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Review of Pure Luck (Jonathan Sheffer/Danny Elfman)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... to pad your Danny Elfman collection if you find good cheer in his vintage music for lightweight movies like Summer School and Article 99.

Avoid it... if you hope to hear the score branch off from Elfman's typical style because of his marginal involvement, Jonathan Sheffer remaining extremely faithful to his sound of the era.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Pure Luck: (Jonathan Sheffer/Danny Elfman) Among the plethora of ridiculous Martin Short comedies emanating from the 1980's and 1990's, few are as dissatisfying as Pure Luck. The 1991 movie is a remake of the popular French comedy La Chevre from ten years earlier, and it teams Short as a bumbling fool with a tough and familiar detective played by Danny Glover. The two traverse Mexico looking for a wealthy woman who has suffered a series of vacation mishaps and has gone missing. While all the involvement of crime and chasing and falls and all the other maladies in the story would suggest some significant pain along the journey, you instead receive nothing but absolute silliness. The characters, despite their constant bad luck, are never really in any danger even when it literally looks like they about to fall over a cliff, a balcony, or a waterfall to their untimely demise. The whole concept of luck is twisted so that the bad luck inherently caused by the woman and Short's character is countered by equally good luck that ensures their unlikely survival. But the gags aren't that good, and you eventually wish some of the characters a grisly death. Glover and Australian director Nadia Tass were frustrated by the end result of the picture, but despite critics and audiences both laying waste to the movie, it somehow managed to become a fiscal success. Among the hot young names involved in the project was composer Danny Elfman, who was in coming off of a 1989 and 1990 that saw him skyrocket to mainstream blockbuster success. His career was still frequented by silly, non-Pee-wee Herman-related comedies, however, with a stretch from Back to School to Article 99 containing a variety of decent but rather anonymous entries like Summer School and Pure Luck. In the case of the latter lightweight diversion between his two Batman scores, Elfman provided only themes to the score and handed it off to his primary assistant of the time, Jonathan Sheffer, to flesh out the remainder.

Sheffer had a nascent composing career in the 1980's but became better known in the film scoring industry for his conducting work, first for Elfman and then for Elliot Goldenthal. (He was, in fact, a rare crew holdover between the Elfman and Goldenthal Batman scores.) Having contributed a few episodic scores to "Pee-wee's Playhouse," he found himself assisting Elfman in writing additional material for 1990 and 1991 assignments for which Elfman was running out of time. Notably, this work included a select action scene in Darkman but was more substantial in the case of Pure Luck. Well experienced with Elfman's various styles of the era, Sheffer adapted the composer's thematic and instrumental foundation for the film and fleshed it out in his own arrangements. Elfman was keen to ensure that Sheffer received composition credit if he was substantially arranging the themes in new directions for various scenes, and such work represents the vast majority of the cues here. Generally, the contemporary pop and jazz sounds in Pure Luck are at home with Elfman's sound at the time, an orchestra joined by accordion and saxophone for hints of the bluesy jazz that had laced his career to that point. The demeanor is more in line with Summer School and Article 99, with some rather vague ethnic influences factoring at times. None of it has the pure joy of Back to School, however. The music can be divided into two halves, the portions directly informed by Elfman and the residual filler material supplied by Sheffer in emulation of the same style. The score doesn't utilize just one main theme but rather a series of three or four phrases that together comprise the comedic and barely dramatic personality of the film. The main phrase is a vaguely amusing, descending figure over upbeat rhythmic flow, heard almost immediately on clarinet in "Pure Luck Theme." A performance of this A phrase on accordion at 0:20 adds blurting brass lines and a slightly noir feel. A subsequent B phrase at 0:45 helps reset the main theme but isn't particularly memorable, and a C phrase at 1:24 adds traditional Elfman weight in the silliness. The main phrase returns with pop drums at 1:45 and is adapted to a dramatic close.

Unfortunately, while each of the phrases of Elfman's theme for Pure Luck are adequate to the task at hand, none achieves any memorable positioning compared to the others, leaving the work as one defined by style over substance. Three of the phrases inform "Valerie's Vacation," a cue that is essentially a direct extension of Elfman's main summary of ideas as the premise of the story is established. This material is adapted into a Latin flavor in "Kidnapped" with castanets but returns to Elfman zaniness on winds and strings in the latter half of that cue. Stomping action occupies the middle of "At the Airport" with stylish saxophone outburst, and the main phrase takes a faux-Latin, more Mediterranean sound during "In Mexico." (The ethnic miss in this work is perhaps its biggest sin.) This idea becomes a frantic action motif in "As the Bee Flies" and receives only minimal thematic wrapping in "We Found Her" at the end despite one heroically romantic moment. The portions credited primarily to Sheffer are still saturated with the composer's mannerisms, and he seems to handle the Short character with his own material. Slight fragments of the themes inform the conversational humor of "Meet Eugene Proctor" while the fake Latin elements from Edward Scissorhands carry over to "From Segoura to Fernando." Fluffy drama with slight jazz sentiment prevails in "Proctor Crawls Home," this material carefully plucked and on piano in rhythmic playfulness in "Roadtrip to Quicksand." Sheffer's breezy comedy continues in "As the Bee Flies" with one Pee-wee-appropriate outburst of energy, but an anonymous character resolution for soft orchestral layers follows in "Getting Close." The tandem of composers functions well enough to yield a likeable and effective score, but there's nothing here that Elfman collectors won't be able to find in better incarnations elsewhere. Too much of the score sounds perfunctory in its execution. The only album for Pure Luck is a standard, 30-minute Varèse Sarabande issue from 1991. The album's versions of cues don't always match what's heard in the film, including most prominently the finale in "We Found Her." While there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this music, it's difficult to find truly unique benefits for a pursuit of the long out-of-print product or any digital alternative.  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 74:27

• 1. Main Title* (2:30) • 2. Valerie's Vacation* (2:09) • 3. Kidnapped* (2:10) • 4. Meet Eugene Proctor (1:32) • 5. At the Airport* (3:03) • 6. In Mexico* (1:07) • 7. From Segoura to Fernando (1:42) • 8. Proctor Crawls Home (1:19) • 9. Roadtrip to Quicksand (5:00) • 10. As the Bee Flies (4:33) • 11. Getting Close (3:37) • 12. We Found Her* (1:17)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.

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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 Pure Luck are Copyright © 1991, Varèse Sarabande and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 11/28/24 (and not updated significantly since).