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First Knight: (Jerry Goldsmith) Outside of Sean
Connery's casting as the famed King Arthur, the rest of
First
Knight was both an artistic and intellectual disaster. So
embarrassing was director Jerry Zucker's mutilation of the Arthurian
legend that Camelot became humorous in parts where it was not intended.
A ridiculously dumb script, poor special effects, and absolutely wooden
performances by Richard Gere and Julia Ormond rounding out the love
triangle were the doom of
First Knight. Aiding in the
discontentment were comparisons at the time to the more fiercely original
Rob Roy and
Braveheart, both still fresh in the minds of
audiences and critics at the time. Faring reasonably well despite
scathing reviews,
First Knight is remembered with more
forgiveness by film score fans for Jerry Goldsmith's heroic music. The
project marked the second time in the matter of two years that Goldsmith
would replace Maurice Jarre in the action and adventure genre,
confirming (among other factors) Jarre's slow descent into relative
obscurity at the end of his career. The score that Goldsmith would
provide for
First Knight was so epic in proportion and noble in
tone that some might have wondered, given the suspect quality of the
film, if the composer was writing a parody score. But with his tendency
to tackle substandard projects with the utmost serious enthusiasm, it's
far more likely that Goldsmith was over-compensating for a film that
lacked scope and nobility in its other production elements. His score is
quite memorable in its blatant statements of each of its ideas, with two
extremely obvious primary themes typically sounding off amongst several
smaller motifs of equal power. It's a score dear to the hearts of many
Goldsmith fans if only because it is saturated with techniques that span
from
The Wind and the Lion and
The Omen in the mid-1970's
to
Air Force One and
The 13th Warrior later in the 1990's.
The music for
First Knight may not be packaged as well as those
other scores, but it nevertheless entertains fans of the composer with
unyielding bombast and romanticism.
The score opens and closes with a sparse, but effective
fanfare for Arthur himself, and this idea permeates the score with its
easily-identifiable octave-spanning structure. The high tones of this
theme (as defined by the trumpets) can be obnoxious at times, though the
theme fares far better when Goldsmith uses it as counterpoint to one of
his other ideas. A curious statement of this theme exists over upbeat,
oddly mixed metallic percussion at the end of "A New Life." The three
massive action pieces in the score, "Raid on Leonesse," "Night Battle,"
and "Arthur's Farewell," all feature stock Goldsmith action material,
but pulling inspiration from different directions in each case. It
wouldn't be surprising if a snare drum was damaged during this
recording, for its sharp pronouncement of each note gives these action
cues a distinctive, deliberate sense of movement. In a return to the
pulse-pounding style of
Lionheart, Goldsmith provides a somewhat
refined version of the pompous and loquacious form that impresses with
volume rather than unique substance. With the pride of Camelot at stake,
Goldsmith pulls all the stops the bombast department, with no cue as
impressive as "Arthur's Farewell." Goldsmith withholds the adult choir
until this late cue and the final minute of the score, but the merging
of style from Carmina Burana and Goldsmith's own
The Omen makes
for a stunningly deep and massive climax. This cue would serve as
compilation bait, with The City of Prague Philharmonic and Crouch End
Festival Chorus offering a very impressive performance of this piece on
their best-selling Cinema Choral Classics album (under the more
appropriate cue title "Never Surrender"). Aside from the totalitarian
action cues, the score has a beautiful and often overlooked love theme.
This theme, introduced in "Promise Me" and "Camelot" and fading with
bittersweet longing in "Camelot Lives," is among Goldsmith's more
attractive romantic themes of the 1990's. The performance of the theme
in that last cue would remind of the elegant finale of
Total
Recall and foreshadow the more fluid movements of his later
Star
Trek scores. At only 40 minutes on album, some fans grumble about
its brevity, though many of the same bold and brassy attitudes in
performance would resurface in superior form in 1999's
The 13th
Warrior. It's fun, but predictable.
****
| Bias Check: | For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.22 (in 111 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.36
(in 120,002 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
