Buy it... if and only if you maintain a complete collection of Alan Silvestri's works and want to hear the light rock that guided his career before his consistent orchestral success.

Avoid it... if campy, 1980's contemporary pop and comedy jazz doesn't float your boat, no matter the composer.

Silvestri

Romancing the Stone: (Alan Silvestri) A struggling 20th Century Fox took a chance on a relatively unknown director, Robert Zemeckis, for Romancing the Stone, a project that Michael Douglas had been strongly pushing for a few years. Despite the fact that the film was a cash cow for Fox, the project was plagued with every imaginable post-production problem, from poor test audience reactions to, ironically, a need to distinguish the film from the concurrently released Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Zemeckis was frustratingly fired from the upcoming Cocoon (and replaced with Ron Howard) before Romancing the Stone could even be finished. Perhaps the best thing to come out of all that mess was the suggestion that Zemeckis visit with an aspiring television composer, Alan Silvestri, at his house to see if his ideas would match the style of music the producers were looking for. As difficult as it is to imagine today, there was a time in 1983 when Zemeckis couldn't find a composer to pair up with. So famous now is the Zemeckis and Silvestri collaboration that the director's troubles finding the right sound for Romancing the Stone make the project noteworthy for film score enthusiasts without further note. To further combat the competition (that pesky Indiana Jones film), the score for Romancing the Stone was desired to be campy and feature contemporary appeal, with the amount of bulky orchestral action held to a minimum. Silvestri, known professionally only because of his work for the television show CHIPS, impressed Zemeckis with his easy-going, free-flowing style, and several of the ramblings of musical ideas that Silvestri performed on the day that Zemeckis visited his house turned out to win him the job. Unlike its more serious competition, there was an effort to take Romancing the Stone and its basic adventure story far into the realm of modern romantic comedies, with dumb villains, unbelievable luck, and testy dialogue between characters who end up, of course, falling in love against unlikely odds. Silvestri's easy-going, funky, light rock music, with all the appropriate drum pads and associated tools of the era, was a perfect match for this cinematic personality.

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The style of Silvestri's work for Romancing the Stone is really an extension of television show mentality and instrumentation at the time. Light rock and jazzy rhythms were the staple of such shows back then (and, in some ways, still was twenty years later), and Silvestri had the genre knocked. The contemporary keyboarding and synthetic percussion was just a few steps away from the alterations Silvestri would apply to it for the exotic locations in the film. The Vera Cruz sequences have dorky, carnival-like instrumentation that you might have heard on cruise ships in the Caribbean at the time, and it would be an insult to any native peoples if not for the fact that all the white characters in the film are so ridiculous as well. Almost always moving with an enthusiastic rhythm and synthesized, pseudo-jungle instrumentation, the score resorts to stereotypical, urban saxophone performances for the romantic scenes. In fact, if a cue in the score isn't too stereotypical of 1980's romance films, then it's campy beyond a level of tolerance on album. The latter is evident in the full scale use of Alfred Newman's How the West Was Won in the prologue. The only really remarkable action cue for the moderate orchestral ensemble exists hidden near the end of "The Gorge." Overall, it's a lightweight compared to all of Silvestri's other scores for Zemeckis (even the forthcoming comedies), and it cannot be said that Romancing the Stone ages well. Released in its entirety for the first time on CD as part of the Varèse Sarabande Club series in 2002, the score was aimed primarily at hardcore film score collectors who, more than anything else, were likely interested in hearing the fledgling success of Silvestri's career. The music doesn't hold up as well as Howard Shore's Big, which is a comparable genre score provided in the same series of albums. Even as dated as it is, Romancing the Stone may appeal to Silvestri completists, but Varèse Sarabande would have done significantly better pursuing a long-awaited release of the next score in the collaboration, Back to the Future. The album does contain extra source and bonus cues, but only the most serious Silvestri collectors or enthusiasts of the film should seek Romancing the Stone at its limited edition price. Given that the product has sold out, listeners are better served by the label's release of Cast Away, which includes six minutes from this score as a bonus. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Alan Silvestri reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.34 (in 32 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.27 (in 30,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.