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| Goldsmith |
Extreme Prejudice: (Jerry Goldsmith) The name of
director and producer Walter Hill is synonymous with gritty action of
the 1980's, a resurrection of the stylistic genre created by Sam
Peckinpah decades earlier and revised for the era of honor exemplified
by
Rambo and a rash of law enforcement and Western films along
similar lines at the time. Like many of the movies in this genre, 1987's
Extreme Prejudice is largely forgotten today, its stars faded and
its ilk largely neglected. Its premise involves a good versus evil
battle of torn love and drug trade in a small Texas town on the Mexican
border, with the drug lord and Texas Ranger standing firm on their
convictions until the obligatory duel of Peckinpah proportions at the
end of the film. Relying on the building of suspense through brooding
weight and occasional massive bloodshed,
Extreme Prejudice added
a twist of modern military commandos to the traditional Western setting,
updating the genre for
Rambo-friendly audiences. Composer Jerry
Goldsmith was, of course, no stranger to this genre, and it was by the
fate of mistaken timing that he landed on the project of
Extreme
Prejudice. Hill's usual collaborator was Ry Cooder, who passed on
the project due to scheduling conflicts that turned out to resolve
themselves. By then, however, Goldsmith was at work on the film and
Cooder only provided a handful of source cues as his contribution. While
Goldsmith's exemplary efforts of the 1980's, the most inventive decade
of his career and arguably the best, often saved B-rate films from the
pits of despair, even an above-average result for
Extreme
Prejudice failed to salvage the film for mainstream American
audiences. Hill was never a fan of large orchestral scores, a sound he
believed to be a relic of 1950's vistas, and was likely swayed to hire
Goldsmith in part because of the composer's versatility with
synthesizers at the time. Coming off of
Hoosiers just months
before, Goldsmith had proven that his electronics could be combined with
an orchestral ensemble to create a magnificent result in situations
where the synthetics were certainly not an inherently logical choice of
instrumentation.
Despite the brilliance Goldsmith displayed with such cases
as
Hoosiers and
Under Fire in synth-defying genres, the
composer had a difficult time reprising that quality for
Extreme
Prejudice. The elements are all exactly the same from those two
previous scores; in fact, if you take the Hungarian orchestral ensemble
and the array of electronic keyboarding and effects that Goldsmith used
for
Extreme Prejudice, you'd hear an overwhelming influence from
Hoosiers and
Under Fire, with several hints of
experimentation that would yield great results a few years later in
Total Recall and even
Star Trek: Insurrection much later,
too. You can easily hear the wheels turning in Goldsmith's head when
working on
Extreme Prejudice, because the maturity of his
synthetic/orchestral marriage was fine-tuned by that point and
consistent as ever. The only problem with the equation this time around,
however, was Hill's own extreme prejudice against the traditional sound
of the orchestra. Between Hill and the studio, much of Goldsmith's most
interesting and heart-pounding music for
Extreme Prejudice was
never heard in the film. Just as the composer's original trailer music
for the project (essentially previews of his relevant themes for the
score) was replaced, a funeral cue was cut along with the entire scene,
and the lengthy bank robbery cue in the middle of the film was toned
back considerably by Hill's request, removing the orchestra. Goldsmith
was always amenable to directors' requests, and he faithfully
substituted several of the orchestral elements with a harsher electronic
ambience. But you can hear two different scores for
Extreme
Prejudice in action on its album releases: Goldsmith's and Hill's.
And while you have to admire Hill for sticking to his guns in protecting
the sound of his films, a learned Goldsmith collector will hear some
outstanding material in the rejected portions that many might wish that
the composer had expanded upon for
Extreme Prejudice. The
composer's intended final result for Hill was an often edgy score deep
in synthetic layers, with all of Goldsmith's recognizable electronic
samples zipping, tearing, swooshing, and ticking in every cue.
Ironically, it's the collection of bouncing basketball sounds, drum
pad-like effects taken directly from the courts of
Hoosiers, that
propel the action in
Extreme Prejudice.
A substantial amount of interesting but not necessarily
exciting atmosphere exists in
Extreme Prejudice. The score is
certainly rich with themes, and Goldsmith remains loyal to his motifs
for the lead character, the soldiers, and a two-part, Latin-influenced
main theme that eventually steals the show. But these themes are often
muted by the limited capabilities of a synthesizer array pushed to
maximum volume by Hill's narrow vision of Western tension. Only two of
the themes that Goldsmith created for
Extreme Prejudice are
readily memorable, and it is no coincidence that they are the ones
featured with prominent orchestral performances over those synthesizers.
When the composer allowed himself to explore this hybrid avenue, the
score takes on traits very similar to
Under Fire, which offered a
heartbreaking combination of electronics and orchestra for its major
thematic statements. The first outstanding moment in
Extreme
Prejudice is the rejected "The Plan" cue, a lengthy concert-style
action romp that concludes with four minutes of ballsy brass
performances of the soldier theme that rival Goldsmith's best action
music of the era. Any Goldsmith collector hearing the latter half of
this cue will immediately scratch his or her head in the act of
questioning the sanity of Hill's demands. The soldier theme is a rising
series of phrases that opens the score in "Arrivals" and is a frequent
tool of gritty suspense thereafter, adapted to propulsive machismo by
"Out of Business." Ghostly trumpet figures a la
Patton often
follow these characters at an echoing distance, a convenient stinger
device. A theme for Nick Nolte's lead ranger character is a descending
figure, an interesting twist in that this score applies downward
phrasing for heroes and upward movement for villains. Between "The
Morning After" and "The Funeral," Goldsmith develops the idea mainly for
woodwinds, its main five-note descent transitioning to solo trumpet, the
composer's usual choice for solitary heroism. By the end of "The Bank,"
this theme becomes a massive rhythmic force countering the score's other
themes, and it survives as the most organic in the work. Where the
composer succeeds in inserting his grand orchestral/synthesizer balance
with lasting results is in the very final moments of the score. In the
latter portions of the film, he takes a motif barely stated in the first
half and expands upon it until it is, by the end credits, the only
identity you'll remember from the soundtrack.
