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Filmtracks Recommends:
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. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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. 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. ****
The album contains the usual excellent quality of pictorial and textual information established in other albums of FSM's series, with extremely detailed notes about the films and scores. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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