 |
|
| Goldsmith |
|
|
Matinee: (Jerry Goldsmith) With the collaboration
between director Joe Dante and composer Jerry Goldsmith spanning several
decades and including many successful titles, it's easy for
Matinee
to slip through the cracks. Arguably their least popular project together,
Matinee is a film that accomplishes several things at once for Dante:
it's a "coming of age" picture for a group of pre-teen youth, it pokes fun
at the B-horror film industry of the 1950's and early 60's, and it plays on
the fears of nuclear proliferation that were at their height in October,
1962 (the time frame of movie's setting). While the group of young actors is
more than sufficient in their roles, it's John Goodman who steals the show
as showman Lawrence Woolsey, a character based on the real-life horror movie
experimenter William Castle. Attempting to capitalize on nuclear fears and
bring the third dimension of film back to theatres, Woolsey debuts a 'movie
within a movie' called "Mant" (half man, half ant) and includes drama with a
live 'mant' inside the theatre itself at the showing. With nostalgia and
sentiment at heart, the comedy of the film is an extra bonus. With that in
mind, Jerry Goldsmith provides a score that is appropriately light-hearted,
but not strictly comedic as you might first imagine. An important
distinction to make is between the music you hear in "Mant" and that which
Goldsmith wrote. The old horror music is reused material from actual films
of the era and genre, and only in the context of a cue like "Showtime" does
Goldsmith play with some of that outwardly Hermannesque knock-off style in
his own material. While the "Mant" music may, for some listeners, be the
more memorable cue-by-cue material in the album (the "Mant" film is, after
all, quite funny), none of that music exists within Goldsmith's
contribution. Alone, Goldsmith's writing here sounds much like the
lesser-inspired moments of
The 'Burbs from several years
earlier.
In these regards, the score is far less entertaining in a
comedy or action sense than other Dante/Goldsmith pairings spanning from
Gremlins to
Looney Tunes: Back in Action (nine films total).
Goldsmith's themes follow the route of sentimentality and nostalgia far more
than comedy, with the first half of the score containing little excitement
beyond the consistency of the composer's delightful, soft melodies. The
themes Goldsmith concocts for these films are very similar, with
Love
Field,
Rudy, and
Angie all coming to mind, although in the
case of
Matinee, his customary electronics are mostly absent. Relying
instead on the slur of a jazz theme here and occasional string theme
borrowings from the style of
Moon River,
Matinee is an
instrumentally conservative score. His theme for the kids is a lightweight
for strings and woodwinds, although the ideas for the theatre owner are far
more intriguing. For Goodman's character, Goldsmith inserts some sleazy jazz
on piano, making for some greasy moments at its start (complete with
carnival pipes at one point) but some outwardly elegant ones as the show
goes on in later cues. An attractive theme for suburbia takes the page from
The 'Burbs with its chipper melody over pulsating brass and plucking
bass strings. The quantity of themes for
Matinee is surprisingly
deep, with the final cue, "The Next Attraction," combining all of the
thematic ideas into one 8-minute cue (ending with a cute whistling sound
effect from Goldsmith's library), including an expansion of the faster,
rhythmic percussion-driven piano cues that finally provide a small taste of
that
Gremlins attitude. The latter half of
Matinee provides a
much more varied and interesting listening experience than the first,
thematically conservative half. If you could throw the short blasts of
B-horror music in "Showtime" someplace in the vast end credits cue, you have
all the music from
Matinee that you really need. The album is among
those plentiful Varèse Sarabande releases of Goldsmith music in the
early-90's that is not quite out of print, but nor is it easy to find. A
collector of the composer's work will find enjoyment in this album's
sentimentality, although it fades from memory quickly after its final
notes.
***
| 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.
|
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
