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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Last Embrace (Miklós Rózsa)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... on the 1991 Varèse album if you are a
Miklós Rózsa completist and are interested in two of his
final scores that are solid in sound quality and compositional merit
despite exhibiting some flimsy militaristic material.
Avoid it... if Rózsa's lush Golden Age romanticism doesn't impress you regardless of sound quality, despite its understandable application to films of the 1970's and 1980's that were attempting to resurrect the best of the noir thriller generation.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Last Embrace: (Miklós Rózsa) An early
and relatively unheralded film by director Jonathan Demme for United
Artists, Last Embrace tensely follows the states of paranoia that
a CIA agent experiences after seeing his spouse executed while on a
mission and figuring that he is the next target of either his employer
or another interest. He spends the majority of the film chasing after
leads with the help of a mysterious woman, only to end up in a climactic
confrontation at Niagara Falls. The lead performance by actor Roy
Scheider as the protagonist whose sanity is in constant doubt was widely
considered the highlight of the film. It also represented one of the
final scoring assignments for legendary Golden Age composer
Miklós Rózsa before his choice to retire from the
industry. After the end of the studio contract system that bound
composers as recently as the early 1960's, one of the most displaced
artists was Rózsa. The maestro was as far removed from the
biblical epics the 1950's and 1960's that had served as the climax of
his career, and after taking several years in the latter decade removed
from film music all together, he resumed regular freelance scoring
duties in the late 1960's and 1970's. Unfortunately, few of his scores
from the last dozen years of his career accompanied particularly
memorable films. His collaborations often produced unimpressive results
or, in the case of Fedora and Billy Wilder, ruined his
professional relationships. While Fedora and Time After
Time are generally considered to be truly the last of his great
scores, Rózsa's remaining few works weren't as reflective of the
composer's decline in health as some might suggest. Rózsa went on
to live for another entire decade after finishing his film scoring
career, with the recording process simply taking too much energy for him
to muster by the 1980's. His scores for two thrillers, Last
Embrace in 1978 and Eye of the Needle in 1981 ultimately
exhibited many similarities, including the sharing of what was, for a
long time, the final album of importance representing the composer's
works.
These movies late in his career represent instances in which Rózsa continued to maintain his lush 1940's romanticism and instrumental styles into an era well beyond his time, serving in both cases to eclipse their films in quality with their faithful resurrection of a genuine film noir sound. Both movies also involve the worlds of espionage and love affairs, allowing Rózsa to mingle his classic romance mannerisms with more modern militaristic tones. The most dominant aspect of Rózsa's score for Last Embrace is an easily accessible string theme for the troubled affair between the agent and a new love interest, evoking many of the high class, melodramatically layered strings in Rózsa's classic scores over worrisome timpani rumblings. This material grows out of a five-note motif that rolls with ominous warning of oppression starting immediately in "Main Titles." That motif is very keenly transformed into a bridge with the love theme, sometimes reduced to the same instrumentation and serving as an interlude to the secondary idea. The composer's loyalty to the five-note motif is remarkable, too, performed by seemingly every instrument in the orchestra at some point in the score. A driving snare rhythm serves as another secondary motif, mirroring, interestingly, some of John Barry's James Bond action motifs of the era. A cymbal-crashing brass finale suits Rózsa's closing fanfare sensibilities exactly as expected. In fact, the composer's collectors will not be able to hear much difference stylistically between this score and the composer's most vintage works, especially when considering the restricted, mono soundscape that in effect enhances the noir element. The original recording was long neglected on album, though re-recordings of both Last Embrace and Eye of the Needle made in the early 1980's were released on LP and that presentation was pressed onto CD in the latter half of Varèse Sarabande's original CD Club series. While neither score is as strong as Fedora had been earlier in that Club series, their equal presentation on this dual album is perhaps more satisfying. Only 1,000 copies of the title were produced, with the significant number of Rózsa collectors hoarding them and maintaining abnormally high prices on the secondary market during the 1990's. The majority of tracks on that Varèse product are devoted to Eye of the Needle, however. Rózsa's last significant original score existed for this film, in which a World War II German spy is stranded on a island off the coast of Scotland and ends up in an unlikely romance with a lonely local woman exiled from the mainland. The Ken Follett novel adaptation received positive reviews, as had Last Embrace, though neither picture grossed significant returns. Rózsa's score for Eye of the Needle is an alternating battle between the thematic ideas for the German spy and the British woman in exile. While their love affair may be genuine, Rózsa doesn't let the viewer forget the foundations of their characters. If the score has a weakness, it exists in the comparison between the wartime material and the lush love theme that once again reminds of the Rózsa glory days. The two are alternated in the "Prelude," exposing the militaristic snare theme as a bit trite in execution and not stated as cold and forcefully as it could have been. The seamless transition to the love theme glorifies the latter theme, and it's fitting that the tender theme for the exiled woman gains more power as the film progresses; as she is forced to kill the spy at the end of the film, the militaristic theme literally dies with a whimper while the woman's theme resolutely takes charge. By the "Finale/Epilogue" cue, Rózsa is in full victory form once again, with the same crashing cymbal, rolling timpani, and tolling bell method of finale that collectors of the composer have always loved. Of the two scores, Eye of the Needle is the slight favorite, in part because it's technically the last full score by Rózsa and partly because of its even more unashamed throwback sensibilities. In 2008, Intrada Records finally released the full, original recording for Last Embrace on its own album, minus a choral overlay that was added to one cue in post-production. Extremely narrow, dry sound quality causes this presentation to lack the crossover appeal that Varèse's dual album had offered, though it remains as faithful a treatment of the prior recording as possible. In general, collectors of the digital era of scores should take note of both original Varèse Club titles of Rózsa's late works, as well as Time After Time, because they offer an opportunity to hear the composer's Golden Age styles in sound quality far better than the archival sound we often associate with those older recordings.
TRACK LISTINGS:
1991 Varèse Album:
Total Time: 67:02
2008 Intrada Album: Total Time: 58:19
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 1991 Varèse album includes detailed
information about the score and film. All copies of that product were
numbered by hand. The insert of the 2008 Intrada album also contains
information about the score and film.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Last Embrace are Copyright © 1991, 2008, Varèse Sarabande, Intrada Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 6/26/97 and last updated 7/22/11. |
