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The Swarm: (Jerry Goldsmith) The highly publicized film
The Swarm ushered in the end of director and producer Irwin Allen's
fantastic voyage through the ranks of Hollywood's disaster film renaissance in
the 1970's. Unlike the previous hits of
The Poseidon Adventure and
The
Towering Inferno, audiences and critics gave a resounding sigh of impatience
with the genre by the time
The Swarm hit theatres in 1978, despite a
similarly loaded cast of actors. The plots of these films were getting more
bizarre and the special effects weren't holding up in the
Star Wars and
Close Encounters generation that represented the beginning of another age
in Hollywood. The concept of a massive attack by killer African bees in the
United States was simply one that couldn't be executed well on screen without
relying too heavily on seeing blurry shots of people running around trying to
avoid them, and time has not been as kind to this entry as it has been to Allen's
others. The director's career would fizzle from that point on, banished to the
realm of television, but the composer of the music for
The Swarm was red
hot at the time and was primed to get even better. Jerry Goldsmith was already a
composer considered at the height of his profession in the late 1970's, fresh off
of his Academy Award win for
The Omen. He took over a genre that had been
marked with memorable scores by John Williams, including
The Towering
Inferno, which is still considered by the majority of critics today to be the
best disaster score of the 1970's. Goldsmith rose to the challenge of tackling
The Swarm and produced what was one of the few bright spots for the entire
production. The score is a large-scale thematic and creative endeavor for the
Hollywood Symphony Orchestra, with all the bells and whistles required for an
Allen film (but curiously minus the trademark pop song that had always garnered
Oscar consideration). A well-rounded work, Goldsmith's effort includes a major
disaster theme, a love sub-theme, and a motif usually on the high strings and
brass that imitates the buzzing noise required to foreshadow and announce the
arrival of the killer bees invading Texas. The title theme, ironically, begins
with nearly the identical three note progression that opens Williams' primary
fanfare for
The Poseidon Adventure (but then branches into its own). The
love theme is sufficient in its high range string delicacy, almost reminiscent of
the romance affairs of twenty years prior, but not as compelling, perhaps, as
what Williams presented in the other scores.
The key to Goldsmith's success with this score is his brilliant
method of wavering the brass, woodwinds, and strings in a bee-like buzz. So
precise is the sound that the waffling of those instruments creates that it might
cause you to hear bees swarming in the room with you. Goldsmith also varies the
intensity of this orchestral sound effect in order to elevate or slip into the
subconscious the danger posed by the oncoming swarm. In some cases, this reduces
the effect down to a single woodwind underneath a romantic string interlude. The
only downside to the effect is the dry sound that the lack of resonance causes,
which diminishes the sonic size of the swarm to an extent. That, however, is a
recording quality issue; the overall sound quality is on par with other scores of
the time. When hearing the complete recording, there will be fifteen to twenty
minutes in the 72-minute experience that barely register in volume and are thus
not of much interest (the filler material in the work isn't particularly strong).
Easily the most interesting aspect of
The Swarm is the fact that Goldsmith
saves a singular theme for the "End Title," an exuberant, driving piece of
chopping strings and pounding timpani that actually, in its horn movements,
reminds of
Rudy,
Hoosiers and other later Goldsmith scores that
rely on rolling momentum for their appeal. This is the most common representative
from the score on re-recorded compilations. At the time of the film's debut, the
score was released on a 40-minute LP record and was received coolly by the
public. Just like the film, the music was soon forgotten, and this was partly the
reason why the score never experienced a commercial release on CD. Two widely
circulated bootlegged versions of the score existed for many years on the
secondary market, but neither was attractive enough to warrant serious attention.
With the other major Irwin Allen films' scores already released by Film Score
Monthly, the 2002 release of
The Swarm on a legitimate album by Prometheus
(which was experienced in pressing several other Goldsmith scores of that era)
completed the availability of these strong scores on CD. Like the two FSM ones
mentioned above, this product was limited to a pressing of 3,000 copies and
eventually joined its predecessors as a moderate collectible when it sold out
from soundtrack specialty outlets. Technically, it is a step beyond
The
Poseidon Adventure, but thematically and dynamically, it is a step behind
The Towering Inferno. On its own,
The Swarm is a worthy entry by
Goldsmith in the genre.
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The insert includes extensive information (written by Gary Kester) about
the film and score, as well as a list of performers.
