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| Goldsmith |
Legend: (Jerry Goldsmith) If film score disasters
could be ranked on a top ten list, then
Legend would exist
somewhere near the top of it. Director Ridley Scott was coming off of
two rather unpleasant films in the middle of the 1980's,
Alien
and
Blade Runner, and had decided to create an uplifting fantasy
film targeted towards families. The convoluted story conveyed all the
genre staples of the best alternate worlds, with incredible creatures,
demonic villains, and a sappy love story. With a young Tom Cruise in the
lead role and Tim Curry as the demon opposing him, the tone of Scott's
Legend somehow darkened considerably during its shooting, leaving
its original audience behind. Plagued by production cuts, stage fires,
and studio meddling, the movie turned out to be just as much of a
nightmare for the director as it would be for composer Jerry Goldsmith.
The veteran composer had been less than happy with his experience
working on
Alien with Scott, but he was favored heavily by the
film's studio and additionally won over by the fantasy script and was
eagerly brought in on
Legend's pre-production to assist in
adapting John Bettis' lyrics into source-like songs that would fit into
appropriate points during the film and were helpful to have in hand
during filming. Goldsmith had just completed the synthetically jarring
music for
Runaway, and he thankfully utilized his newly developed
array of synthesizers in a much more harmonious fashion with a London
orchestra and choir for
Legend. The massive score was destined to
suffer the same fate as Scott's entire film, however, with the earlier,
European release cut significantly and arbitrarily in length.
Goldsmith's score experienced the same ill fate. With more than forty
minutes of his music removed from various places in the project,
including a huge chunk of half an hour in the middle of the narrative,
Goldsmith's score was ultimately jumbled and out of place in that
international cut of the movie, with several astonishingly bizarre temp
cues, including music from his own score for
Psycho II, even
remaining in the final cut of the film.
After he initially lauded the score for
Legend as
among his best ever in the genre, Goldsmith's frustration with this
process was significant. Not only had Scott demanded constant, annoying
changes to cues after they were recorded, but he had no advance warning
that his music would be largely rejected. All of the most drastic
changes came after he had been paid and left the project for greener
pastures, including his famous effort for
Hoosiers the following
year. Like many others, Goldsmith had his scores mutilated or rejected
altogether on multiple occasions, so the event really was not considered
earth shattering at the time. Only in retrospect, with the help of a
director's cut DVD that revisited copies of the original master tapes
for the score, has the situation been deemed tragic. Through careful
reconstruction, the Silva Screen label has, over the years, treated
Goldsmith's score with great care, reconstituting most of its cues on
multiple releases. While collectors of the composer's works assume that
his music would have been better suited for the picture in its original
arrangements, this is a case in which even a casual observer could also
say the same. Goldsmith's score is lyrical and thematically beautiful, a
relative rarity at a time in his career when he was using his music in a
variety of more abrasive applications. Sensitive in its attitude and
fantastically evocative in its use of melody to soften the characters at
the heart of the faerie tale, his music for
Legend is rich with
texture and choral majesty. The thematic battle between good and evil is
masterfully matched to the attempts by the Dark Lord to reign in the
film. Instead of resorting to several completely separate motifs to
distinguish this dichotomy, Goldsmith establishes a central faerie tale
theme and simply elaborates on different sections of that theme to
represent other characters and locations in the story. The performances
of the National Philharmonic Orchestra are dynamic and precise, with the
endless electronic supplements integrated from live stereo performances
with skill. Goldsmith had always stated that he wanted to treat his
synthesizers like a fifth section of the orchestra, and this score is
among the composer's most notable such combinations. Many of the
techniques he employed with the electronics in this score would directly
inform his music of the next fifteen years.
The dynamic range of emotions in
Legend extends
from cute, dancing interludes for innocuous creatures to deep brass
explosions for the Dark Lord. The latter representation culminates in
"Darkness Fails," the last three minutes of which present harsh, lower
range brass performances of the kind of satisfying resonance that
bridges
Poltergeist and
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
The score really doesn't feature many extended action sequences, content
to meander through contemplative territory of an airy fantasy
atmosphere. At several points in the work, Goldsmith transitions into
lyrical female vocal performances of "My True Love's Eyes" and other
material, some of which is vaguely Celtic in its tone, and these are
always fully integrated into the orchestral recordings. The composer's
theme for the main hero, Jack, emerges in "The Armour" and anchors the
final three cues, by which time the villain receives a minor-mode
variation on the same idea. The lullaby for the lead love interest is a
whimsical extension of Goldsmith's sung theme for
Poltergeist.
