 |
|
 |
|
 | |||||||||
| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
| . |
1. Nim's Island 2. The Life Before Her Eyes 3. Horton Hears a Who! 4. Leatherheads 5. The Spiderwick Chronicles | . | . |
1. Moulin Rouge 2. Gladiator 3. POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl 4. Star Wars: A New Hope 5. Edward Scissorhands |
6. Pearl Harbor 7. Schindler's List 8. Titanic 9. Braveheart 10. Home Alone | . | . |
1. Varèse Sarabande 25th 2. The Last of the Mohicans 3. Legends of the Fall 4. Schindler's List 5. LOTR: Return of the King (Set) |
 | ||||||||
|
|
|
 
Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you are a Miklós Rózsa completist and are interested in two of his final scores that are solid in quality despite exhibiting some flimsy militaristic material. Avoid it... if Rózsa's lush Golden Age romanticism doesn't impress you regardless of sound quality. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Eye of the Needle/Last Embrace: (Miklós Rózsa) After the end of the studio contract system for composers in the early 1960's, one of the most displaced artists was Miklós Rózsa. The legend was as far removed from the biblical epics the 50's and 60's that had served as the climax of his career, and after taking several years in the 60's removed from film music all together, he resumed regular freelance scoring duties in the late 60's and 70's. Unfortunately, few of his scores from the last dozen years of his career accompanied memorable films. His collaborations often produced unimpressive results or, in the case of Fedora and Billy Wilder, ruined his professional relationships. While Fedora and Time After Time are truly the last of his great scores, Rózsa's remaining few scores weren't as evident as the composer's decline in health as some might suggest. Rózsa would go on to live for another decade after finishing his film score career, with the recording process simply taking too much energy for him to muster. His scores for two thrillers, Last Embrace in 1978 and Eye of the Needle in 1981 would share many similarities, including the sharing of the final album of importance from the composer's works. They both represented times in which Rózsa continued to maintain his lush 1940's romanticism and instrumental styles into an era beyond his time, serving in both cases to eclipse their films in quality. And both would also involve the worlds of espionage and love affairs, allowing Rózsa to mingle his classic romance themes with more modern militaristic tones. Last Embrace was an early Jonathan Demme film commenting on the states of paranoia that a CIA agent experiences after seeing his spouse executed and figuring that he is the next target. The dominating aspect of Rózsa's score is an easily accessible string theme for the love affair between the agent and a new love interest, evoking many of the high class melodramatic layered strings in Rózsa's classic scores over worrisome timpani rumblings. A driving snare rhythm serves as a secondary motif, mirroring, interestingly, some of John Barry's James Bond action motifs of the era. A cymbal-crashing brass finale suits Rózsa's closing fanfare sensibilities exactly as expected. Similar themes would be heard in Rózsa's last significant original score, Eye of the Needle, a film in which a World War II German spy is stranded on a island off the coast of Scotland and ends up in an unlikely romance with a lonely local woman exiled from the mainland. The Ken Follett novel adaptation received positive reviews, as had Last Embrace, though neither picture would gross significant returns. Rózsa's score for Eye of the Needle would be an alternating battle between the thematic ideas for the German spy and the British woman in exile. While their love affair may be genuine, Rózsa doesn't let the viewer forget the foundations of their characters. If the score has a weakness, it exists in the comparison between the wartime material and the lush love theme that once again reminds of the Rózsa' glory days. The two are alternated in the "Prelude," exposing the militaristic snare theme as a bit trite in execution and not existing as forcefully and cold as could have. The seamless transition to the love theme glorifies the latter theme, and it's fitting that the tender theme for the exiled woman gains more power as the film progresses; as she is forced to kill the spy at the end of the film, the militaristic theme literally dies with a whimper while the woman's theme resolutely takes charge. By the "Finale/Epilogue" cue, Rózsa is in full victory form, with the same crashing cymbal, rolling timpani, and tolling bell form of finale that collectors of the composer have always loved. Of the two scores, Eye of the Needle is the slight favorite, in part because it's technically the last full score by Rózsa and partly because of its unashamed throwback styles. On album, full 1981/1982 re-recordings of the scores made the transition from LP to CD in the latter half of Varèse Sarabande's original CD Club series, and while neither score is as strong as Fedora was earlier in the series, their equal presentation on album here is perhaps more satisfying. Only 1,000 copies of this title were produced, with the significant number of Rózsa collectors hoarding most of them. Collectors of the digital era of scores should take note of both original Varèse Club titles of Rózsa's late works, as well as Time After Time, because they offer an opportunity to hear the composer's Golden Age styles in sound quality far better than the archival sound we often receive on the significantly older recordings.
Eye of the Needle: *** Combination Album: ****
The insert includes detailed information about the score and film. All copies were numbered. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
