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Twilight's Last Gleaming
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(1977)
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1991 Goldsmith Society |
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Composed, Conducted, and Produced by:
Orchestrated by:
Arthur Morton
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LABELS & RELEASE DATES
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ALBUM AVAILABILITY
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The 1991 Goldsmith Society album (the label's first entry) was
limited to 500 copies, each hand numbered. The Silva album released in 1992
was a regular commercial product and diminished the Goldsmith Society album
to below $50 in value (as a novelty item only).
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AWARDS
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None.
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ALSO SEE
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Buy it... only if you seek a complete collection of Jerry
Goldsmith's action music, including the hastily written and less
interesting variety tepidly conveyed by this score.
Avoid it... if you expect consistent action rhythms, pronounced
melodies, or the vibrant sound quality that often propel the brass and
percussion in this genre of Goldsmith's music.
BUY IT
 | | Goldsmith |
Twilight's Last Gleaming: (Jerry Goldsmith) The
American public wasn't yet quite ready to accept the anti-Vietnam,
anti-government messages in 1977's Twilight's Last Gleaming, and
the film was a major contribution to the sinking of director Robert
Aldrich's career. Despite the fact that the Pentagon Papers, released in
1971, revealed everything that Aldrich was trying to use to outrage the
American public, one of Twilight's Last Gleaming's plotlines (and
the politically motivating one) involves the notion that terrorists from
within the American military could force the President of the United
States to admit to all the faulty policies behind the Vietnam War,
without even mentioning that conflict by name in the first two hours of
the film. The other plotline in the film involves a typical action line
that depicts Burt Lancaster as a former military general who, along with
two cohorts (including Paul Winfield), sneaks into a missile silo in
Montana and threatens to launch its nine nuclear missiles on the Soviet
Union unless, of course, his own government admits to its failings.
Reactions to the film were similar to the response by the public to
anything related to Vietnam in the late 1970's; people simply accepted
the fact that the government was faulty and didn't need to see someone
take over missile silos in order to force the shady Federal institutions
to expose the depth of its own evils. For the purposes of the film's
original score, Aldrich had wanted to hire his usual collaborator, Frank
De Vol, for Twilight's Last Gleaming. The tandem that had
produced The Flight of the Pheonix, however, was disrupted by an
illness that struck De Vol at the time of production, and Jerry
Goldsmith, who was in the midst of an extremely successful period in his
career and had always wanted to compose for an Aldrich film, was brought
in at the last minute to provide the music. He completed the score in
almost record speed and later revealed that did not even have time in
his schedule to oversee the dubbing process. Consequently, the score was
chopped up considerably in the final product by editors, and Goldsmith
admitted that his music was not used in the film as he would have liked.
Perhaps because of the rushed process, the resulting soundtrack is
somewhat underdeveloped, especially when considering the tension and
grand geo-political issues addressed by the film.
Not only are the political implications not
particularly well emphasized in the often underplayed weight of
Goldsmith's approach to Twilight's Last Gleaming, but those
listeners expecting to hear the composer let rip with his trademark
action thriller rhythms will probably be disappointed as well. The score
is a cross between Capricorn One and Seven Days in May,
very sparsely militaristic in drive and heavily reliant upon the
percussion section. For lengthy sequences, the snare and bass drums will
maintain a staggered rhythm while harsh brass and burping woodwinds
perform simple, typical Goldsmith motifs on the top. For the General
McKenzie's character (leading the government's side), Goldsmith offers
some faint echoes of the trumpet heroics of Patton and
MacArthur, including a few recognizable two-note trumpet
alternations from the former score. After meandering through ambient
suspense passages with very subdued drum rhythms for the sneaking
sections at the outset, as well as a short, soft, and underdeveloped
woodwind theme in "A Reflective Interlude," Goldsmith finally starts to
establish hints of his usually satisfying action rhythms with the whole
ensemble in "Operation Gold Begins." In "The Tanks," Goldsmith previews
some of the stock action material that would define his career in the
middle of the 1990's, though punctuated nicely here by distinct piano
strikes in the bass ranges. In the final moments, however, Goldsmith
allows the score to dissolve once again into a tangled mess of snare
rips and singular blasts from the brass section, with no melodic
development worth speaking of. Because of the failure of the film at its
outset, a release of its music was a long time in the coming. Many of
the original tapes of the recording had gone missing before it was
determined that Goldsmith's son Joel was in possession of them. It was
finally released in 1991 as the debut CD album of "The Goldsmith
Society," with a limited run of only 500 albums produced. Not long after
this product created a fuss with the Goldsmith collectors in the film
music community, the Silva Screen label released the identical contents
in regular commercial form the following year. Both versions suffer from
seriously detrimental archival sound issues that especially hurt the
cause of the percussion in the score. Brass flubs are also frequent
detractions, the trumpets clearly mangling some key sequences. Overall,
even if you are a collector of Goldsmith's superior action writing of
the early 1980's, Twilight's Last Gleaming is a much less
developed and far less interesting foreshadowing of those efforts.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.26
(in 124 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.29
(in 153,456 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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asdf - August 9, 2005, at 12:36 p.m. |
2 comments (3330 views)
Newest: August 9, 2005, at 6:57 p.m. by
Steven |
Plot?
Fraley - August 9, 2005, at 7:11 a.m. |
1 comment (2277 views) |
| Both Albums Tracks ▼ | Total Time: 38:33 |
• 1. Silo 3/The Takeover (3:34)
• 2. General McKenzie Arrives (1:11)
• 3. "He Has Launch Control"/Special Forces Arrive (3:41)
• 4. The Bubble (2:57)
• 5. Nuclear Nightmare (3:15)
• 6. A Reflective Interlude (1:26)
• 7. "After You Mr President"/Heading for Home/The President Falls (2:34)
• 8. The Taking of Silo 3 (3:27)
• 9. Operation Gold Begins/Watching and Waiting (3:17)
• 10. The Tanks (3:40)
• 11. Down the Elevator Shaft/The Gold Bomb (2:14)
• 12. Gold Team Enters Silo 3 (4:56)
• 13. The Final Betrayal (1:58)
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Both albums contain basic information about the score.
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