Buy it... if you seek the last Western score of Jerry Goldsmith's early career, with a maturation of his melodic sensibilities combined with a twist of the expected Ennio Morricone style for the dying genre.

Avoid it... if you have the four or five highlights from this score on the 1993 SPFM Goldsmith tribute album and weren't impressed with those selections.

Goldsmith

Take a Hard Ride: (Jerry Goldsmith) With Westerns falling from grace with mainstream audiences in the 1970's, Hollywood was doing everything it could to infuse some last breaths of life into the genre. If that meant inserting kickboxing, helicopters, black football stars, unconventional filming techniques, and the concept-bending sounds of Ennio Morricone into the mix, then it was done. The 1975 flop Take a Hard Ride was one entry that attempted to do all of the above, and to such an extent that the film drew its own unique form of ridicule. The emergence of the spaghetti western sub-genre, and its subsequently quick demise, forced the last few kings of the old 60's Western classics to adapt in order to survive. One such artist was composer Jerry Goldsmith, who approached Take a Hard Ride at a time when his career was branching off in other directions. After such a grand variety of works for the genre over the previous dozen years, this film would be the last Western he would score until 1994's Bad Girls lured him back to the genre. He was very familiar with the direction that Morricone had taken the genre's music, and since the director was an Italian working under an altered screen name, Goldsmith knew that some of Morricone's experimental new sounds would need to be used. Interestingly, though, Goldsmith chose also to continue his own metamorphosis in the Western genre by leaning more heavily on lyrical themes to create a melodic identity for those scores. He had discovered this lyrical style with The Wild Rovers several years earlier, and in Take a Hard Ride he would create arguably the most attractive Western theme of his career (though fans of both The Wild Rovers and Rio Conchos could make a stake for those scores' themes as well). With these easy melodies came a symphonic representation of Americana that brought Goldsmith as close to Elmer Bernstein's styles as he would get.

For film score fans, this culmination of thematic development in the genre would cause Take a Hard Ride to contain several lengthy statements of rolling orchestral harmony (over tambourine and guitar) that would elevate demand for the score on album. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Goldsmith's thematic identity for Take a Hard Ride is his choice of piccolo and recorder to render some sensitivity to an otherwise brutish, unsophisticated film. The piccolo in particular would be integral in performing several of the film's smaller motifs. In the primary statements of the title theme, heard best in "Main Title," "Friendly Enemies," "The Wagon," and "A Long Walk," Goldsmith would hand the theme over to high strings and brass for their most satisfying performances. Outside of these statements, Goldsmith tackles Take a Hard Ride with a wider sense of ambient sound design. Early electronics make a significant impact on the score, foreshadowing the disembodied echoing effects that would define the Rambo scores. The use of the harmonica as somewhat of a source instrument would be Goldsmith's nod to Morricone, as would be some of the striking, shrill brass usage late in the score (among other techniques of disillusionment). These effects would be taken out of context in the final edit of the film and provided with far more frequency than Goldsmith had originally intended. A mingling of ethnic spice for "The Trek" is also a twist of the same style. Closer to home for the composer would be the use of percussion, especially during some of the hand to hand combat scenes; for these moments, Goldsmith would employ a range of thunderous timpani and medium-range drums that would mirror his concurrent use of such sounds in The Wind and the Lion. In its full album presentation, Take a Hard Ride strikes a satisfying balance between the maturation of Goldsmith's thematic sensibilities in the genre and the Morricone-like demands of the filmmaker and sub-genre.

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Unfortunately, the director would mangle Goldsmith's score in the film, rearranging it to death and failing to use some sequences. A 2000 album from Film Score Monthly presents the score in its chronological and original form. Marking the first album of Film Score Monthly's third volume of Silver Age Classics products (and sporting a new look since their inaugural release two years prior), Take a Hard Ride was one of the more obscure, but noteworthy releases for FSM at the time. Having provided many Goldsmith scores in the series, including the questionably redundant Patton and Rio Conchos, FSM's treatment of Take a Hard Ride was by far the most attractive Goldsmith entry of the series. Like FSM's immediately previous release, The Film-Flam Man, this score had only been available before on the Society for Preservation of Film Music's tribute dinner CD to Goldsmith back in 1993, a collectible that had become one of the most rare and expensive in the soundtrack community. That tribute album contains all four major statements of the primary theme from Take a Hard Ride (listed in the cues above), so casual collectors who aren't impressed by those cues on the compilation need not investigate FSM's product. But the expanded 2000 release once again receives strong treatment of sound quality by Intrada's Douglass Fake and, unlike many other Film Score Monthly albums in their series, offers a very simple, 45-minute experience of continuous, quality Goldsmith music. With no source cues, mono versus stereo versions, or songs, the album makes few demands. Additionally, unlike the troubles experienced by many previous FSM releases, the original multi-track (stereo) masters with individual instruments alone for Take a Hard Ride were available to Doug Fake for the best possible mix. Crisper stereo sound has come out of a few of Goldsmith's other scores of the era, but the presentation here ranges from adequate to impressive. With a hearty 3,000 copies available to the film music community, yet another portion of the 1993 SPFM tribute album was rendered defunct. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.26 (in 113 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.32 (in 133,461 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.