Jeff Bond's CD Reviews: Pearl Harbor and Cool Hand Luke

Pearl Harbor * 1/2

HANS ZIMMER

Hollywood/Warner Bros. 9 48112-2.

9 tracks - 46:20

After Hans Zimmer's frequently rousing, Oscar-nominated Gladiator made such an impression last year, expectations were equally high for this year's gigantic historical epic Pearl Harbor. But, appropriately enough, Zimmer's score has all the problems of the movie itself. Michael Bay's approach to WWII is to provide viewers with a Cliff's Notes version of history while lavishing the majority of his efforts on a love story so fatuous it plays out like a 1940s Taster's Choice coffee commercial. The emphasis on romance over patriotism means that Zimmer doesn't even get the chance to provide a fat, Backdraft-style heroic theme for the proceedings. Instead, the same mushy, lukewarm love theme plays during every other scene of the film's interminable 90-minute preamble to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The album features only one action cue, "War," although Zimmer's koto-drumming Japanese bad guy music does make an appearance in "Attack." Left off the album is the composer's 3/4 meter aerial dogfight music for the big scene in which Ben Affleck takes out a few Japanese Zeros over Pearl. Strangely, this is a leftover of Zimmer's exciting opening battle music from Gladiator, a large component of which was inspired by William Walton's "Battle in the Air," written for the movie The Battle of Britain (footage of which is reused in Pearl Harbor). In a seeming act of desperation, Zimmer winds up applying the Walton dogfight music to something resembling the setting for which it was originally written. Reportedly, Zimmer agonized over the main theme to Pearl Harbor for an unusually long period, but the final results don't sound particularly distinctive. Nevertheless, this album is flying off shelves at a rate that suggests at least some of the sought-after Titanic demographic of romance-happy teenaged girls was successfully targeted.  -- Jeff Bond
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cool Hand Luke ****

LALO SCHIFRIN

Aleph 022

20 tracks - 57:26

Arguably the finest Guy Movie ever made, Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke stars Paul Newman as Lucas "Cool Hand" Jackson, who is sent to a Southern prison camp for cutting the heads off parking meters. There his seemingly indomitable spirit inspires the other prisoners to various acts of civil disobedience in the face of brutal and remorseless guards and overseers, until Luke himself finally takes one step over the line and faces consequences he never expected. Rousing and fiendishly enjoyable, Cool Hand Luke moves on the strength of a great script and an even greater cast, including George Kennedy, the magnificent Strother Martin ("What we've got here is a failure to communicate."), J.D. Cannon and Joe Van Fleet -- and those are just the leads. It's continually amazing to watch people who are essentially background players on this movie: Anthony Zerbe, Harry Dean Stanton, Wayne Rogers of M*A*S*H, Robert Drivas, Charles Tyner, Ralph Waite of The Waltons, Joe Don Baker, Luke Askew, the great Morgan Woodward (as the menacing Man With No Eyes), Robert Donner and even a young Dennis Hopper!

Lalo Schifrin's score is right up there with the rest of the movie's stellar performances. His wistful guitar theme for Luke (lyricised as "Down Here On The Ground") captures Newman's inherent likability and humanity as well as any music ever associated with the actor, and also lays the groundwork for what the viewer may soon realize is not going to be a particularly happy story. While he's known for the gritty urban vibe he brought to movies like Dirty Harry, Schifrin is equally at home in a rural setting, and he ingeniously mixes loose, vibrant jazz and blues effects with impressionistic scoring. The original LP for Cool Hand Luke played at around 32 minutes with 13 tracks of underscore. The new album adds five additional score tracks ("Eye-Ballin Glasses," "Criss-Crossing The Fence," "Got My Mind Back," "Radio in Barracks" and "Dog Boy") and two concert pieces, Symphonic Sketches of Cool Hand Luke and "Down Here On The Ground" (Symphonic Version). Of these, the rambling, logy textures, menacing brass and searing shock effects of "Eye-Ballin Glasses," and the weirdly echoing banjoes and moody, anguished underscoring of "Got My Mind Back" are highlights. "Criss-Crossing the Fence" and "Dog Boy" seem like reedited replays of the original album's "The Chase," which may have been a strategy on Schifrin's part to characterize Luke's single-minded approach to several escape sequences in the film. The concert pieces are entertaining but a bit on the redundant side and are recommended mainly for their sonic superiority over the score tracks, some of which are in mono. It's great to have more of this score and my only complaint is the absence of my personal favorite cue in the movie: a growling, rhythmic charge of low brass that plays over relentlessly hammering percussion as trucks roll out at sunrise to take the chain gang out for more road work. It's a short cue but in a way it encapsulates the hellish existence of the movie's inmates and whips up some of the brassy excitement Schifrin brought to the Tiger Tank cues in Kelly's Heroes.  -- Jeff Bond

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