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FILMTRACKS.COM
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Review of Legend (Jerry Goldsmith)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you want to hear a fascinating and melodic venture by
Jerry Goldsmith that remains one his most outlandishly stylish and
effective integrations of synthesized and symphonic elements.
Avoid it... if you prefer Tangerine Dream's less striking music for the American release of the film despite the fact that Goldsmith's partially rejected work remains extremely memorable in its own hybrid fantasy rendering.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
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. ****
TRACK LISTINGS:
1986 Filmtrax Album:
Total Time: 46:06
1992/2002 Silva Albums: Total Time: 70:50
* previously unreleased # lyrics by John Bettis 2021 Music Box Album: Total Time: 126:42
* previously unreleased
NOTES & QUOTES:
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.
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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 Legend are Copyright © 1986, 1992, 2002, 2021, Filmtrax PLC (Germany), Silva Screen, Silva America, Music Box Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 3/15/97 and last updated 1/10/22. |
