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City Slickers: (Marc Shaiman) Occupying a place on
many top 100 lists of the funniest films ever made, Billy Crystal's
City Slickers was a monumental fiscal success and spawned an
inferior sequel a few years later. The 1991 original is a midlife crisis
story in which three New York City friends feeling their age sign up for
a dude ranch cattle drive in New Mexico. Along their journey to
Colorado, they overcome their initial city slicker limitations and
deliver the livestock to the right destination despite the death of
their old cowboy guide and several other mishaps. It's a redeeming tale
of friendship and family with a priceless series of hilarious
conversations and one-liners between the three leads early in the
picture. Arguably stealing the show is veteran Western actor Jack
Palance, whose resurgence in Hollywood at the time led to an unlikely
Academy Award win for
City Slickers. The 73-year-old became a pop
culture icon upon accepting the Oscar with an arguably foul speech that
included one-armed push-ups, references to sex and defecation, and an
intimidating demeanor that recalled fond memories of his memorable role
in
Shane forty years earlier. It remains one of the most
controversial and entertaining acceptance speeches in major awards
history. Not yet achieving the same level of fame in the early 1990's
was composer Marc Shaiman, though he had already been a regular
collaborator with Bette Midler and Billy Crystal in the writing and
production of song numbers. The always affable Shaiman was just a few
years from five Oscar nominations later in the 1990's, and he continued
to arrange the AMPAS shows' musical performances throughout the 2000's.
His association with Crystal is what brought him the assignment on
City Slickers, and he responded with a score every bit as vibrant
as the comedy on screen. The film's plot presented Shaiman with a few
obstacles, the most severe of which being the need for parody Western
music opposite tender melodic material to accompany the main characters'
growth. The composer has always been extremely talented at merging and
adapting incongruous genres of music, and perhaps no better examples of
this capability exist than the main titles sequences for
City
Slickers and its sequel. As effective as Shaiman was in achieving
the right balance of Western flavor, wild orchestral comedy, and
wholesome personality for
City Slickers, however, the score
remains a step or two behind its sibling in the franchise.
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The word schizophrenic has often been used to describe
the flow of Shaiman's approach to
City Slickers, and the story
necessitated such an approach. The "Main Title" sequence is a haphazard,
frantic collection of Western cliches in direct battle with Carl
Stalling/Warner Brothers cartoon music, introducing many of the score's
secondary Western motifs before making the first full statement of the
primary theme of adventure near its conclusion. A sudden gunshot
appropriately concludes this performance. Most of the Western motifs
recur in short snippets throughout the score before occupying, along
with the title theme, the majority of "Mitchy the Kid" at the finale of
the picture. The main theme receives fully symphonic, dramatic treatment
in "The River," the film's sole serious scene of perseverance. The
Western influences in
City Slickers do owe a fair amount to Elmer
Bernstein and Ennio Morricone, though perhaps not as obviously as in the
sequel score. The score's secondary theme is the basis for Shaiman's
light rock song "Where Did My Heart Go?" at the end of the album and
begins its transformation from contemporary melancholy tone for
saxophone in "Career End" (emulating Dave Grusin's 1980's style quite
well) to a pleasantly orchestral conclusion in "Birth of a Norman." The
Stalling-like material returns in "Walking Funny," extending the
train-like percussion sounds from the titles into a hyperactive blend of
honky-tonk spirit and slightly hip blues. The latter becomes it own
force in "Cowabunga," with Gospel vocals letting rip for obvious laughs.
The most balanced cue in
City Slickers is "Find Your Smile,"
which bridges the contemporary and Western genres with performances of
both major themes and a few longing harmonica and acoustic guitar
interludes for the romantic appeal of the Old West. On the whole, all of
these cues have abundant personality and work effectively in context,
but they yield a somewhat disjointed presentation on album. The ensemble
size, performance enthusiasm, and recording mix of
City Slickers
is notably inferior to that of
City Slickers II: The Legend of
Curly's Gold, too, with the latter score featuring increasingly
robust, fully orchestral passages and a more dynamic soundscape. The
short, 37-minute album for the original
City Slickers score
includes, to its credit, the Jimmy Durante song "Young at Heart" in its
midsection. For fans of this entertaining film, the album is an old
friend with a title theme that's hard to shake, but for purely listening
purposes, seek the sequel score's album first to get a taste of
Shaiman's sense of humor and homage to familiar Western styles.
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| Bias Check: | For Marc Shaiman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.13 (in 8 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.12
(in 18,264 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