Related material for the unicorns of the tale also occupy the softer
passages, and humorous sidebars provide the supporting faeries with
color. The only major detraction from Goldsmith's
Legend score is
a crashing glissando, or wobbly electronic pulse, that jabs at the
listener several times near the beginning of the score for the goblins
and as dark events are suddenly foreshadowed in the story more
generally. These "oiya-oiyu, oiya-oiyu" noises (as opposed to the hard
"doyng!" noises heard courtesy the Blaster Beam in the original
Star
Trek score, though just as metallic in general tone) often interrupt
Goldsmith's best statements of the lullaby and nearly ruin the integrity
of a few cues. Aside from those bizarre blasts of the synthesizer,
Goldsmith's electronics match the eerie setting well. They are slowly
removed from the equation and replaced with the choir almost completely
in the last twenty minutes of the work. At the outset, though, the
rolling synthetic effects are so alien to the ear that they may be
considered to be a disqualifying feature by some listeners. Such folks
will gravitate back to the soft vocal performances of the angels and
central female character. The "My True Love's Eyes" lullaby served as
proof that Goldsmith was young at heart and could, conceivably, have
made an entire career out of lyrical children's film scores.
The last three cues of
Legend are where
Goldsmith's work really shines, especially in the massively tonal,
horror-like tone of the closing two minutes of "Darkness Fails." A
heroic fanfare of the caliber of
Lionheart highlights "The Ring,"
the final two minutes of that cue offering remarkable flute lines atop
its pretty fantasy atmosphere. The score is completed by a restatement
of all the extended components of the thematic core in the remarkably
enjoyable "Reunited," providing a vocal recapitulation of the lullaby
and rotating through Jack's theme and the unicorn material. The
integration of the faerie's chanted theme into this extended suite is a
surprising but nice choice. As a benefit, the more abrasive electronic
aspects of the goblins from earlier in the score are absent from this
fantastic suite. Unfortunately, as the studio distributed the film
around the globe, more sorrow was in store for Goldsmith's score when it
was entirely dumped for the film's subsequent American release. The
single man at Universal responsible for this decision was then-executive
Sydney Jay Sheinberg, who was the idiot known for making some of the
most disastrous decisions for the studio in the 1980's; he also replaced
Michael Kamen's score for
Brazil and blessed the production of
Howard the Duck. Sheinberg decided that
Legend needed more
appeal to teenagers and thus oversaw editing of the film himself (in MTV
style) so that it included more kissing and other sexually associated
material. He commissioned the German electronic group Tangerine Dream to
re-score the film in haste, figuring that their score for
Risky
Business had enhanced a previous Tom Cruise film and the same
success could result again. What Tangerine Dream provided was
electronically and thematically inferior compared to Goldsmith's
symphonic/synthetic hybrid effort, and the members of Tangerine Dream
themselves became frustrated when Sheinberg mutilated their score in the
final edit as well. Ironically, when the film was extended in length for
American television, scenes with Goldsmith's score from the European
version ended up alongside scenes with Tangerine Dream's music, making
the combined experience a musical embarrassment. After Sheinberg's
foolish actions,
Legend was a total flop in America, seizing
neither teenagers nor families, and part of this failure was no doubt
due to the removal of Goldsmith's full score.
On album, the two scores for
Legend have long
been widely available. The Tangerine Dream score was released by
Varèse Sarabande on an early CD in 1985 and re-issued in the same
form in 1995. The Goldsmith score has been released several times on CD
as well. An original German CD was pressed in 1986 with contents
identical to the English LP release, which contained ten tracks and
about 46 minutes of score. When the Silva Screen label returned to the
project for a CD release in 1992, their original intent was to solely
re-issue the same content in remastered form with better packaging. But
upon a fortuitous mix-up with master tapes and the discovery of
better-sounding alternative master copies, Silva Screen produced a full,
70-minute album in excellent quality. This album remained in circulation
as an import in the United States until it began becoming difficult to
find around the year 2000. The Varèse Sarabande label originally
advertised that it would release a "Deluxe Edition" of Goldsmith's
Legend in December of 2000 but then backtracked when Silva Screen
retained the rights. (Varèse only distributed the score at that
time through its European branch). Then, in 2002, Silva finally
re-issued the album once again, with new artwork but the same contents
as the 1992 product for total commercial circulation; this album
remained in print and readily available for about ten years, after which
it too escalated as a collectible. While the 2002 edition claimed to
have better sound quality than all the others, the 1992 pressing has a
very good balance of clarity and resonance itself, and either product
could satisfy Goldsmith collectors. In 2021, Silva Screen revisited the
score more definitively, expanding the presentation to add another four
minutes of material to the intended film version of the score. The
monumentally grim chanting of "Darkness Arisen" finally reveals a
potentially long-lost villain's identity, while "Playmates" opens with
extremely challenging suspense dissonance but adds some moderately
attractive fantasy material in its midsection that is largely devoid of
melody. A second CD on the 2021 set includes a remastered presentation
of the original 46-minute album, though this material sounds far duller
and more muted compared to the film version. Two alternate versions of
Goldsmith's early source recordings on that second CD are interesting
but not enjoyable. Overall,
Legend was a fascinatingly doomed
project from which a memorable Goldsmith score has emerged and lived a
healthy life apart from its disgraced film.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.28
(in 120 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.3
(in 150,292 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The 1986 Filmtrax album has sparse packaging, but both Silva
albums and the 2021 Music Box set offer extensive information about
the film and score.
