Buy it... only if you seek a complete collection of Jerry Goldsmith's action music, including the more hasty and less interesting variety defined by this score.

Avoid it... if you expect consistent action rhythms, pronounced melodies, or the vibrant sound quality that often propels the brass and percussion in this Goldsmith's genre.

Goldsmith

Twilight's Last Gleaming: (Jerry Goldsmith) The American public wasn't yet quite ready to accept the anti-Vietnam, anti-government messages in 1977's Twilight's Last Gleaming, and the film was a major contribution to the sinking of director Robert Aldrich's career. Despite the fact that the Pentagon Papers, released in 1971, said everything that Aldrich was trying to use to outrage the American public, one of Twilight's Last Gleaming's plotlines (and the politically motivating one) involves the notion that terrorists from within the American military could force the U.S. president to admit to all the faulty policies behind the Vietnam war... without even mentioning the war by name in the first two hours of the film. The other plotline in the film involves a typical action line that depicts Burt Lancaster as a former military general who, along with two cohorts (including Paul Winfield), sneaks into a missile silo in Montana and threatens to launch its nine nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union. Unless the government admits to its failings, of course. Response to the film was similar to the response by the public to Vietnam in the late 1970's; people just accepted the government was faulty and didn't need to see someone take over missile silos in order to force the government to expose its own evils. For the purposes of the score, Aldrich had wanted to hire his usual collaborator, Frank De Vol, for Twilight's Last Gleaming. The tandem that had produced Flight of the Pheonix, however, was disrupted by an illness that struck De Vol, and Jerry Goldsmith, who had always wanted to compose for an Aldrich film, was brought in at the last minute to provide the music. He completed the score in almost record speed, and later revealed that did not even have time in his schedule to oversee the dubbing process. Consequently, the score was chopped up considerably in the final product, and Goldsmith admitted that the score was not used in the film as he would have liked.

	Learn about supporting Filmtracks

The resulting soundtrack is somewhat underdeveloped, considering the tension and grand geo-political issues discussed in the film. Let's not forget, also, that Twilight's Last Gleaming is an action thriller as well, and Goldsmith's handling of this genre is also lacking in the film. The score is a cross between Capricorn One and Seven Days in May, very militaristic in drive, and relies heavily on the percussion section. For lengthy sequences, the snare and bass drums will maintain a staggered rhythm while harsh brass perform simple, typical Goldsmith motifs on the top. For the General McKenzie's character (leading the government's side), Goldsmith offers some faint echoes of the trumpet heroics of Patton and MacArthur, including a few recognizable two-note trumpet alternations from the former score. After meandering with very subdued drum beats for the sneaking sections at the outset, as well as a short, soft, and underdeveloped woodwind theme in "A Reflective Interlude," Goldsmith finally starts to establish satisfying action rhythms with the whole ensemble in "Operation Gold Begins." In "The Tanks," Goldsmith previews some of the stock action material that would define his career in the mid-1990's, although punctuated nicely here by distinct piano strikes in the bass ranges. In the final moments, however, Goldsmith allows the score dissolve once again into a tangled mess of snare rips, singular blasts from the brass section, and no melody worth speaking of. Because of the failure of the film at its outset, a release of its music was a longtime in the coming. Many of the original tapes of the score had gone missing before it was determined that Goldsmith's son Joel was in possession of them. It was finally released in 1991 as the debut CD album of The Goldsmith Society, with a limited run of only 500 albums produced. Just after this product created a fuss with the Goldsmith collectors, the Silva Screen label released the identical contents in regular commercial form the following year. Both versions suffer from archival sound issues, which especially hurt the cause of the percussion in the score. Overall, even if you are a collector of Goldsmith's superior action writing of the early-1980's, Twilight's Last Gleaming is a much less developed and far less interesting sibling of those efforts. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.25 (in 113 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.34 (in 129,363 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.