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| Delerue |
Platoon: (Georges Delerue) For many years, films
about the Vietnam War failed to capture any true semblance of the
realities faced by soldiers on the ground in that conflict. Writer
Oliver Stone, branching out to directorial endeavors in the 1980's, had
experienced much of the worst of that war, and he had sought since the
1970's to bring his story of Vietnam experiences to the big screen, with
no luck. By 1986, however, he was finally able to get
Platoon
shot on a frightfully low budget, scrambling through less than two
months of shooting that required the group of lead actors to undergo all
the hardships of the soldiers of the war in their on-location training.
That ensemble cast was filled with half a dozen names of young men who
later enjoyed significant success, including Charlie Sheen, Willem
Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Forest Whitaker, and Johnny Depp, and their
performances are outstanding. With Sheen's character standing in for
Stone's self in the war, he is drawn into a conflict between his two
leading sergeants (Berenger and Dafoe) in a battle of good versus evil
more perilous and psychologically damaging than the war against the
North Vietnamese Army. The film is extraordinarily brutal, its shocking
violence countered by Stone's gorgeous visuals of the landscape and
religious connections in the plot, Dafoe's character definitely a Christ
figure. The soundtrack for
Platoon features a few source-like
period rock songs for lighter scenes involving the soldiers, but Stone
intentionally opted to present the fighting scenes without any music.
This left only the suspense and drama moments in need of original score,
and he considered himself extremely lucky to have collaborated with
French composer Georges Delerue on his just-completed
Salvador
and asked him to tackle
Platoon as well. Delerue was in the
process of entering the Hollywood scene in the early 1980's, but he had
experienced heartbreak when his when his score for
Something Wicked
This Way Comes had been rejected in 1983. Sadly, he was destined to
reprise that unfortunate scenario with
Platoon, but to a lesser
degree. As is all-too-common in the industry, Stone fell in love with
the ascendant nature of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" when it was
applied as a temp track to certain scenes in the film during early
editing.
A number of people attempted to talk the director out
of placing "Adagio for Strings" in
Platoon, mostly because it
already had a history of being used as score-like material in
award-winning movies in the previous ten years, including
The
Elephant Man. Delerue was actively engaged in the project by that
point, and he concurred that his original music would suffice better
than the Barber piece; it could be applied in more varied nuances for
similar scenes. Stone relented to the extent that he allowed the
composer to write an alternative that he could compare to Barber's
music, though Delerue really never stood a chance. The "Adagio for
Strings" piece is among the most yearningly depressing but beautiful
compositions of its kind, and, in retrospect, it was always going to
prevail for Stone. Its use in the film for the opening and closing
scenes, as well as transitional landscape shots, the burning village
scene, and the famous death of Elias (Dafoe) sequence, is legendary for
its effectiveness in contrasting beauty against chaos. The piece easily
overcame any previous associations and will now forever be associated
with
Platoon because of that tremendous impact. Delerue was well
aware of this issue and addressed all of those scenes in his score with
a very similar string-dominated theme that goes so far as to borrow
significantly from certain progressions in the Barber piece. His
lengthier renditions of this theme even follow the exact ascending
structure and crescendo as Barber had, building to excruciating heights
on violins at the same times. Descending counterpoint lines match the
Barber composition as well, with a few bars late in the theme almost
interchangeable. One must commend Delerue for bending to the desires of
the director to the extent that he did, for his theme for
Platoon
is clearly a very classy rearrangement of Barber with just a touch of
the composer's own harp and other techniques added. One could argue that
the two alternatives would have functioned just as well in the picture,
though as much as Delerue enthusiasts may not want to admit it, "Adagio
for Strings" remains the greater gut punch. While most listeners
remember the soundtrack solely for "Adagio for Strings," Delerue's score
wasn't entirely rejected. He also conducted the Barber piece himself
with the same Vancouver ensemble at Stone's urging, so his touch is
reflected in the drama of its appeal. Pieces of Delerue's own theme did
make it into the film, most memorably the short "Base Camp" cue.
Despite the score's status as a rejected work, the
composer's suspense material was largely utilized in
Platoon,
lending often sparse but appropriately tense ambience to the horror of
the stalking and quiet killing scenes. In these cues, the composer often
applies high string sustains colored by exotic bass flutes and
shakuhachi accents, though it's his precise use of high-toned Chinese
wood blocks that really stands out in these cues. These wet wood block
sounds may not evolve in any way during the score, but they do provide
the jungles with an almost animalistic element, as though the score is
part insect and part bird. Grim versions of this material with lower
string emphasis provide gravity to the two most pivotal shooting scenes
("Barnes Schoots Elias" and "Killing Barnes"). Outright fright stingers
also exist in Delerue's score, the outsets of "Bunker to Village" and
"The Turning Point" using the dissonance of shrieking violins and flutes
to denote sudden terror. The rest of Delerue's score is occupied by
fainter versions of his main theme, as in "Grunts in the Rain" and
"Carrying the Children." The incidental suspense cue "Enemy Prep" also
cranks up the tension another notch with its expanded depth to the
jungle material. Occasionally, as in this cue and "The Enemy Was in Us,"
a fluttering woodwind flourish provides a notable accent, and these are
sadly too few in the score, yielding their role to the woodblocks. On
the whole, Delerue's score does have an impact on the film in these
parts and the few more dramatic moments where his music survives. It's a
challenging listening experience, for his adagio equivalent theme is not
as romantically appealing as his norm by design. Delerue refused opening
titles credit after Stone applied the Barber piece all over the score,
and he may have lost himself an Oscar win because of it. On album, the
long-available commercial soundtrack included two cuts of "Adagio for
Strings" (the opening with sound effects and the latter with Sheen's
dialogue closing the story), one Delerue cue ("Barnes Shoots Elias"),
and memorable songs from the film. In 1995, the Prometheus label
combined the majority of Delerue's
Platoon material with the
longer of the two Barber recordings and the composer's music for the
previous Stone collaboration,
Salvador, and this product was
re-mastered in 2006. An impressive 2018 Quartet Records expansion of only
1,000 copies on CD provides Delerue's full, 35-minute score with
alternates, both Barber tracks, and the three relevant commercial album
tracks, including sound effects and dialogue. This remastered
presentation is definitive, offering Delerue's bittersweet but important
contributions to this classic film in the best light.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
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The inserts of all the albums contain information about the score or film.
