Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,701
Written 7/20/09, Revised 7/25/21
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Buy it... only if you are an established enthusiast of Jerry
Goldsmith's Latin tones, for the five or so minutes of compelling ethnic
material related to this score's primary theme stands apart from the
rest of the work.
Avoid it... if you expect a significant amount of original
contribution to this soundtrack by Goldsmith, because all of the film's
romantic material is adapted from or outright states existing songs from
the story's era.
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| Goldsmith |
Caboblanco: (Jerry Goldsmith) Tough guy Charles
Bronson existed on screen in the 1970's and 1980's to accomplish one
thing: punish the wicked. In Caboblanco, he essentially meets
that goal once again, though the screenplay is so awful that the payoff
at the end is hardly worth the intolerably endless conversations prior.
Obvious noir sensibilities and too many parallels to the 1942 classic
Casablanca (extending well beyond just the title of the film)
make 1980's Caboblanco laughable in parts and insufferable in
others. Bronson is an inn owner in South America caught in the middle of
a scheme by Jason Robards, the town's commanding force and a former Nazi
in hiding, to sink and retrieve priceless, stolen wartime artifacts that
exist at the bottom of the town's bay. A love triangle complicates
matters, and regardless of how seriously Bronson tries to take his role
in Caboblanco, his other collaborations with director J. Lee
Thompson remained closer to his comfort zone. Also a regular partner in
the productions of Thompson was composer Jerry Goldsmith, though none of
their work together gained much attention in the mainstream due to the
poor overall quality of those films. Goldsmith had been interested in
exploring Latin sounds in his music for much of his life, gaining the
opportunity to do so in several projects ranging from Bandolero!
to Medicine Man, though none would prove quite as intoxicatingly
effective as Under Fire. The Latin influence on Caboblanco
is arguably more pronounced than in many of his other similar
examinations of this cultural sound, with the highlights of this score
firmly rooted in the subgenre. While performed by the National
Philharmonic Orchestra, the composer's most reliable players at the
time, the straight symphonic elements are not the most memorable aspects
heard in Caboblanco. Castanets, tambourine, solo trumpet,
acoustic guitar, and other stereotypical instruments for the region
contribute to the flair of Latin rhythms and flourishes in counterpoint
that very convincingly ground the score in the proper place. The
complimentary tones of two harmonious trumpets together is a welcome
technique from the composer. If anything, though, Caboblanco
contains far too little flavor of this distinctive variety, for the
score is ultimately sunk by its remaining, more anonymous parts.
The lack of development of the main theme in
Caboblanco is its doom, for outside of "Main Title," "Beckdorf's
House," the start of "The Drowning," and "The Final Act Begins,"
Goldsmith not only loses its motific identity in the remainder of the
work, but its exotic personality as well. The secondary themes are all
weak. The love theme for
Caboblanco is comprised of an adaptation
of Roy Noble's "The Very Thought of You," presented in solemn,
whimsically romantic tones that are surprisingly shallow throughout the
picture, attempting too hard to pull at the
Casablanca strings
and failing to achieve any sense of convincing warmth that is usually
present in Goldsmith's own compositions along similar lines. The film
and album both make liberal use of the adaptation, extending to over ten
minutes of ultimately boring material that really doesn't fit the tone
of the rest of the score despite the late 1940's setting. The soft song
appropriate to the time written by Goldsmith himself, "Heaven Knows," is
equally mismatched. A slightly terse string rhythm for Robards' villain
is only vaguely explored in "Beckdorf's House," giving the character
none of the convincingly sinister musical personality that Goldsmith had
given Gregory Peck's hiding Nazi character in
The Boys from
Brazil, a score with fewer but more effective Latin tones. The
action cues in
Caboblanco are surprisingly orphaned by the rest
of the score as well, creating a basic ambient environment for grisly
killings but not really achieving any greater purpose. The duo of "Boat
Attack" and "Hide and Seek" on album, its two longest cues, are both
severely underachieving in depth, despite the composer's attempts to
incorporate some of the Latin instrumentation into their otherwise
symphonic stirrings. The concluding cues do very little to intelligently
convey the climax of the story, leaving the score in an aimless fog of
uncertainty before invariably returning to the Noble adaptations. The
album presentations are disjointed in personality, never living up to
the contextual flair of the opening cue. Hearing less than 25 minutes of
original Goldsmith music doesn't help, either. A non-limited CD released
by Prometheus in 1993 was re-issued with identical musical contents but
different artwork in 2005. La-La Land Records remastered and rearranged
the same original music in 2021 and added a variety of source material
from the production. The score had promise, but
Caboblanco is a
rare case in which Goldsmith fails to deliver upon a compelling main
theme after its promising introduction.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.23
(in 140 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25
(in 154,785 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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