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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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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) |
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you're exploring the early triumphs of John Williams' transformation into a master of large-scale orchestral action. Avoid it... if badly substandard sound quality due to poor master tape availability, as well as the scarcity of the score on album, deter you from its often high prices. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Only one source cue of jazz in the main dining hall interrupts Williams' perpetually gloomy string and brass rumblings in the deep layers of bass. Even the piano is tethered to these dark bass regions, often crashing to accentuate an orchestra hit or rambling without direction in the more tentative cues. The nonstop dread finally yields to a slightly more upbeat variation on the tumbling string rhythms in the finale cue, slowly building in E.T. fashion to cymbal crashing statement of triumph in the title theme (during the rescue scene) that remains the highlight of the score. At the time, the score was unfortunately overlooked by the general public (even though the film was a smashing success) because of the Academy Award winning song "The Morning After" tacked on to the film; Williams uses the song's theme only briefly in the score and had no association with its production. On album, The Poseidon Adventure has suffered from poor sound quality from the start. A 40-minute bootleg was released in 1995 with all pertinent cues, and though its sound quality was horrendous, it remained the only available source of music from the film and sold for as much as $150 in the years that followed. In 1998, the Film Score Monthly magazine was introducing its fledgling Silver Age Classics CD series to collectors, and after a somewhat lackluster opening entry with Stagecoach, FSM sent cheers through the crowd with a compilation of three John Williams scores of the early 1970's on CD #2. The selling point of the album was The Poseidon Adventure, with a source cue added to the bootleg material and the entire score recorded directly from the original tapes; unfortunately, only the mono backup recordings remain viable at this time for most cues. Listeners will note a significant improvement in quality for two seemingly random cues in the middle of the score for which the stereo tapes were available. The album also features premier recordings of The Paper Chase and Conrack, both of which differ in style from the disaster classic. The contemporary drama The Paper Chase exhibits both some of Williams' more romantic, jazzy pop themes and modern classical interpretations. An unassuming, relaxing score, its pop-influenced love theme is genuinely enjoyable, swinging with a small ensemble through an eclectic collection of cues that includes some classical source material. The societal commentary of Conrack, on the other hand, runs parallel musically to Sugarland Express, and its heartfelt theme is dominated by vibrant solos. Presented on the album is the only surviving music from the film (roughly a third of the overall length of Williams' composition for the project), but easily the most important. This cue, as Jon Voight prepares to teach school in a backwards Southern community, features guitar and flute solos that mark some of the best thematic material Williams composed for small-scale drama in that period. Overall, sound quality will remain a touchy issue. While the scores of John Barry from the early 1970's can be heard today in perfect, crystal-clear vibrance, it's hard to imagine how a composer of Williams stature (equal to that of Barry by the early 1970's) wouldn't afford extra recording capabilities above the shoddy ones that studios often used at the time... The recordings of the 1970's were often worse than those of the 1960's, and The Poseidon Adventure is clear evidence of that misfortune. Contrary to original rumours, the Film Score Monthly release features better sound quality than the bootleg, but still not satisfying by any means. Nevertheless, the three scores together sound equivalent in their muted qualities, and this shouldn't stop any ardent Williams fan from seeking the FSM album. Along with FSM's even more impressive release of The Towering Inferno, the limited The Poseidon Adventure edition of 3,000 copies disappeared within a few years and has escalated in price on the secondary market in the years that followed. Indeed, these two have proven to be FSM's most popular releases ever.
1995 Bootleg: ** 1998 FSM: ****
* Contains music not used in the film ** Not used in the film *** Stereo
The 1995 bootleg insert includes no extra information about the score or film. The 1998 Film Score Monthly album includes the label's usual standard of outstanding, in-depth notes about films and scores for all three scores represented on the product. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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