Filmtracks: 100 Rifles (Jerry Goldsmith)

•	2018 Album

•	1999 Album

•	2018 Album

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Composed and Conducted by:

Jerry Goldsmith

Orchestrated by:

David Tamkin

Audio & Track Listings

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Album Cover Art

1999 Film Score Monthly
2018 La-La Land

Labels & Release Dates

Film Score Monthly
(February, 1999)

La-La Land Records
(June 26th, 2018)

Album Availability

The 1999 Film Score Monthly album was a limited release of 3,000 copies, available only through soundtrack specialty outlets and eventually selling out. The 2018 La-La Land album is limited to 2,000 copies and available initially for $25 through those same outlets.

Also See

•	Stagecoach
•	Rio Conchos
•	Breakout

Notes & Quotes

Both albums' inserts contain detailed information about the film and score.

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Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #913
Written 3/8/99, Revised 9/1/20

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Buy it... if you delight in Jerry Goldsmith's darkly dissonant and richly textured Western action mode that tests you with its often harsh and brutal tone.

Avoid it... if you'd prefer to be entertained by romantic Western stereotypes without feeling the need to study any of Goldsmith's multi-cultural intricacies in this case.

Goldsmith

100 Rifles: (Jerry Goldsmith) Attempting to utilize the same basic elements as The Wild Bunch, 1969's 100 Rifles was a predictable failure. Stagnant direction by Tom Gries, worn action concepts in the Western genre, and a cast of stereotypically supporting stars like Jim Brown and Raquel Welch thrown into prominent roles doomed the film. The Indian versus Mexican versus lawman concept prompted significant spaghetti Western action scenes, but they were shot with such a fixed, unengaging technique that nobody could ever have expected audiences to stay interested in them. Trying valiantly to compensate for this bland direction was composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose score for 100 Rifles could most easily be described as overachieving. Goldsmith was already well established in the Western genre at the time, with most of his classics in that area already on film, and he was clearly defining the style of his sound as an alternative to Elmer Bernstein's more heroically fluid sense of Americana for 1960's Westerns. The composer approached 100 Rifles after having finished the highly acclaimed Planet of the Apes, and while the quality of later project represented a significant decline, the composer strove to maintain much of the instrumental creativity from that famous score in this undeserving Western. The complex, highly-layered music that Goldsmith provided for 100 Rifles saves the film from total mediocrity and embarrassment. It's an interesting paragraph in Goldsmith's career story, but isn't of the caliber of his classic Western scores. He utilizes, perhaps more pervasively here than in any of his other genre scores, a creative array of traditional Latin instruments along with the more typical, moderately sized orchestra for broader genre expectations. His energetic Latin rhythms are mixed directly with his bombastic, brassy style of thematic resonance, making 100 Rifles a more intelligent multi-cultural listening experience than some of his other Westerns. At the same time, though, Goldsmith also infuses a significant sense of dissonant darkness into the score as necessary for some of the film's brutal scenes of killing.

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Goldsmith establishes the primary themes for 100 Rifles in succession over the first five or six minutes of the score. His main theme will perhaps sound a bit stock-oriented for Goldsmith collectors, though its staggered progression represents the brash attitude of the film quite well. This theme is reprised several times by the full ensemble throughout, including a climactic finale in "I'll Go Back." For enthusiasts of Goldsmith's bold Western themes, the opening and closing cues, along with the ambitious "Escape and Pursuit," will provide the seven best minutes of material when heard on album. The middle portions of the score are more interesting than they are enjoyable, with "Cliff Fight" being completely intolerable. Goldsmith's diversity of Mexican instruments is employed in disjointed rhythms concurrently with the orchestra, creating a truly odd crossover effect in parts. From marimbas and castanets to electric and acoustic guitar, the score's parts aren't as difficult to grasp as the dissonant layers with which Goldsmith applies those instruments. The only respite in the middle of 100 Rifles is "Lydecker and Sarita," a romantic variant of the main theme which, after some mariachi movements at the opening, yields a combination of instrumentation and counterpoint that well foreshadows his later Under Fire. The two disparate mixes of the original recordings available on the albums bring out differing accentuations in the Latin instrumentation. The same album presentation exists on a 1999 Film Score Monthly product and a 2018 La-La Land Records re-issue, the latter offering remastered sound and joined by Goldsmith's Rio Conchos on the same product. The album arrangements include the maximum amount of music available for 100 Rifles, and due to the varying quality of the sources, the entire score is included in mono (as heard in the film) while others were mixed into stereo. The stereo tracks do better justice to the large-scale opening and closing themes (the mono version of the finale is greatly muddled), however some of the mono tracks bring out the best of the marimbas, flutes, gourds, and other featured instruments. The careful assembly of music on these albums, including two tracks of source material, will appeal to the most studied Goldsmith collectors, but the majority of it will fall short of stirring the interest of casual listeners. *** @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.23 (in 139 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 154,744 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

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