My Poledouris rundown and subsequent write-up was fun, so I decided to do a follow-up - everything I have by Georges Delerue. Hopefully this serves as a decent guide on what to pursue for those who read this post’s subject and said “Dele-who?”

Note #1 - A lot of Delerue’s music is CD-only. Many of Delerue’s scores weren’t terribly long, and the specialty labels have been nice enough to group many of them on single discs, though as most of these are now out of print growing one’s Delerue collection isn’t as cost-efficient as you would think hahaha.

Note #2 - I thought I’d be able to post this a week or two ago. It’s funny when you’re midway through a Delerue rundown and you get staffed on a project with a French client...and then you work the entire weekend (and your Wednesday workday stretches until 3am Thursday). Now I see why the pace of this site’s reviews slowed to a crawl when CC was much busier.

Note #3 - Binge-listening is not advised (CK is right about a lot of his 80s American works being cut from the same cloth). I balanced this with a concurrent Silvestri survey along with other various albums, and each composer’s works served as effective palette cleansers for the other’s (side effects of shifting from Jules and Jim to something like friggin’ Predator can induce whiplash; consult your doctor before pairing Delerue and Silvestri).

Note #4 - No, I haven’t heard the score Jon Broxton covered in his last Throwback Thirty review. It’s like Qyburn said...“the work continues.”

Note #5 - Wow, I’ve only seen one of these films.

The compilations
The London Sessions, which feature re-recorded themes and suites largely from his 80s works, are sublime and a highly recommended starting point for the uninitiated (“but we are initiated, aren’t we Bruce? Members of the league of scores.”). Be advised that the release history of these is a tad convoluted.
- First there were the three original single-CD volumes which mixed in some film recording suites.
- Then we got the Great Composers rerelease (on Spotify) which includes most of the re-recordings, some of the aforementioned film recordings, and new tracks which turned out to be more tracks from prior VS releases
- More recently we got a 2CD reissue that was advertised as being all the rerecordings yet omitted one song (no great loss) and still featured one film recording suite.

Nonesuch Records also put out a very good anthology re-recording of music from the films of François Truffaut. Cinéfonia Records’ Les Notes de L'Écran compilation of original tracks from some of Delerue’s more obscure works for French TV is decidedly less essential.

Too short, didn’t rate
Day for Night / La Nuit américaine
Greed in the Sun / Cent mille dollars au soleil
Love at Twenty / L'Amour à vingt an - Antoine And Colette
The Last Metro / Le Dernier Métro
Magnet of Doom / L'aîné des Ferchaux
The Soft Skin / La peau douce
Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me / Une belle fille comme moi
Two English Girls / Les Deux anglaises et le continent
The Woman Next Door/ La Femme d'à côté

All of the above are either briefly featured on the Truffaut album or included as bonus tracks on a Universal France album.

**½
53. Your Turn, My Turn / Va Voir Maman, Papa Travaille - There’s nothing super-duper wrong with this work, the B side of a Music Box release of a score later down the list. It has a nice-enough theme, but the ratio of source music to score is askew, and as with some other Delerue scores that source music is period-appropriate (i.e., painful and skippable).

***
52. Josepha
51. The Candlestick / Le chandelier
50. Jacquou le Croquant
49. The Foundling Boy / Le jeune homme vert
48. American Friends
47. Fortune
46. The White Queen / La reine blanche
45. Nobody’s Women / Femmes de personne

I would describe all of these as for Delerue completists only. Quite a few are short but sweet, including the small-scale trio (#49-51) featured on the Les Notes de L'Écran album.

American Friends is appropriately restrained though a bit bland compared to many of his other dramatic works. The White Queen is pleasant but also features a bunch of carousel-sounding material that...just...ain’t for me.

Nobody’s Women used to rank a little higher in my book, but that “come and relax over here with this xylophone” sound shows up in better forms in later scores; it’s nice, but why program this when I could program my #19 pick?

***1/2 (round down to 3)
44. Her Alibi
43. Incorrigible / L'incorrigible
42. Rapture / La fleur de l'âge
41. Horses of the Sun / Les chevaux du soleil
40. Love Thy Neighbor
39. Promise at Dawn
38. Sin of Innocence

The London Sessions suite of highlights from Her Alibi should be enough for most folks. You have to be in the right mood to enjoy Incorrigible, which is the closest he came to writing a Mancini comedy score. Rapture and Sin of Innocence have terrific main themes, but the former also has haunting vocals that get repetitive and the latter throws 80s rock jams at you.

The opening whimsical tracks in Promise at Dawn would probably fit perfectly in a Wes Anderson film.

Has anyone heard the full album for Horses of the Sun? I based my rating on the selection of tracks on Les Notes de L'Écran.

***1/2 (round down to 4)
37. To Kill a Priest
36. The Day of the Dolphin
35. The 25th Hour
34. Happy He Who Like Ulysses / Heureux qui comme Ulysse...
33. Exposed
32. The Good Pleasure / Le bon plaisir
31. Rich and Famous
30. Black Robe
29. Platoon
28. Shoot the Piano Player / Tirez sur le pianiste
27. The Unvanquished / L'Insoumis
26. Countdown to Vengeance / Comptes à rebours

In this tier we see several scores with terrific themes that don’t salvage their surrounding material. Dolphin has moments of baroque exuberance but is dominated by uninteresting suspense. Delerue’s mostly unused Platoon theme is powerful but barely evolves throughout the score. The theme song from To Kill a Priest is striking.

