This is part of a series. The prior installments can be found below:
Part 1: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=141012
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After Hours (1985)
Here’s one that I’d be interested to know how many of y’all have actually seen.
An early(ish) Martin Scorsese picture starring Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London) as an overworked office employee who attempts to get back home after striking out with a girl one night in Manhattan’s SoHo district. Despite that description this is one wild flick with all manner of increasingly bizarre, surreal misadventures befalling Dunne until an equally surreal and abrupt ending (no-one really knew how to end the picture). Despite doing decently at the box office and getting positive reviews at the time, After Hours seems to have become more of a “cult classic” within Scorsese’s filmography. If one is into surrealist dark comedies, it’s worth a gander at least once.
Scoring duties were given to Howard Shore who ultimately wrote only about 11 minutes of original material for the film for a handful of key sequences not accompanied by assorted radio hits. Considering the repetitive nature of what Shore wrote, it’s probably a good thing there’s not more of it. All of Shore’s material was released on a compilation album in 2009, “Howard Shore: Collector’s Edition Vol. 1”, through Howe Records and features four tracks from the film all named after times of the night. The main theme (heck, only theme) is presented in “9 PM” and sounds not unlike a merging of Jerry Goldsmith’s The Russia House (1990) thriller material with an Italian contemporary score of the period. It’s a slightly odd sound, but one that works very well for the film and actually makes for a nice standalone listen while letting Shore’s jazz roots show a bit.
There’s also a ticking clock effect that appears most prominently in “6 AM”… oh, and a large part (if not most) of this is a synth affair. There’s also a Classical piece that’s used for the end credits (Symphony in D Major, First Movement by Mozart) that is not included on the compilation album but is probably what most folks will remember want from the film.
While After Hours is definitely a slight (and repetitive) effort from Shore, it’s oddly charming personality helps to drag it up from a true middle-of-the-road rating and into something I feel relatively confident in recommending. This is also another fortuitous film assignment as Shore and Scorsese would end up working together four more times in the 2000’s and early 2010’s
SCORE:
3/5
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Fire with Fire (1986)
The same year Shore composed one of his early masterpieces for Jeff Goldblum having fly trouble, he also scored this American romantic-drama venture about a young woman (Virginia Madsen) from a Catholic boarding school hitting the road with an escaped young, hot criminal (Craig Scheffer). There’s some interesting talent involved in this including cinematographer Hiro Narita (The Rocketeer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Hocus Pocus) and director Duncan Gibbins who probably best known for some of his music videos in the 80’s like “Careless Whisper” and “Smugglers Blues”. And that’s basically it for this one. Fire with Fire was largely lambasted upon release and everyone involved went on to do better things.
As for Shore’s music, well… it’s like, totally 80’s you guys!!
Lots of synths, piano and electric bass. That’s your ensemble with the Synclavier being front and center again (which I’m learning is apparently Shore’s synth of choice). Actually… there’s an acoustic ensemble here as well, but the recording quality of the album is so bad that it sounds like samples. So yeah, a hybrid score but one that still relies heavily on those three elements I originally mentioned. Thematically there’s not a lot going on outside of the rather nice, “destined to be an end credit song” primary theme (“Captive Hearts”) though Shore is able to play around with some of his darker textures from Videodrome in the works second half. This is also another VERY short score clocking in at around 30 minutes with the currently available digital album released in 2023 rounded out by some demo tracks and the end credit song “I’m in It for Love” sung by James House.
If one is particularly a sap for ultra-80’s sounding romance-drama scores that are heavily synthetic than this might be your jam. For the rest of us, this falls firmly into an interesting time capsule curiosity but I doubt it will end up on anyones Top 10 Howard Shore lists. That said, it is nice to hear Shore branching out from the horror-thriller genre and doing something more “normal”*, an avenue he’d continue to explore for the rest of his career.
SCORE:
2 1/2 out of ;
*Shore had already worked on two dramas previously, Nothing Lasts Forever and Places in the Heart both in 1984, but I was unable to find any score-only videos.
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Big (1988)
Alright, this one I think everyone knows. 

Young boy from a broken home wishes he was “big” … and turns into Tom Hanks. Misunderstandings, personal growth and some retroactively rather questionable story elements ensue. A MASSIVE commercial hit upon release in ’88, Big has become a cornerstone in 80’s nostalgia and is oft referenced either by name or via similarly premised pictures. It’s a good time, though perhaps not as great as nostalgia would have you believe, that is massively carried by the performance of Hanks as well as Elizabeth Perkins, Robert Loggia and John Heard in supporting roles. Also like with most 70’s and 80’s “family films” this gets rather dark and heavy at points, which is always a win.
I jest. Or do I? I’ll never tell!!!
Now for the music… it’s fine.
Before starting this Journey I vaguely remembered there were some of Shore scores I had heard that really didn’t sound like the man, in my opinion, and was mostly thinking of Mrs. Doubtfire. That said, Big also fits the bill. This is a perfect fine, pleasant drama-comedy score anchored by a perfectly nice primary theme (“Main Titles”) and a more interesting pair of sub-themes for the Zoltar fortunate telling machine and the concept of magic, repetitively. Granted all this pales in comparison to Shore’s reworking of “Heart and Soul” by Hoagy Carmichael which not only gets its own track for the iconic toy store piano scene but also acts as the end credits piece, just remixed in a jazzier fashion. While this is no doubt one of the more accessible Shore scores of the period and matches the film well, this sadly doesn’t rank very highly for me personally. Perhaps it’s the fact this hardly sounds like Shore (outside of the Zoltar/magic material) or that this film/music wasn’t ingrained in me since childhood.
All the above said, if you want to hear Shore in completely amiable musical territory or to hear him effectively mimic Pino Donaggio, than Big should be right up your alley. For me, it’s a bit too “generic” (ugh… I hate using that term for scores) to really standout amongst Shore’s work or even the drama-comedy scores of the era. So yeah, I guess this one earns the “your milage may vary” warning.
SCORE:
2 1/2 out of 5
(Message edited on Friday, May 9, 2025, at 9:56 p.m. and Friday, May 9, 2025, at 10:00 p.m.)
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