: (Jerry Goldsmith) The 1970's were rich
with films about otherwise normal-looking children behaving in demonic
and supernatural ways. Usually, the best option in these fantasy horror
movies is to simply kill the offending child, but that never seems to
happen. Chalk up yet another win for the violent brat concept in 1972's
, which takes place in an idyllic 1935 New England
setting. Several generations of a family operate a farm, and when the
Russian grandmother teaches one of the young twins of the household how
to astrally project his mind onto other living creatures, including
humans, the boy loses control of the capability and unwittingly turns
into a serial murderer with an affinity towards eliminating troublesome
family and friends via nasty falls. It doesn't help that the boy is
naturally curious about the strange and unusual happenings at a local
carnival. By the end of the picture, his father, brother, and older
sister's infant are dead, and the grandmother takes it upon herself to
execute the little shit before he can kill again. Of course, she only
succeeds in destroying herself, leaving the boy left with catatonic and
paralyzed surviving members of his family and primed to cause more havoc
elsewhere. It's a highly dissatisfying movie glorifying suffering and
death, and audiences never warmed up to it despite generating some
decent theatrical returns. The project represented one of several movies
composer Jerry Goldsmith tackled with a psychologically troubled child
at its core, usually with good success. He was embroiled in a period of
diminished acclaim in his career during the early 1970's, though,
relegated too often to mediocre television films of minimal scope. But
he strove to maintain the quality of his output despite the poor films
he was assigned during this period. In the case of
, a
large portion of his recorded music was discarded in the film, some of
it replaced with sound effects while often yielding to silence instead.
Despite this partial rejection, Goldsmith succeeded quite well in
generating a coherent narrative throughout the story, even if that music
is a little too heavy-handed at times. That forceful suspense and horror
manipulation would work in
, but the filmmakers and some
critics found the music's presence too pronounced even in what remained
in this film.
Goldsmith opted to maximize the dichotomy between the
child-like, tonal innocence of the positive side of his music for
The
Other and the sheer horror elements, with differences far greater in
style than the subsequent
Poltergeist. Interestingly, music from
both the brighter and darker halves of the work was rejected, along with
some of the suspense material in between. Instrumentally, Goldsmith's
standard but not expansive orchestra offers plenty of interesting
coloration for the topic. He starts with harpsichord and harmonica to
offer some legacy to the time period, and a marimba is introduced midway
through the score to join woodblocks and xylophone for the sound of a
child's typical, playful exuberance. The composer once again cannot
resist the use of an Echoplex machine to augment various instruments in
rhythmic formation, the electric harp foremost among them. On the grim
side, the orchestra is joined by tam-tam to provide wind-like effects of
metallic discomfort for the mind connections in the story, and once
these capabilities turn fatal, Goldsmith employs tolling chimes for
imminent death, as in "The Flight." For the score's main theme, he adds
whistled performances by his wife that are intentionally off-key and
heard by the lead boy on screen, an interesting choice to turn the score
diegetic in the story. This primary theme is a child-appropriate lullaby
with waltz formation and avant-garde effects often intertwined. It is
carried in its primary statements by typical Goldsmith woodwinds and
strings, similar in fashion to countless later character ideas from the
composer in subsequent decades. Some listeners may be tempted to extract
the five to ten minutes of purely upbeat renditions of this idea from
The Other for rather easy listening. This theme for the boy is
introduced ominously in "Main Title" with both the whistling and tam-tam
wind effects but shifts to a very bubbly, unused version carried without
dissonance in "Summer Fun," where the idea is brightly optimistic on
harpsichord, wood blocks, xylophone, and flutes. This mode is reprised
in the second half of "The Well," and a marimba joins a similarly upbeat
rendition in "The Ice Truck." A straight flute rendition over meandering
harp and strings remains positive in "The Pond" as well. The whistling
returns solo in "The Apple Cellar" for suspense, but Goldsmith applies
the theme with false, soaring innocence in "The Flight" while increasing
dissonant piano thuds and effects for the grisly death at the end of the
cue.
The main theme of
The Other becomes far more
frazzled in the second half of the narrative. Reduced to its ominous
tendencies in "The Portrait" before a flowing harpsichord ending, the
idea is barely alive on woodwinds by the unused "No More Games and a
Visit With Mother." It shifts to the horror realm by "Angel of Fire,"
where melodrama is in full mode with strings, and a waterphone joins the
wind effects for the quietly stunned aftermath in "End Title," another
unused cue that had intended to close the score with the solo whistling.
Secondary themes include one for the boy's tormented mother, a tragic
identity of lamenting strings over compelling piano lines that is
layered with immense sadness in "The Well" and augmented by distant
harmonica. This theme is afforded a nice, major-key version on harp,
winds, and strings in "Alexandra" but turns its darkest and most sparse
in "Mother Knows," where it previews the most challenging parts of
Goldsmith's much later
The Haunting. It's barely on life support
by the eeriness of the rejected "No More Games and a Visit With Mother."
Meanwhile, a theme for the mind connections, otherwise known as the
"game theme," is purported as an adaptation of a Russian traditional
tune performed on screen, and this idea represents the boy's unnatural
relationship with his dead twin brother. It taunts quietly on the chimes
and harpsichord in "The Flight" and is most consolidated in "The Game,"
returning to those same instruments. Echoplexed flute and marimba
figures punctuate the idea in "The Cemetery," at the end of which
shrieking players abuse their instruments to unlistenable degrees. The
game theme's creepy rendition in "The Casket" was removed from the film
and replaced with wind effects, and none of its long exploration of
dissonant textures made the picture. Finally, there's a circus motif the
Goldsmith revisits as a mostly a carnival rhythm that haunts the main
character's devious side briefly in "The Apple Cellar," the middle of
"The Finger and Free Admission," and elsewhere. Overall,
The
Other is an intelligent but sometimes overwrought horror score, its
extraordinarily disparate personalities challenging to appreciate on
album. About 22 minutes of the score was edited into one long suite by
the Varèse Sarabande label in 1997 as an appendage to its release
of
The Mephisto Waltz. It took until 2024 for a full presentation
of
The Other to emerge, courtesy of that same label in a limited
pressing. The fuller, 45-minute product is a far superior experience
with surprisingly good sound quality, but don't expect the score to be
any more pleasant in this faithful examination. Goldsmith's competent
but arguably too obvious approach leaves you as frustrated as the film.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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