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| Barry |
Night Games: (John Barry) Largely forgotten as one
of director Roger Vadim's erotic sideshows, the 1980 movie
Night
Games polarizes audiences with near constant nudity or semi-nudity
in the guise of a thriller about a lonely and disturbed house wife's
sexual fantasies. Vadim had been a controversial artist for years, known
for mounting his leading ladies, and the same happened with actress
Cindy Pickett in this entry. Her casting was met with derision because
of her pixie haircut and small breasts, but that didn't stop Vadim from
filming her in all manners of steamy pleasure. Her character cannot
experience orgasms with her husband because of memories of a prior rape,
but when she's alone in their Beverly Hills home, she conjures sex
adventures with masked men who conveniently materialize to fulfill her
needs. When the collection of secondary characters intersects with her
fantasies and things turn to mystery and suspense, a dose of reality has
to reset the narrative. The movie absolutely bombed, and much of the
criticism was aimed at Pickett, who admitted that she was no genuine sex
goddess. Composer John Barry wasn't afraid to score thrillers with an
erotic tilt, though how he got involved in
Night Games at all is
something of a head-scratcher. His musical style was a good match for
the topic, though, and he approached the assignment exactly as anyone
might expect. There's no really convincing suspense element in his
music, the composer instead choosing to keep the ambience darkly
romantic from his usual perspective. His work here is softly orchestral,
with notable female vocals in a wet mix providing the necessary
sensuality. Strings and woodwinds largely define the soundscape, with
notable piano parts for the score's main but sparse love theme.
Percussion and brass interject in a tango cue and the beefier thriller
portions, but they are always subdued in their personality. Very slow
tempos convey most of the light erotica passages, and Barry's simplistic
and repetitive structures remind of the female choral parts of
The
Lion in Winter. These vocal contributions steal the show with their
steely allure, but they are too infrequent, the rest of the score rather
inert in ways that will annoy Barry detractors. Still, some listeners
may find interest in the tango and waltz diversions in the soundscape,
as at least they spice up the composer's usual meters even if the
overall tone of the music remains the same.
The score for
Night Games is melodic but not
memorably so, the main love theme tracked several times into the movie
but only heard rarely on album. It's a pretty identity though somewhat
stereotypical to Barry's career. Opening "Descent Into Decadence" on
piano, a similar performance closes the score in the brief "Afterplay."
The idea struggles to emerge at the start of "Phantom of the Orgasm,"
its chord progressions lending warmth on undulating strings at 3:25 and
battling Barry's suspense motif for the rest of the cue. That motif uses
rising pairs of notes on strings over cascading, rhythmic bass string
and woodwind lines, initially presenting as an interlude to the love
theme. This material emerges at 1:13 into "Descent Into Decadence" on
strings, shifts to the female vocals at 2:11, and extends for the
remainder of the cue, achieving a crescendo of the descending lines at
the end. Its facets, both the ascending pairs and the descending rhythm,
inform "The Lesbian Tango" and tickle with their progressions at the
outset of "The Wet Spot." Stuttering on voices early in "Water Sports,"
the suspense motif drives part of the first half of "Phantom of the
Orgasm" with tingling triangle and mingles with the more attractive love
theme portions for several minutes. The idea's descending lines turn
into something of a brass fanfare of victory at the cue's conclusion. A
tango variant of the suspense motif's structures has more zest and
proceeds with inevitability during all of "The Lesbian Tango" before
becoming more tentative at 0:50 into "The Wet Spot," in which the female
voices make it somewhat alluring in the latter half. A separate waltz
theme is sickly on strings and clarinet at 2:15 into "The Dominatrix's
Waltz" and adds depth from the full ensemble over the rest of the cue,
though a slight acceleration of its pacing in the latter portions isn't
enough to sustain the idea. None of these themes or renderings is
unsavory, but they're also not that engaging apart from the film, which
is a detriment to erotic expectations. There's nothing as intense as
what Barry later wrote for
Jagged Edge. The narrative is also
diminished on album because of the film's liberal re-tracking of the
love theme. Several cues just dial out the volume instead of ending
musically. The score was released many times on a dual album with
Barry's
Game of Death from a few years before, and the only music
missing from that recurring presentation is the movie's opening
adaptation of a traditional piece. On the upside, you receive some
humorously atypical cue titles for a Barry score. If only the composer
could have worked some genuine moaning into those female vocals...
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.6
(in 40 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.33
(in 30,603 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The inserts of the 1993 and 2003 Silva Screen and Silva America
albums include notation about the film and score.
