Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #608
Written 4/10/97, Revised 11/24/08
Invert Colors
Buy it... if you have the 1997 album and seek a significantly better product
in the 2003 expanded edition, especially in regards to the bold theme for the
Tigerfish submarine.
Avoid it... if you are rightfully suspicious of any action score that has the
name Michel Legrand on it, and you're not interested in paying higher prices for
only ten minutes of outstanding music.
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| Legrand |
Ice Station Zebra: (Michel Legrand) Taking advantage of cold
war tensions between America and the Soviets, author Alistair MacLean wrote many of
the most popular war and espionage stories of the 1960's and 1970's, a handful of
which were translated onto the big screen. While not at all the most successful,
Ice Station Zebra was a heroic and entertaining 1968 adaptation of a
submarine adventure plot. Plagued by early production problems, the venture
eventually became one of the better submarine movies of the Silver Age and beyond,
netting Oscar nominations for cinematography and special effects. The ship's race
to a remote outpost at the North Pole represented a story that served as a bridge
between the plethora of World War II submarine stories and those that fueled a
resurgence of interest in the topic in the 1990's. The choice of composer for
Ice Station Zebra was, however, not a name you would have expected at the
time. Michel Legrand was known best (and by many people, known only) for his
romantic pop and jazz scores, for which he was often nominated for Academy Awards.
Legrand, however, was himself a fan of action films, and he took the task of
scoring this large scale action feature with delight and vigor. Because his scores
were often for smaller, less complicated ensembles, he orchestrated all of his own
compositions. With seventy-five musicians for this project, Legrand would spend
sleepless nights translating his themes and motifs into a score that would stretch
from the first to last minute of the film, and every minute in between. The result
of his efforts were a score with two better than average themes (one of which would
go down in submarine score history as a fan favorite), but a lengthy series of less
interesting material that exposes, perhaps, Legrand's lack of experience in the
genre. The film is floated by the two themes; the first is a somewhat sweeping,
romantic overture piece to represent the highly developed characters of the film.
The second, though, is the theme that most fans adopted as the title theme, and
that is the repeating four-note motif for the Americans' Tigerfish
submarine. It plays prominently during several key sequences in the film, and
especially maximizes its impact during the loaned footage of the Tigerfish
leaving for the open seas early in the story ("loaned" because the American Navy
opted not to give the filmmakers footage of a genuine nuclear sub).
In between these thematic bursts is an enormous amount of dense,
suspenseful underscore. Legrand's handling of these cues is adequate for the
occasion, but he continuously inserts disharmony into many situations, often with
woodwinds and a vibraphone, that causes the underscore to become difficult to
digest outside of the film's excellent story. A fair amount of tension in the plot
translates into extended substandard and predictable performances of slightly
atonal atmosphere. Even during the main thematic sequences, it seems that Legrand
was intent on taking a harmonious structure and inserting one or two awkwardly
wandering instruments into the mix, likely to accentuate the complicated
international implications of the ensuing race to the station. This counterpoint
places the score at an imbalance between thematic beauty and effective dissonance,
and it unfortunately causes several cues to lose their potential power both in film
and on album. These techniques may also cause the score to sound more dated to ears
accustomed to the adventure music of the Digital Age. Nevertheless, because of a
lack of transfer of
Ice Station Zebra to the digital realm for a significant
time, the
Tigerfish theme alone was considered a top "most wanted" item on
album for a lengthy time. An LP record release, followed thirty years later by an
identical CD release from P.E.G. in 1997, offered key cues, but only amounted to 30
minutes in total length. The P.E.G. album was snatched up quickly by fans in 1997,
though they were presented with sound quality that seemed as though somebody had
recorded the score from two rooms away and the product featured strange packaging
that transposed a backwards American flag on the cover (that's what happens with
you invert the artwork without watching what you're doing). A limited 2003 Film
Score Monthly album (in the Silver Age Classic series) replaced the badly packaged
and incredibly poorly engineered P.E.G. album with a crisp-sounding, rearranged,
and well presented
Ice Station Zebra, finally translating the original
five-channel stereo recording from master elements for our enjoyment. While in
2003,
Tigerfish fans finally had an excellent treatment of this score, it's
still questionable if almost 80 minutes of this score is truly necessary. A 50 to
60 minute remastered album may have been best, given that some of Legrand's suspense
cues are difficult to handle on their own. But you can't discount the restoration
effort put forth by FSM, and the improvement in sound quality is alone worth the
price of the album for enthusiasts of the film and genre.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for Film: ***
- Music as Heard on 1997 P.E.G. Album: **
- Music as Heard on 2003 FSM Album: ****
- Overall: ***
