Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... on the limited 2009 Intrada album if you love the film and desire a truly comprehensive examination of the evolution of Carmine Coppola's troubled efforts to find the right heart for the concept. Avoid it... if you expect the butchered, often badly understated score for the classic to meet any of the same standards of storytelling excellence by which you casually recall the film itself. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Black Stallion: (Carmine Coppola/Shirley Walker) The films based on "The Black Stallion" fantasy story written by Walter Farley in 1941 were not only popular, but they helped the concept become a fixture in 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, exhibiting highly acclaimed, often spectacular location photography. The original 1979 film retains the most attention in the mainstream for its classic storyline, depicting a boy and a wild Arabian stallion marooned on a tropical island as the sole survivors of a shipwreck. The film is divided very obviously into two halves, the first dealing with the growing relationship between the boy and the horse (helping each other to survive) and the second showing their training and winning of a race in America after their rescue. Both films were produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and it was because of this connection that Coppola's father, Carmine Coppola, ultimately received the assignment to score the first film. To say that the scoring process of The Black Stallion was a mess is generously worded. In fact, it was a tense nightmare that churned in the background of the Coppolas' concurrent efforts on Apocalypse Now. Due to the producer's initial wish to have a purely unconventional musical approach for the concept, the film was originally to be scored by jazz and classical crossover artist William Russo, but immediate disagreements with first-time director Carroll Ballard about this musical approach caused the composer to walk away without writing a note. Working with Carmine Coppola yielded a decent orchestral 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 of the film. Unfortunately, most of the rearrangements, rough edits, and total re-writes forced upon The Black Stallion, despite whatever intelligence it took from the underrated talents of Walker to appease the director, were inferior to Coppola's original score. This downgrade is especially prevalent in the second half of the film, a damning statement given that that initial material was highly flawed in its own tepid tone and mismanagement of themes in the first place. Coppola's music still maintains a majority of screen time in The Black Stallion, and it is simplistic and barely adequate thematic material that struggles to generate and hold an appropriate tone for the story. It's remarkable to consider the underlying strength of the thematic constructs but the careless and completely unenthusiastic manner in which they were conveyed by the Los Angeles musicians. A pretty title theme for the boy/horse relationship, a secondary Arabian-influenced theme for the stallion, and a potentially rousing idea for their riding sequences (as well as a distinct training theme in the second half of the movie) are all well conceived and probably looked great on paper. Somewhere in the translation of that material to performance, all the life was sucked out of the music, leading to a score with the cool warmth of elevator tunes. The title theme is especially strangled by slow pacing, outright boring orchestration, and performances that lack any particularly deep meaning. This lack of emotional engagement is critical to the score's failure, though Ballard's response was to apparently shake the score down to even less dense soundscapes. Although the ambience Coppola set for the film was carried on by the other musicians who wrote additional material, the thematic integrity and instrumental cohesion became lost in the process. 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. Genres of music are badly merged, from jazzy piano to slight string waltzes. By the time of the banjo, steel guitar, and harmonica material meant to represent Americana elements in the second half, the score has completely lost any semblance of consistency. There are individual highlights to be heard in The Black Stallion, however. 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 earlier scenes, led by solo harp and flute, completely loses the fantasy element that Coppola's score had attempted to capture in its entirety. Much of this material sounds almost like documentary music that you'd hear in National Geographic nature shows at the time, scores that made a conscious effort to provide a basic backdrop and avoid any significant emotional impact on the visuals. The cues for the final race and its aftermath 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 either of the score's two official albums, a correct sequencing will give you a very good idea of just how butchered the recording process was in its final weeks. 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. A 2001 Prometheus album placed both scores together, 35 minutes total from B>The Black Stallion. An impressive 3-CD set from Intrada Records in 2009 offered that same original album presentation but also two CDs of the complete score with many alternate and unused takes. Although the best treatment of the score possible, that 2009 product (limited to only 1,500 copies) only served to expose the extremely troubled evolution of a score that ultimately had no chance to form a cohesive whole in the picture. It's a prime example of a promising, but ultimately underachieving, fragmented soundtrack that is carried by the strength of the other production elements. Skip the expensive collectable of 2009 and try instead to satisfy yourself with the 2001 double-score album, which is worth its price for the Delerue sequel score alone. ** Track Listings (2001 Prometheus Album):
Total Time: 65:41
Track Listings (2009 Intrada Album):
Total Time: 126:03
All artwork and sound clips from The Black Stallion are Copyright © 2001, 2009, Prometheus Records, Intrada Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 1/11/02, updated 2/27/10. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2002-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
2001 Prometheus