Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,084
Written 12/15/01, Revised 8/30/20
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Buy it... only if you already have James Horner scores like
Unlawful Entry and Once Around on your shelves, because
Jack the Bear resides comfortably as a subdued cross between the
two.
Avoid it... if you expect all your softly dramatic scores from
Horner to pull at the heart strings, because the low volume and lack of
spirit in this score fail to accomplish that task.
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| Horner |
Jack the Bear: (James Horner) The 1993 film Jack
the Bear was director Marshall Herskovitz's attempt to add another
compelling entry to the genre of films involving suburban family
hardship from the perspective of a child. Despite featuring a reasonable
cast, a serious subject matter, and a top flight composer for the score,
Jack the Bear failed for a number of reasons, most of which
related to the unnecessary move by the writers to shake the story up
with Nazi undertones and other violent and unnecessarily scary scenes.
Substantial disagreements between the director and lead actor Danny
DeVito preceded endless editing and re-shoots in post-production. For
what was originally a heartfelt tale about a son saving a father from
the depths of despair, the film became fragmented by too many
sensational and unexplained twists. None of this tumult ultimately
helped James Horner's score, which suffered an equally tepid response
from film score fans. Even as late as 1993, Horner was still actively
involved in smaller, intimate projects, a choice that would guide the
composer's later years after he tired of blockbuster demands. At the
time, his well-known scoring assignments were mixed with several
back-shelf films that had shown promise in pre-production but faded
quickly upon release in the theatres. Utilizing an array of synthesizers
for depth, Horner produced a score for Jack the Bear of minimal
stature that relied heavily on the solo performances of the violin,
piano, and flute to convey generally pleasantly melodic ideas in between
challenging synthetic dissonance. The famed composer was no stranger to
the concept of understated dramatic scores at that time in his career.
His smaller scale efforts often fell into two categories: first, those
that contained a theme, motif, or instrumentation that endeared the work
to the hearts of fans and therefore thrived (Sneakers,
Thunderheart, Searching for Bobby Fischer) and second,
those scores that fell through the cracks because of their lack of
memorable attributes in the minds of the majority of Horner's fans
(Once Around, To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, Class
Action). Undoubtedly, Jack the Bear falls into the latter
category, with enough endearing qualities to be effective in context but
offering very little to distinguish itself in a career that pulled so
effectively on the heart strings on other occasions. This is a work that
has "auto-pilot" written all over it, despite some interesting moves by
Horner to slowly develop the primary thematic idea over the course of
the film.
Perhaps the most shunned score of the 1990's for Horner
remains
Unlawful Entry, which meanders in a synthetic soundscape
that is largely unlistenable outside of its two thematic performances as
bookends. In its darker moments, such as the synthetic cue "Dylan's
Gone," the score for
Jack the Bear suffers from some of the same
uninteresting, droning style as
Unlawful Entry. Hidden in this
tone, however, are several short performances of a main theme that would
eventually be fleshed out by the composer in
Deep Impact. It's a
children's lullaby (written by Horner earlier in production for a source
performance on screen) conveyed most often by piano and flute, with
sporadic performances by a solo violin interspersed. Most of this
theme's best airtime exists in the second half of the score, first
introducing itself in full during "Flashback" and eventually occupying
much of "Resolution & End Title." A secondary, descending theme for the
concept of parenting, exhibited better at the very start, is less
interesting, as are the synthetic cues of underscore in between. The
scarier parts of the film drag Horner out of the otherwise perpetual
major key for a series of two-note progressions that accompany the Nazi
element. The use of a bass harmonica accentuates the titular character's
monster movie occupation rather than the villain, and this usage is
somewhat intriguing though not memorable. The darker plot elements cause
several cues to lose the delicate, tonal edge maintained by the rest of
the score for the child's perspective, creating consistency problems. As
a result,
Jack the Bear is a score with perhaps fifteen minutes
of thematic material that may appeal to devoted Horner fans, though
nothing contained in this work would go unexplored by significantly
larger ensembles in his subsequent scores of the 1990's. At the end of
the decade,
Jack the Bear was one of only five or six officially
unreleased Horner scores of the 1990's, but Intrada Records presented it
as the third installment of its new "Special Collection" series in 2001.
Intrada did an exemplary job of mastering the music to an extent that
had never been heard in the numerous fragments that had appeared on
bootlegs through the years. Some of the material is so subdued, however,
that casual listeners might not notice the difference. La-La Land
Records expanded the presentation in 2018, adding three largely
redundant, mundane passages that have no positive impact on the whole.
Unless you are a die-hard Horner fanatic with
Unlawful Entry
already on your shelves, you'd likely be better served by investigating
one of Horner's more creative small-scale works of the early 1990's.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15
(in 108 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.23
(in 203,549 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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