Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you enjoy John Barry's slowly paced, lushly romantic scores and wish to hear one of the last truly effective ones in his career. Avoid it... if you think that once you've heard one Barry epic, you've heard them all. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Chaplin: (John Barry) So much had been known about Charlie Chaplin's movies and the public persona he attempted to enhance in his own autobiography, and yet the significant (and, to some extent, self-imposed) troubles in his personal life went largely undocumented until Sir Richard Attenborough attempted a revealing bio-epic of the early film star in 1992. As to be expected from this sort of Attenborough venture, the film's scope was grand and the acting credits contained a dozen well-known names. In the title role, Robert Downey Jr. (like Chaplin himself, mired in legal trouble) is convincing both aesthetically and in mannerism, and the film is littered with other high quality performances. But the major faults of the film are the pace at which it steams through Chaplin's life, the emphasis on the sex and other turmoil (an encounter with J. Edgar Hoover is invented to explain that a snub of Hoover by Chaplin at a party is a reason why the FBI pursued Chaplin as a Communist during his later days), as well as the flashback format of the film that includes Anthony Hopkins attempting to get the juicier details out of Chaplin before his decline in the 1970's. Despite these critical complaints about the project, Attenborough's film received some recognition during awards season, and an Academy Award nomination was given to John Barry for his dramatic underscore; it would be the last nomination for the man who had won four "Best Score" Oscars from the late 1960's through the early 1990's. Barry had met Attenborough back when Barry was still the nameplate on a jazz group, and Attenborough hired Barry to one of his first film score assignments to provide additional jazz source music for The L-Shaped Room. After a collaboration that lasted a few years, the director and composer would never be able to work together until Chaplin, and despite the great anticipation of their reunion, reports indicate that Attenborough was originally horrified by Barry's title theme for Chaplin. But after matching Barry's theme for the character with the tragic opening scene (in which Chaplin is seen taking off his makeup), Attenborough was brought to tears. In the 1990's, Barry's music was becoming far more predictable, with his slow, rolling, lushly romantic style finding fewer and fewer applications on the screen. This style had worked so well in Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves that he won Oscars for those efforts, and in so doing had created a situation in which anything similar for films thereafter would be considered by many to be re-hash. To some extent, his work for Chaplin is highly derivative, though this would be one of the last (if not the final) film for which this music would be a perfect match. Epic tragedy has never been captured quite as well as Barry had accomplished in the last two decades of his career, and his quiet piano and string score for Chaplin is both predictably deliberate and melodramatic. A delicate piano theme yields to several subthemes throughout the film, all moving at an extremely slow tempo and exhibiting the same chord progressions and bass string/cello counterpoint technique that was heard in Raise the Titanic, High Road to China, and Out of Africa. Pleasant to the last note, each of Barry's themes is simple in construction and painstakingly emphasized in every note. For veterans of film music, these quietly meandering themes will be exactly as expected, so the far more interesting parts of Chaplin will be Barry's more upbeat, out-of-character cues for dancing and the physical moving of Chaplin from London to California. These cues are set to light snare rhythms and pulsating brass, eventually dancing with woodblocks in parts that emulated Rachel Portman's more playful moments. The two "Roll Dance" cues show a glimpse of the old big band and Monte Walsh days for Barry, with the second one offering a snazzy brass rhythm over honky tonk piano. Barry also shows skill in adapting Chaplin's own musical compositions into his score, making generous usage of the "Smile" theme. There is a definite reason why the Downey Jr. club vocal version of "Smile" wasn't heard in the film; to do so would probably have killed Attenborough from humiliation. As with most of Barry's albums, the recording and mixing of Chaplin is exquisite, with the layered strings and delicate piano easily distinguishable in crystal clear quality. One of the last truly effective John Barry scores, Chaplin will be an easy and pleasurable listening experience for any of his collectors. **** Track Listings:
Total Time: 49:32
* Features re-recorded music from the song "The Honeysuckle and the Rose" ** Rerecorded music from the Charles Chaplin film City Lights *** Produced by Jonathan Elias, Alexander Lasarenko and Fritz Doddy and not featured in the film All artwork and sound clips from Chaplin are Copyright © 1992, Epic Soundtrax. 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 7/7/98, updated 2/17/06. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 1998-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