Folks who prefer more consistency may enjoy Rich and Famous which is pretty much 30 minutes of circling around the same lovely main theme.

The 25th Hour and Black Robe have their powerful moments but also left me a bit cold, and the former doesn’t quite congeal its various parts (mournful choir, dulcimer, folk music, etc.).

I’ve only heard suites from my #26-28 and #34 picks which were very welcome bonus tracks on the album release of my #13 pick. Some folks might despise the goofy nonsense of Happy He Who Like Ulysses (also, what a title!), but I don’t.

Amusingly, the failed political satire Le bon plaisir (with a main theme not too dissimilar from some of Joe Hisaishi’s) was never released anywhere with an English title.

****
25. The Escape Artist
24. Salvador
23. Regarding Henry (rejected)
22. Rich in Love
21. Memories of Me
20. True Confessions
19. The Pick-Up Artist
18. Cartouche
17. Thibaud the Crusader / Desert Crusader / Thibaud ou les Croisades
16. Chouans!
15. A Show of Force
14. Our Mother's House
13. Contempt / Le Mépris
12. Jules and Jim / Jules et Jim
11. Man, Woman and Child

The Escape Artist has some less interesting moments of drama/tension, but the work is elevated by the magical whimsy of its primary themes.

If I were to do this again I might have a different order for Cartouche, Thibaud, and Chouans!, all of which feature magnificent large-scale themes. Keep in mind that the lengthy expanded album for Chouans!, which I can never not pronounce without screaming it, can start to overstay its welcome.

#21-23 are REALLY GOSHDARN GOOD and only really suffer in comparison to the man’s more transcendent works. I rank The Pick-Up Artist higher because it’s an easygoing joy of an album, or half an album anyway since it’s under 30 minutes and has been (hilariously) paired with a wildly different work on two different occasions.

The final track from A Show of Force, a score that’s as close as Delerue ever got to Under Fire, remains one of the high points of the composer’s late career output. And the main theme from Our Mother’s House is so good I almost want to hear The Color Purple next just to find out what Quincy Jones did with it!

I know some people adore Contempt as well as Jules and Jim. It’s hard for me to give a better rating to works this short, though you have to commend Universal France for saying “hey, we looked, but this is really all there is” in the liner notes of its Le Mépris album.

Man, Woman and Child’s main theme hits a perfect intersection between being silky smooth and achingly longing. It remains a triumph and a testament to how Delerue was able to adapt to the Hollywood comedy/drama jazzy scoring conventions of the era without writing scores that feel wretchedly dated now.

10. Maxie
I should hate it. 80s sax. Drum kits. Ragtime. Spectral comedy. It all combines brilliantly and is tied together by one of the man’s most intoxicatingly playful themes. If you liked how Traumfabrik’s plot allowed for some “filmmaking within a film” music then you’ll have fun here too. The end credits piece might be my most-played track from the London Sessions. The full score is worth exploring if you can find Intrada’s release at a reasonable price; my copy was a Christmas gift last year courtesy of my stepfather finding it at a Metro Detroit record store.

9. An Almost Perfect Affair
Catnip for those who like scores dominated by waltz-like themes.

****1/2 (round down to 4)
8. Agnes of God
“But I’ve already heard this in Hook,” you say. Well, yes, you’ve heard the harp part. You haven’t quite heard the actual theme, which remains one of the most overpoweringly gorgeous ideas the man ever wrote. The choral music haunts. The low-key dramatic music is more engaging than expected. There are very few wasted moments here. I added a half-star this time.

7. Crimes of the Heart
The crown jewel of his overachieving, jazz-influenced scores for 80s comedies and dramedies. Recommended for fans of long-lined main themes and/or works that subtly evoke the feeling of a southern summer.

6. The African / L'Africain
This forgotten gem couples spirited adventure music with arguably the strongest love theme the composer wrote for a dramatic film that decade. It’d rank higher if the mighty idea that opens and closes the work showed up more often. Don’t let the few seconds of horns imitating elephants scare you off!

5. Something Wicked This Way Comes (unused)
Take Herrmann, add a dash of Rapture’s vocals, and blend in Delerue’s skill at balancing sadness and jubilation and you get this potent brew. He never got the chance to write anything this ambitious after. He arguably didn’t write anything like it before. It drags in parts, and some of the carnival bits can be a challenge, but neither element kept me from adding a half-star to its rating. Gimme this over the Horner version anyday.

4. Tours of the World, Tours of the Sky / Tours du monde, tours du ciel
I said this is a “brief work for sure, but it contains some of the finest pieces ever written by the maestro” in my recent FB group post about this. That’ll do.

****1/2 (nearly 5 stars)
3. The French Revolution / La Révolution française
Essentially Chouans! 2 (Chouans 2!?), but bigger, longer, and uncut (in the case of the 2CD Music Box release). Oh, and with a more anthemic theme.

2 .The Black Stallion Returns
This one gets my vote for containing the best theme Delerue ever wrote. Also, it’s one of the few cases where the composer wrote an all-out action/adventure score.

And, why, yes, dear reader, this IS this third 1983 score of his to show up in my top 10. It was one of the all-time great years for a score composer, even if one of those entries was rejected.

*****
1. Joe Versus The Volcano
If nothing else, hopefully those who made it through this post will be inspired to listen to this work’s stupendous end credits piece. Heck, it’s what I did after writing it!

And yes, the full score is on Spotify now. You holdouts have no excuses.