Filmtracks: High Road to China (John Barry)


Barry

High Road to China: (John Barry) The 1983 adventure High Road to China was meant to be Tom Selleck's victorious transition from television to feature films and a rival to the Indiana Jones franchise. In it, Selleck is a drunken, depressed pilot hired in the 1920's by a British heiress to help find her captured father in order to ensure that his riches transfer to her. With those somewhat curious parameters in mind, the film doesn't ask you to sympathize with any of its leads, but rather entertains you with its aerial journey from Turkey to Afghanistan, Nepal, and ultimately China. With a budding but never realized relationship between the Selleck's rogue and the heiress, who turns out is deceiving her partner in that she's a skilled pilot herself and simply needs his planes to make the rescue attempt herself, the film balances a bittersweet romantic element with the stunning aerial photography central to its appeal. No doubt a logical hire for the assignment at the time was John Barry, who could not only provide the flowing romanticism necessary by those two main features of the story, but also the stock suspense that accompanies attempts by other interested parties in killing off the heiress. Barry was balancing two major sides of his career at the time: the continuing formula of the James Bond scores, and the bloated, string-dominated lyricism that would eventually yield two Academy Award wins for the composer. Collectors made cynical by Barry's consistency in these efforts throughout the decades have rejected both sounds, flocking instead towards the few Barry efforts that don't squarely fit in one of those two genres. For these listeners, High Road to China is truly a nightmare of redundancy. In the film, the majority of cues are actually source material consisting of jazz and classical pieces from the era. Barry wrote two source cues, and most of the others are standards that you may recognize.

The score itself offers absolutely nothing new to the composer's career, but it does have the advantage of stating Barry's obvious mannerisms with a more effective voice than many of his other similar scores. Composed a few years after Raise the Titanic and a few before Out of Africa, the score is a mix of the two. Barry returns to his robust and repetitive title theme of the same grand nature as Raise the Titanic while utilizing the heavier dramatic base of Out of Africa, accentuated by low rumblings of the tuba at regular intervals. The score's two primary themes are almost always present. The title theme doubles as the "Love Theme," an overwhelmingly lush and straight-forward string theme of melodramatic weight, contributed to by Barry's standard, broad brass counterpoint. Like Dances With Wolves, Barry's secondary, more rhythmic theme for the film is the superior attraction. From the inspiration of daring flight, this theme soars with determination and majesty over a churning string rhythm. The medium to high brass layers of this theme are an exceptionally bold twist on the usual kind of propulsive action music that populated Barry's scores for the Bond films at the time. Its keen sense of movement rivals On Her Majesty's Secret Service, especially in its bass and drum use, and the majestic attitude will remind of Moonraker's title theme. For the rugged and mountainous setting of the film, this secondary adventure theme is, despite its simplistic construct, quite effective. Barry's chugging snare drums well represent a biplane engine. A sax in the final cue is an echo of Body Heat. Since the sound quality here is not as clear as in other Barry recordings, a suite from High Road to China has always been a request for the producers at Silva Screen, with whom The City of Prague Philharmonic has always performed adept re-recordings of Barry's music.


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The score has been released twice on CD, and unfortunately both albums lack the clarity that many of Barry's recordings had featured at the time. Still, for fans of Barry's romanticism, the content of the music outweighs any audio deficiencies, standing alongside Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves as a dramatic necessity in any Barry collection. The score's history on CD began in 1990, released as the second album in the Soundtrack Collector's Special Editions (SCSE) series. A much coveted collector's item within the film music community, only 2,750 copies of High Road to China were made available to the public. On the secondary market, they sold for up to $150 in auctions of the mid-1990's. By the end of the decade, though, an unexpected extra stock of original copies of those CDs was made available through Amazon.com (listed as an "import") for $21, greatly reducing demand. In 2000, the Supertracks label released a limited promotional album with two extra minutes of score and the full compliment of source material to make the album complete. With the addition of the traditional source music and the two source cues written by Barry, the 2000 album contains every moment of music heard in the film. Both albums contain music for scenes that were cut from the final release of the film. The two source cues and additional score by Barry are unexciting, not worth the price of the expanded album alone. Thus, if you already have the original 1990 album and are content with presentation, then that product will likely suffice. The re-release does condense the Barry score into one, well-organized 32 minute experience, and is highly recommended for self-proclaimed Barry fans who are not yet familiar with High Road to China. On the whole, this score has a more adventurous spirit than many of Barry's other lush works, and its increasingly better availability on album should satisfy all the demand this film and score can muster.

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Bias Check:

For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.87 (in 23 reviews)
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