Saturday, February 19, 2011
John Williams’ Overture to The Cowboys, Conducted by David Matthies
I saw The Cowboys when I was a teenager, and I recalled it being good, but I had forgotten just how good it really was. Or maybe I needed some years to appreciate it. I just bought the DVD, which I watched with my boy last Saturday, and I’m still savoring it six days later. So is he.
Set circa 1870, the story is about a rancher named Wil Anderson (John Wayne) whose cowhands all get gold fever, just before a herd is due to get taken to market, and who has to choose between some highly suspicious ex-convicts, and boys as young as 11 years old, or losing a year’s investment.
Ably supported by Moses Gunn, Bruce Dern, and eleven young boys, Wayne gives a restrained performance, one of his best, in this powerful character study/adventure, which is one of the 30 or so best Westerns I’ve ever seen.
Anderson is a tough old boot who has to coax young boys, working for men’s wages, into becoming men. And the boys, for whom the “god-damned, mean, dirty, son-of-a-bitch!” becomes a father figure, do not disappoint him.
The language is saltier than Wayne would have preferred, and there is a lot more violence than he cared to show on screen, but times were changing—for the worse—so forewarned is forearmed. Of course, compared to today’s fare, this picture is tame.
Director Mark Rydell had a young composer on hand named John Williams. Williams composed one of the most thematically ambitious scores ever written for a Western—or any other sort of picture, for that matter.
Rydell presents the picture in a way unlike any other Western I’ve ever seen. During the early 1960s’ spectacle period, directors of some long epics with wildly ambitious scores, such as Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick/Kirk Douglas; Alex North) and big musicals, e.g., My Fair Lady (George Cukor), presented them with musical “overtures” and “intermissions” accompanying a dark screen, in addition to the closing credits music. Rydell does just that, and with Williams’ bold score, he can.
Thanks to David Matthies’ talented orchestra, and to Matthies, for his spirited conducting and for uploading the video. But he should have let us see the musicians, and given them their just due. He doesn’t even name the organization.
Nick-
ReplyDeleteBest modern film composers, IMO, are in this order:
Ennio Morricone
Basil Poledouris (sic?)
Angelo Badalamenti
Dear Sonny,
ReplyDeleteSorry about the delay. At the time you wrote, I had to google under Badalamenti, because although I had watched a number of David Lynch movies and Twin Peaks during the late 1980s-early 1990s, I soon tired of Lynch’s smug, anti-small town superiority and glorification of violence, for its own sake. At about the same time, I also got fed up with his interminable dragging out of Twin Peaks with one red herring after another, just so he could make more money. And so, I’d forgotten who Badalamenti was.
After IMDB'g his name and seeing the Lynch connection, I could no longer remember which music post you'd responded to.
I later hunted for your comment, but was only able to find it just now by again hunting down David Lynch's composer (since I'd meanwhile forgotten his name), and googling under mine and his names. Memory ain’t so great with some things.
To make a short story long, I was underwhelmed by Badalamenti’s music, which I found to be a sort of nihilistic techno-muzak.
Poledouris’ name was Greek to me (the spelling, anyway), but you managed to spell it correctly from memory. In his case, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news: I don’t know if you knew this, but he died of cancer in late 2006, a mere 65.
The good news: My son and I saw Lonesome Dove for the first time in the summer of 2009, if memory serves, fell in love with it, bought the DVD, dirt cheap, from Amazon, and promptly saw it again, from start to finish. Poledouris’ rich, epic score was, of course, integral to the miniseries’ power, especially the theme for Part Eight that I call “Requiem for Gus,” where Tommy Lee Jones’ character struggles to bring his dead friend 1000 miles back home to Texas, and which opens the suite that someone was kind enough to put together at Youtube
(http://thecriticalcritic.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html).
Prior to Lonesome Dove, I had never heard of Poledouris, because he spent most of his prime years composing scores for TV miniseries, which I rarely watch these days.
You inspired me to spend a couple of hours listening to a few Morricone themes and, while I don’t yet know enough of his music to talk about it knowledgeably, I do know enough to acknowledge him as one of the great composers of the silver screen.
(http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2011/05/brief-visit-with-ennio-morricone.html)
Thanks.
Regards,
Nicholas