team member Shirley Walker,
along with several of the session musicians themselves, were forced by
Ballard to rewrite multiple cues for the final edits the film.
Luckily, for 1983's
The Black Stallion Returns,
director Robert Dalva and veteran French composer Georges Delerue hit it
off immediately. The sequel score's overwhelming and consistent presence
in the film further proves the score for
The Black Stallion as
evidence of how not to treat the music for your production. For that
original
The Black Stallion score, Coppola's music still
maintains a majority of screen time, and it is simplistic and barely
adequate thematic material that struggles to hold an appropriate tone
for the story. Although the ambience he set for the film was carried on
by the other musicians who wrote additional material, the thematic
integrity and instrumentation became lost their inconsistency. While all
of the music for the film together sounds reasonably similar, the style
that Ballard wanted to hear artificially inserted into some of the
running and vista sequences doesn't mesh with Coppola's otherwise
understated approach. The rousing fanfare in "The Black Stallion,"
composed by Walker and Nyle Steiner, is an obvious attempt to infuse the
picture with a large, victorious burst of brass, though there was never
any way it could possibly work with the preceding cues for the island
scenes. The minimalistic scoring of those scenes, led by solo harp and
flute, completely loses the fantasy element that Coppola's score had
attempted to capture in its entirety. The final two cues provide a
glimpse, along with the simply repeated thematic suite as the finale of
the score, of how rich Coppola's score could have been if Ballard hadn't
sent the musicians back to record over and over again. On the album, the
correct sequencing will give you a very good idea of just how butchered
the recording process was in its final weeks.
Georges Delerue had no such problems, of course, for
the sequel,
The Black Stallion Returns. His work, put into
perspective now by a career cut sadly short, is always precise in its
ability to convey the emotional heart of a film. The story of the sequel
changed the genre slightly; instead of concentrating on the fantasy of
the high seas and racetrack, the sequel takes the awkward move to the
Arabian deserts, and in so doing pushed the film into more of a straight
forward adventure genre. Delerue, as per usual, was up to the task,
writing a sweeping and overwhelmingly romantic theme for the boy/horse
relationship and a handful of impressive secondary ideas for the
adventurous desert settings. The disparity between the sense of style in
the two scores could not be more obvious. Delerue's title theme for
The Black Stallion Returns is among the composer's best, which is
high praise for a man who made a living out of writing attractively
elegant themes. He takes the emphasis on flute, harp, and clarinet from
the original film and unleashes those elements into his beautiful
melodies, mixed brilliantly as always. His mastery of the title theme is
twofold; first, the opening cue ("Alec and the Black Stallion") offers a
superb lesson in tempo. After the flute performs the theme in almost
double time, the full London Session Orchestra kicks in with a
performance of the same theme at a grand and considerably slower pace,
the transition flowing seamlessly. The other mastery of Delerue's
primary string theme is his occasional insertion of minor key interludes
into its progressions. He had a knack for writing incredibly enticing
and sorrowful themes by doing just this throughout his career, though
there is nothing downbeat about
The Black Stallion Returns. The
secondary action theme is a likewise brassy affair that provides more
diversity in the race sequences in the middle of the film.
Overall, though
The Black Stallion is remembered
by far as a superior children's film,
The Black Stallion Returns
is a score that makes the original sound like child's play. Due to the
restraints placed on the team of composers and musicians of the original
project by their director, this is not as much a comment about their
abilities. Instead, their last minute efforts simply cannot compare to
Delerue's talent for these kinds of beautiful productions. The Delerue
score was highly requested on CD by countless film music collectors for
decades. Both scores had existed on LP albums at the time of their
debuts, though the Delerue score especially had been desired in the
digital medium since the mid-80's.
The Black Stallion Returns
never showed up on Delerue's best known compilations or re-recordings
either, making it an even greater request from his fans. The Prometheus
CD release of 2001 (a non-club/non-limited entry), in coordination with
MGM, provided both scores with satisfying attention to detail. The music
was remastered for that CD release, though Delerue's original recordings
always sound fantastic, so it's difficult to determine if there is a
significant increase in dynamic range. The Coppola/Walker score is
distant in parts, but is otherwise acceptable for a 1979 recording. The
contents are identical to what had appeared on the LPs. It's difficult
not to dismiss the original
The Black Stallion score after one
casual listen, skipping almost immediately to the second half as many
others will do. The half hour of Delerue music on this album (and one
could say the final 8-minute track alone) is easily worth the price of
the album. Luckily, the album has never completely sold out from
soundtrack specialty outlets. It should be said, on a side note, that if
Filmtracks were to ever develop into its own, small island nation, then
Delerue's theme from
The Black Stallion Returns would be an
irresistibly tempting national anthem.
The Black Stallion: **
The Black Stallion Returns: *****
Album Overall: ****
