was meant to be actor Tom Selleck's victorious
transition from television to feature films and introduce a rival to the
"Indiana Jones" franchise. In the Brian G. Hutton movie, Selleck is a
drunken, depressed pilot hired in the 1920's by a British heiress to
help find her captured father and thus ensure that his riches transfer
to her. With those somewhat curious parameters in mind, the film doesn't
ask you to sympathize with any of its leads, but it rather entertains
you with its aerial journey from Turkey to Afghanistan, Nepal, and
ultimately China. With a budding but never realized relationship between
the Selleck's rogue and the heiress (who is revealed to be deceiving her
partner in that she's a skilled pilot herself and simply needs his
planes to make the rescue attempt herself), the film balances a
bittersweet romantic element with the stunning aerial photography
central to its appeal. No doubt a logical hire for the scoring
assignment at the time was John Barry, who was well equipped to not only
provide the flowing romanticism necessary by those two main features of
the story, but also the stock suspense that accompanies attempts by
other interested parties in killing off the heiress. Barry was balancing
two major sides of his career at the time: the continuing formula of the
James Bond scores and the bloated, string-dominated lyricism that would
eventually yield two Academy Award wins for the composer. Collectors
made cynical by Barry's consistency in these efforts throughout the
decades have rejected both sounds, flocking instead towards the few
efforts by the composer that do not squarely fit in one of those two
genres. For these listeners,
is truly a
nightmare of redundancy. In the film, the majority of music heard is
actually source material consisting of jazz and classical pieces from
the era. Barry wrote two of these source cues, and most of the others
are standards that mainstream cinema-goers will likely recognize. The
score itself offers absolutely nothing new to the composer's career, but
it does have the advantage of stating Barry's obvious mannerisms with a
more effective voice than many of his other similar scores.
Composed a few years after
Raise the Titanic and
a few before
Out of Africa, the score for
High Road to
China is a clear mix of the two. Barry returns to his robust and
repetitive title theme structure of the same grand nature as
Raise
the Titanic while utilizing the heavier dramatic base of
Out of
Africa, accentuated by low rumblings of the tuba at regular
intervals. The score's two primary melodies are almost always present.
The title theme doubles as the "love theme," an overwhelmingly lush and
straight-forward string melody of melodramatic weight, contributed to by
Barry's standard, broad brass counterpoint. Like
Dances With
Wolves, Barry's secondary, more rhythmic theme for the film is the
superior attraction, however. From the inspiration of daring flight,
this theme soars with determination and majesty over a churning string
rhythm. The expansive gong hits and medium to high brass layers utilized
during this theme are an exceptionally bold twist on the usual kind of
propulsive action music that populated Barry's scores for the Bond
franchise at the time. Its keen sense of movement rivals
On Her
Majesty's Secret Service, especially in its bass and drum use, and
the lofty attitude will remind of
Moonraker's primary theme as
well. For the rugged and mountainous setting of the film, this secondary
adventure theme is, despite its simplistic construct, quite effective.
In a nice touch, Barry's chugging snare drums well represent a biplane
engine. A saxophone over acoustic guitar in the final cue is an echo of
Body Heat. Lovely viola counterpoint to a woodwind performance of
the love theme in "One Eye Open" is unusually textured for this kind of
Barry romanticism, as are the layers of very high violins in the finale
cue. A few secondary motifs do exist for the villains of the film,
stomping to percussive rhythms as usual for the composer and conveying
equally generic progressions of slight dread. Altogether,
High Road
to China is extremely representative of Barry's best mannerisms of
this era, though be aware of its inherent constriction of creativity.
The sound quality enjoyed by this score has never been as clear as in
other Barry recordings, unfortunately, and a suite from
High Road to
China long remained a request for the producers at Silva Screen
Records, with whom The City of Prague Philharmonic often performed adept
re-recordings of Barry's music.
On album,
High Road to China has been released
three times digitally, and all of these products lack the vibrant,
dynamic stereo soundscape existing in other Barry features of the era.
Still, for enduring defenders of the composer's simple romanticism, the
content of the music outweighs any audio deficiencies, standing
alongside
Out of Africa and
Dances With Wolves as a
dramatic necessity in any Barry collection. The score's history on CD
began in 1990, released as the second album in the Soundtrack
Collector's Special Editions (SCSE) series. A much coveted collector's
item within the film music community, only 2,750 copies of this debut CD
of
High Road to China were made available to the public. On the
secondary market, they sold for up to $150 in auctions during the middle
of the 1990's. By the end of the decade, though, an unexpected extra
stock of original copies of those CDs was made available through
Amazon.com (listed as an "import") for $21 apiece, greatly reducing
demand. In 2000, the Super Tracks specialty label released a limited
promotional album with two extra minutes of score and the full
compliment of source material to make the presentation complete. With
the addition of the traditional source music and the two source cues
written by Barry, the 2000 album contains every moment of music heard in
the film. The two source cues and additional score material by Barry are
unexciting, not worth the price of the expanded album alone, and fans
should be aware that the mastering of this product yielded a fair number
of digital artifacts (typically referred to as "pops") that reduce the
listening experience. Additionally, the 2000 album condenses the
original score into a 32-minute suite that combines cues unnecessarily
(and sometimes to the omission of the natural conclusions to some). In
2009, the producers of that CD rectified the sound anomalies as part of
another release of the 2000 album's contents in limited form.
Unfortunately, that BSX Records re-release of
High Road to China
maintained the same somewhat disconcerting suite format and even added
another nine-minute custom arrangement of major cues at the end.
Ultimately, any of the albums will suffice for collectors (all contain
the most notable music, including some for scenes that were cut from the
final release of the film), but there remains an allure to the 1990
album's presentation despite lesser sound quality than on the 2009
product. On the whole, this score has a more adventurous spirit than
many of Barry's other lush works, and its increasingly better
availability on album should satisfy all the demand this film and score
can muster.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Music as Written for the Film: ****
- Music as Heard on the 1990 SCSE Album: ****
- Music as Heard on the 2000 Super Tracks Promo: ***
- Music as Heard on the 2009 BSX Records Album: ****
- Overall: ****
| Bias Check: |
For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.85
(in 27 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.54
(in 28,651 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