Alternately a theme for Mexico and the lead love
affair, this final theme in
Extreme Prejudice debuts in full
during "No Friendlies" and takes on a life of its own in the lengthy end
credits ("A Deal"). The theme has two parts, its
Under Fire-like
location representation at 2:38 into "To Mexico," its final note often
trailing off on synthesizer. The love theme that develops out of a
related villain's identity makes its first major appearance at 0:58 into
"No Friendlies," and these two intertwining ideas guide subsequent cues
in subtle fragments. As previewed by "No Friendlies," Goldsmith runs
both these motifs at once, and in "A Deal," he caps off the cue by
adding the ranger's descending brass lines on top of them. It's a
remarkably intelligent treatment for a schlocky Western score but
addictive nonetheless. For all the seriousness of the film's
personality, the location and romance theme's constructs and rhythm
would seem too positively upbeat for Hill's sensibilities. If you took
out the bouncing basketball-bouncing effect and castanets clearly meant
for location authenticity, you could easily place the theme in a context
like
Rudy and get the same effectively rousing result. With the
composer's familiar pan pipe-like electronics, however, the theme raises
fond memories of
Under Fire and, by the full orchestral
accompaniment at the end, it stands among the more inspirational, if not
unusually placed themes in Goldsmith's illustrious career. Hill and
Goldsmith, despite their good intentions to do so, never collaborated
again. The history of Goldsmith's score for
Extreme Prejudice on
album has been largely satisfying, though. Outstanding sound quality has
always been a major attraction for the score, presenting some of
Under Fire's instrumentation and structure in a much more vibrant
soundscape. Recorded and mastered digitally, which was still not a
guarantee in 1987, the score sounds just as dynamic as many of
Goldsmith's efforts 15 years later. The trumpets are especially well
emphasized in the mix. Despite long-lingering reports of poor
performance standards from the Hungarian ensemble used for
Extreme
Prejudice, the group does reasonably well and maintains the
recognizable "Goldsmith tone" heard in the performances by
better-practiced film score musicians. Only in a few of the action cues
do a couple of the horns slur higher-range notes in multitudes, and it's
hard to tell if that is intentional when two or more of the players are
making the same possible mistake.
A 50-minute album of
Extreme Prejudice was
released concurrently by Silva Screen and Intrada Records (in Europe and
America, respectively) in 1987. Featuring the major cues from the score
and surprisingly superior sound quality for the era, the albums were a
small but satisfying revelation for Goldsmith collectors breaking into
the CD market. Those albums stood alone and forgotten almost as much as
the film until an expanded re-release of
Extreme Prejudice by
La-La Land Records in early 2005 became the first commercial album to
honor Goldsmith after his death the prior year. The additional 15
minutes of material on the 2005 album will be of a moderate interest to
Goldsmith collectors, especially in that the inferior but necessary film
versions of the bank robbery cue was now available (these are truly
awful cues by Goldsmith standards; they really illuminate Hill's poor
tastes with total clarity, and the composer does earn kudo points for
offering those humiliating recordings rather than refuse), but the
majority of attractive thematic material already existed on album as per
Goldsmith's original programatic desires. While many of the newly
released cues are short and of little consequence, La-La Land had taken
the original masters for the score and enhanced them to be even more
dynamic than before, making
Extreme Prejudice one of the
best-sounding Goldsmith scores of the era. In 2021, Intrada revisited
the score in another limited pressing, altering the order of the
presentation and adding a few additional minutes of material ("A Nice
Fellow," "Out of Business," and a snippet in "The Plan"). Some material
on the 2005 album was not included by Intrada in 2021. The synthetic
replacement cues, which are truly a shame, are again appended, as is the
original album presentation from 1987. The music was once again
remastered, though no significant improvement over the 2005 album's
quality is discernable. The basketball-bouncing effect does seem more
prominently dry compared to the surrounding elements on this album,
though. Still, aside from that, if you want to hear what the live
performances of Goldsmith's synthetic elements probably sounded like on
the stage, then the longer albums are a fascinating listening
experience. With the propulsive performances of the driving thematic
maturation in the latter half of the score, amounting to over sixteen
minutes of combined music necessary in any Goldsmith collection, there
remains some very memorable material highlighting this otherwise brief,
average, and derivative Goldsmith work.
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- Music as Heard in the Film: ***
- Music as Heard on the 1987 Albums: ***
- Music as Heard on the 2005 and 2021 Albums: ****
- Overall: ***
| Bias Check: |
For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.26
(in 124 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.29
(in 153,456 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The inserts of the 1987 albums include no extra information
about the score or film. The La-La Land album of 2005 and Intrada album
of 2021 feature extensive information about both the score and film. A
portion of the proceeds from the sale the 2005 product was initially
donated to the Jerry Goldsmith Scholarship Fund for Film Music
Composition.
