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Review of Twilight's Last Gleaming (Jerry Goldsmith)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
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.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
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. **
TRACK LISTINGS:
Both Albums:
Total Time: 38:33
NOTES & QUOTES:
Both albums contain basic information about the score.
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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 Twilight's Last Gleaming are Copyright © 1991, 1992, Goldsmith Society (Limited), Silva Screen Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 8/10/97 and last updated 11/1/11. |
