The Pendulum Swings in Collectors' Favor

by Jeff Bond

Pendulum Entertainment Group has been busy this year, reissuing a number of albums that have either gone out of print on CD (Big Top Pee Wee, Cocoon) or have never been released in that format in the first place (Clash of the Titans, Ice Station Zebra, Lillies of the Field). Here's a roundup of some of the more desirable items, with more to come.

Cocoon ****

JAMES HORNER

Pendulum Entertainment Group PEG013. 12 tracks - 44:28

Another rare CD bites the dust as James Horner's seminal feel-good score from the Ron Howard "Old Codgers Get Down and Boogie" space aliens flick finally reappears on disc. Cocoon was produced in the wake of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., during a period when we got such classics as Mac and Me and every movie about space aliens depicted them as angelic doughboys descending from chandelier-like motherships.

Horner's music couldn't fit the syrupy tone of the movie any better with its glittering sense-of-wonder textures, rich, traditional-sounding cello melodies and cymbal-crashing finale. Everything has a weightless, Disney-like quality but it's grounded by some very strong lyricism (contrast this with the gratuitous Cocoon 2: The Return, which Horner treated with only the tinkerbell-type effects from his original score). Horner's gorgeous finale ("Theme from Cocoon") is one of his great accomplishments, a timeless and beautiful elegiac melody that still sounds a lot like the song "Have You Seen My Old Friend John?" And for Horner-bashers there's always the ammo of his infamous Wrath of Khan rehash in track 3 ("The Chase"). As an example of how pop music dates at a rate around one thousand times that of orchestral music, check out the already prehistoric-sounding '80s workout mix "Gravity" by Michael Sembello. Sound on this reissue is fine, particularly capturing the buzzing atonal brass effects the composer employs during some of the special effects sequences involving the alien cocoons. The artwork is a little on the dark side, however.- Jeff Bond

Clash of the Titans ***

LAURENCE ROSENTHAL

Pendulum Entertainment Group PEG014. 17 tracks - 37:51

1981's Clash of the Titans was the swan song of stop-motion special effects master Ray Harryhausen, an unassuming and largely unheralded genius who probably inspired more people to get into the special effects field than anyone else on earth. By the early '80s the technological advances of movies like Star Wars paid loving homage to Harryhausen's work while, ironically, making his techniques obsolete. With a budget many times that of any of his previous productions, Clash of the Titans attempted to compete with the newer generation of special effects epics, many of which had been scored by John Williams. One of the things I remember about the original LP of this score was that orchestrator Herbert W. Spencer, who had worked with Williams on most of his Lucasfilm and Spielberg epic scores, was credited prominently on the front of the album cover, apparently to clue the cognoscenti in that this would be a Williams-caliber score. PEG's packaging excludes this unique instance.

Rosenthal's work is a bright, shiny effort, with an ebullient romantic overture that comes into play later in the film as the film's hero, Perseus (a pre L.A. Law Harry Hamlin) ropes and tames the winged horse, Pegasus, in one of Harryhausen's most consciously lyrical set pieces. For my taste, Rosenthal's work doesn't quite measure up to the high standards set by some of the greatest composers in the medium (Herrmann, Rozsa, and Jerome Moross) on earlier Harryhausen epics like Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and The Valley of Gwangi. Ironically, Herb Spencer's orchestrations are a little thin-sounding.

Rosenthal's score seems much more overtly aimed at children than any of the previous Harryhausen film scores (or maybe it's that Herrmann, Rozsa and Moross had such powerful personal styles that even their genre scores couldn't escape sounding like their work on more "sophisticated" fare), particularly in the "heroic" parts. Rosenthal's evocations of ancient Greece ("Jappa") and some of the film's mythological monsters (particularly the creepy "Medusa" with its coiling strings and slithering electric organ, and the imposing "The Kraken") do bear favorable comparison to his predecessors, although the presence of wacky music for a mechanical owl doesn't help the juvenility factor.

The score's strongest feature is a beautiful, silky love theme for Perseus and Andromeda which brings the score to a rapturous conclusion. Incidentally, since the Kraken is supposed to be the last remaining Titan, how can there be a "clash of the titans" in this movie? Harry Hamlin seems a few cubits short of titanic.

The observant among you may notice that this CD lists 17 tracks, but that in fact there are only 14 (there is no track 3, 7 or 14). That's because PEG intended to add three previously unreleased tracks but were unable to because the tracks that were not on the original album were owned by a different company. This plays hell with trying to identify the tracks once you get past track 2, however, since track 3 is actually "Boyhood of Perseus," while that's identified as 4 in the track listing, and so on. Why it was possible to remove the track titles but not renumber them is a mystery only answerable by professional typesetters. - Jeff Bond

Ice Station Zebra ****

MICHEL LEGRAND

Pendulum Entertainment Group PEG007. 10 tracks - 30:14

Ice Station Zebra...the words conjure up images of shadowy intrigue, snow-driven Arctic tableaus, cold war tensions, Ernie Borgnine, and Howard Hughes obsessively viewing it over and over. And while Michel Legrand stumbled badly when he tried to apply his style to James Bond in Never Say Never Again, his Ice Station Zebra score is a wonderful entry in the '60s espionage genre. By turns majestic (with a great four note horn theme for the nuclear submarine Tigerfish), driving (during a brief section of "The Satellite Falls" and throughout the terrific, pulsating "The Crevasse"), eerily nervous and oddly soothing (the almost casual string and woodwind line of "The Lab," set off by icy chimes and flute figures), Legrand's score somehow makes real director John Sturge's pageant of paper-maché, snow-covered sets, phony airplane process shots and stern-jawed, manly character actors (with perennial secret agent Patrick McGoohan stealing the show with his indomitable forehead as usual). The old MGM LP was no great shakes in the sound department, and Pendulum's CD doesn't offer up any new sonic pleasures (this is another '60s score ripe for a new recording), but it's a real treat to have this score available to the public again. If only Howard Hughes were alive to see it. - Jeff Bond

Send your questions! Jbond@filmscoremonthly.com. If your question is, why can't I find these albums at my local record store, the answer is, Pendulum is independently distributed. Contact some of the specialty soundtrack stores via our links pages.