Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,422
Written 6/26/97, Revised 5/21/06
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Buy it... only if you can't get enough of Elmer Bernstein's
consistent orchestral Western parody music of the 1980's.
Avoid it... if you are only a casual Bernstein collector.
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| Bernstein |
Stars and Bars: (Elmer Bernstein) Veteran composer
Elmer Bernstein had plenty of scores rejected from films in the last two
decades of his career, and it could be argued that worst of all these
films was Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars in 1988. Based on a
best-selling 1985 novel by William Boyd, the story involves a depressed,
proper Englishman who dreams of becoming a wild American brute. Daniel
Day Lewis is terribly miscast as the English art expert living in New
York City, dispatched to Georgia to acquire a newly surfaced Renoir
painting. Being completely unlearned in American culture, he runs into a
series of eccentric people and bizarre misfortunes, and while he may end
up losing the painting, his career, and his fiancee, he does gain a new,
tougher personality with the help of a scrappy Joan Cusack. The film
only grossed $100,000 and suffered a horrible death before it even
premiered. Released only on videotape many years ago and gone from the
market in any form, the only reason there seems to be any interest in
Stars and Bars is due to Daniel Day Lewis fans who want to see
the then 30-year-old appear in two nude scenes, including one in which
he has to climb out of a second story window while... yes, nude. For
Bernstein, the composer was so entranced by the light comedy genre in
the 1980's --especially any movie in which he could work in some Western
motifs into the parody mix-- that it can't be surprising that he agreed
to write music for this trashy project. The more fascinating aspect of
Stars and Bars is the fact that his score was rejected and thrown
in the garbage. This was an all-too-common occurrence for Bernstein in
the latter half of his career (he had half a dozen scores rejected in a
ten year period around the 1990's), and in some of those cases, such as
with Last Man Standing, you can clearly understand why the
filmmakers would find the music unsuitable. But with Stars and
Bars, Bernstein's score seems like such a decent fit that its
removal (and replacement with a score by Stanley Myers) is
baffling.
Indeed, Bernstein tackles
Stars and Bars exactly
as you'd expect him to: with rolling Western comedy rhythms and parody
insertions of classical themes interspersed with flighty interludes of
romantic, tender ondes martenot performances. Bernstein's nod to the
South in his Western theme is a slight twist of the blues at the end of
his robust titles. Otherwise, he treats the English art expert as though
he's gone from London straight to the Wild West of a hundred years
prior. Some British pomp in his character is addressed, especially in
the orchestrations of the 19th cue on album. Overplaying the situation
seems to be the call of the day for Bernstein, with outbursts of
frivolous Western rhythms serving as the score's highlights. His
creativity expands to a classical rip in a few cues and a statement of
"When You Wish Upon a Star" in the eleventh cue. He also experiments
with a somewhat strange synthesized sound in the 13th cue, producing a
result not dissimilar to some of James Horner's synthetic scores of the
period. The most enjoyable deviation is in the 15th cue, in which
Bernstein kicks some militaristic comedy into the score, including an
exact replica of his underlying title theme rhythm from
Airplane!. Slower sequences utilize either a prancing piano to
accent slight comedy, or the ondes martenot in some of the least
inspiring performances of a love theme by the theremin-related
instrument in any of Bernstein's scores of the era. He does take the
ondes martenot to it's very lowest performance ranges in the 16th cue,
much more clearly mirroring a theremin. Sadly, the title is the score's
highlight and it appears only in full at the outset and finale of the
album. That album happened to be one of Varèse Sarabande's most
rare entries in its original run of Club titles in the late 1980's and
early 1990's (and it referred to the film as "Stars 'N' Bars").
Only 1,000 copies of the album were produced, with no
track titles and no information about the circumstances of Bernstein's
departure from the project. The item remained a top collectible for
Bernstein collectors despite its near total anonymity. If you missed the
boat on
Stars and Bars at the time, don't fret; it's about as
enjoyable as any of Bernstein's other wacky comedy efforts of the
80's.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Elmer Bernstein reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.29
(in 18 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.18
(in 11,116 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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