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Review of The Swarm (Jerry Goldsmith)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you are an enthusiast of the campy Irwin Allen
disaster epics and have an appreciation for Jerry Goldsmith's more
ambitious action scores of the 1970's and 1980's.
Avoid it... if the thought of Goldsmith using every section of an orchestra, sans synthesizer, to emulate the swirling buzzing of bees as a technique of horror makes you squirm.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Swarm: (Jerry Goldsmith) The highly publicized
but embarrassing The Swarm ushered in the sudden end of director
and producer Irwin Allen's fantastic voyage through the ranks of
Hollywood's disaster film renaissance in the 1970's. Unlike the previous
hits of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno,
audiences and critics gave a resounding sigh of impatience with the
genre by the time The Swarm hit theatres in 1978, despite a
similarly loaded cast of actors forced to endure unusual circumstances.
The plots of these films were getting more bizarre and the special
effects weren't holding up in the Star Wars and Close
Encounters generation that represented the beginning of another age
in Hollywood. The concept of a massive attack by killer African bees in
the United States was simply one that couldn't be executed well on
screen without relying too heavily on seeing blurry shots of people
running around trying to avoid them, and time has not been as kind to
this entry as it has been to Allen's others. Part of the ridicule of
The Swarm owes to Allen being allowed to direct the picture on
his own this time, his techniques awful and the pacing of the plot
insufferable. The director's career fizzled from that point on, banished
mostly to the realm of television, but the composer of the music for
The Swarm was red hot at the time and was primed to get even
better. Jerry Goldsmith was already a composer considered at the height
of his profession in the late 1970's, fresh off of his Academy Award win
for The Omen. He took over a genre that had been marked with
memorable scores by John Williams, including The Towering
Inferno, which is still considered by the majority of critics today
to be the best disaster score of the 1970's. Williams, incidentally, had
been hired originally to score The Swarm but, perhaps due to a
sense that the film would be terrible, he withdrew from the commitment.
Goldsmith was less adverse to tackling films of questionable quality,
and for The Swarm he produced what was one of the few bright
spots for the entire production. The score for is a large-scale thematic
and creative endeavor, with all the bells and whistles required for an
Allen film but curiously minus the trademark pop song that had always
garnered Oscar consideration on these films.
A well-rounded work, Goldsmith's The Swarm includes a major disaster theme, a romantic character sub-theme, a rousing military motif, and a frenzied motif usually on the high strings and brass that imitates the buzzing noise required to foreshadow and announce the arrival of the killer bees invading Texas. The main theme, ironically, begins with nearly the identical three note progression that opens Williams' primary fanfare for The Poseidon Adventure before branching off into its own. Some listeners may also find similarities between this phrase and Goldsmith's later "Star Trek: Voyager" theme. The composer's sense of humor is espoused in the three-note, B-E-E progression that opens both the primary theme and the bees' action variant. It's a malleable idea that informs both outright action and the suspense of scenes of abandonment, and easy tool for subtle counterpoint throughout. Some of the best highlights of the idea come in the battle between the heroic and nightmarish versions of the same identity, both offering highlights in the work that accelerate near the end of the narrative. The romance theme applied to several characters is sufficient in its high range string delicacy, almost reminiscent of material twenty years older but not as compelling, perhaps, as what Williams presented in the other genre scores. It's fairly mundane by Goldsmith standards, with the muted sound quality of the recording not allowing its soloists the breadth necessary for these passages to shine. The literally swirling adaptation of the main theme for the bees is brilliantly handled by Goldsmith by various methods of wavering the brass, woodwinds, and strings in a bee-like buzz. Goldsmith varies the intensity of this elusive layering of instruments as an orchestral sound effect in order to elevate or slip into the subconscious the danger posed by the oncoming swarm. In some cases, this reduces the effect down to a single woodwind underneath a romantic string interlude. The only downside to the effect is the dry sound that the lack of resonance causes, which diminishes the sonic size of the swarm to an extent. That, however, is a recording mix issue; the overall sound quality is on par with other scores of the time. The militaristic element of The Swarm is afforded Goldsmith's most muscular and attractive cues, the government's response in "Red Two Reporting" and from "No Effect" onward receiving the composer's more brutal but accessible rhythmic material. In totality, the score for The Swarm is slowed by the many inconsequential, soft interludes that doomed the picture as a whole (these cues present fifteen to twenty minutes in a 75-minute experience that barely register in volume), the military and bee attack sequences joining the fantastic "End Title" cue as the memorable passages. The main theme is expanded into a somewhat singular identity in "End Title," an exuberant, driving piece of chopping strings and pounding timpani with the composer's more typical meter that merges the propulsion of Capricorn One with horn performances reminiscent of Rudy, Hoosiers, and other later Goldsmith scores that rely on rolling momentum for their appeal. This memorable cue, not surprisingly, is the most common representative from the score on re-recorded compilations. At the time of the film's debut, the score was released on a 40-minute LP record and was received coolly by the public. Just like the film, the music was soon forgotten, explaining why the score never experienced a commercial release on CD. Two widely circulated bootlegged versions of the score existed for many years on the secondary market, but neither was attractive enough to warrant serious attention. With the other major Irwin Allen films' scores already released by Film Score Monthly, the 2002 release of The Swarm on a legitimate album by Prometheus, which was experienced in pressing several other Goldsmith scores of that era, completed the availability of these strong scores on CD. Like the two FSM Williams products, this entry was limited to a pressing of 3,000 copies and eventually joined its predecessors as a moderate collectible when it sold out. In 2020, La-La Land Records offered another 3,000-copy, more definitive 2-CD set for the score, the first CD expanding the film presentation and second CD presenting the different arrangements and takes of the LP album and a pair of alternate takes. The LP album evenly intersperses the character cues in between action explosions, and its beefier romantic passages, as in "Don't Take Him," are sometimes superior to the film versions. The 2020 product is a fantastic album for the score, both CDs offering unique highlights in commonly improved sound quality. On the whole, the score will eclipse The Poseidon Adventure in its thematic diversity but remain a step behind the dynamism of The Towering Inferno. It stands as a worthy Goldsmith action entry with instrumental techniques so effective that you'll swear you're hearing bees swarming in the room with you. ****
TRACK LISTINGS:
2002 Prometheus Album:
Total Time: 72:36
2020 La-La Land Records Album: Total Time: 117:04
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 2002 Prometheus album includes extensive information
about the film and score, as well as a list of performers. That of the 2020
La-La Land Records album also features the same depth of information. The 2020
product also came with the following disclaimer: "This release is MQA encoded.
Listeners with an MQA decoder can enjoy this album in high resolution, up to
176.4 kHz/24-bit, from these Compact Discs."
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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 The Swarm are Copyright © 2002, 2020, Prometheus Records, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 2/4/03 and last updated 4/11/21. |
