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Posted: |
Apr 11, 2020 - 2:19 AM
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By: |
Zooba
(Member)
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Just watched LIONHEART (THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE) on DVD last night after so many years. Franklin Schaffner's 1986 film set in the time of the Crusades and King Richard the Lionheart, starring Eric Stoltz and with that great Jerry Goldsmith score.
I had been lucky to have attended that great 1986 Jerry Goldsmith UCLA Seminar where Schaffner screened the film before it's release for all of Jerry's adoring fans. David Anspaugh was also there screening HOOSIERS before it's release as well. What a day for the memory books indeed. If I remember correctly they showed HOOSIERS in the morning section of the Seminar and then had Q & A with the director and Goldsmith, moderated by Bruce Broughton.
And so I believe we saw LIONHEART after returning from the lunch break. After seeing it just last night, I can recall that we definitely saw a different "cut" of the film with Frank and Jerry. The opening was different and it started right into a scene, as the DVD cut had a more of a card Main Title sequence. For some reason the Card sequence in the DVD look a tad pieced together and a bit amateurish. The DVD mix of the score seemed really low and I wanted to hear Jerry's music stronger and louder in the mix. It seemed quite low throughout the DVD viewing. I remember at the Seminar, Jerry kept apologizing to everyone for the sound system where we saw it at UCLA. He was like a father who wanted you to see and hear their child performing at their utmost best.
Even back then in 1986 I felt that Eric Stoltz's performance was quite weak and he just looked like a skinny puny kid going against Gabriel Byrne as "The Black Prince". Even when Stoltz fought the Girl Knight Matilda, I really thought she would have truly kicked his ass in the proceedings, realistically.
I didn't believe the story and thought Gabriel Byrne and his Bad Guys could have at anytime just attacked and wiped out Stoltz and his group of children, that he was supposedly leading so heroically. So the script by Menno Mejes just didn't work that well. The "Black Princes" brother who ran the underground city of Lost Children came off a tad creepy with some of the little boys he was caring for and yet it was probably just me thinking like a perv. Some of the kids following Stoltz to freedom were good and some were a tad obnoxious. The kid with the Hawk reminded me of a good friend of mine, just a smaller younger version of him. The film was pretty short and again it just didn't feel totally realistic, as these kids would really be starving and suffering more than they appeared to be in their journey with Stoltz. They sure had a lot of energy for walking and fighting the bad guys with not much food in their stomachs.
For me perhaps the greatest Hi-Light of Jerry's score was definitely his "The Lake" Love Theme sequence played for Stoltz and his blond Circus Girlfriend even though those two had Less than Zero romantic chemistry. A shame a young Brad Pitt wasn't cast as the young Robert Nerra (The Stoltz part) but he had just started working as an extra in the business and hadn't been discovered yet. The year LIONHEART was released Pitt was showing more energy in background extra roles in films like LESS THAN ZERO, NO WAY OUT and NO MAN'S LAND. Pitt would have at least looked like he really defeated The Black Prince. Dang, PRETTY IN PINK'S Andrew McCarthy could have played the role. He might have at least did his over the top crazy "Eye" thing and yelled out convincing dialogue like "I LOVE HER MAN!". Sorry to dwell on Stoltz's acting or in this film, the lack of it. Getting back to the music again, most of the other good Goldsmith stuff just seemed mixed too low. I think I would rate the film perhaps 6 out of 10 Stars as it was just mildly entertaining and about average as a view. I gave it 1 more star over 5 just for Jerry's score which helped the film considerably. Without it I may have rated the film a low 4 as a rating. Just my honest opinions of course.
Please share your thoughts on LIONHEART: THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE, the title it was intended to be released with back in the day. Please, your thoughts on film and score. Thanks.
Like how the WB ARCHIVE Collection people used Leonard Maltin's Thumbs up as he complimented Jerry Goldsmith's contribution on the packaging.
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Saw the film just once, when it came out, and have no desire to revisit it.
The score, however, while you wouldn't rank it as one of Jerry's finest, would be the best score of practically any year this century.
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I only saw the movie years after buying the score(s). And I always thought it would be this epic and spectacular film judging from Goldsmiths brilliant score but it turned to be Schaffner's weakest film of his career. It just shows what a fantastic composer Mr. Goldsmith was. It's due for a fully remastered deluxe edition.
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Posted: |
Apr 11, 2020 - 6:06 AM
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By: |
Spinmeister
(Member)
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Saw this in Toronto when it briefly poked it's head out of the ground back in '87. I don't think anyone had any idea what to do with the story and so it settled on facile, juvenile hijinks. Other than Byrne, the casting and performances are uniformly unconvincing. Even Goldsmith's score, as entertaining and as bountiful in ideas as it is, still strikes me as tonally off-centre—as if though he were providing the ambient backdrop for a Medieval theme park and not, ostensibly, a grimy period drama revolving around a religious crusade, child enslavement—even the plague—set in 13th century Britain.
And still to this day I try to imagine, for starters, that anachronistic synth that opens the "The Future" performed by a chorus instead (Lionheart being one of the few Goldsmith scores with electronics that I consistently find off-putting), and that the whole affair were performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra and not some cheapo, inexperienced orchestra outa Hungary.
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Posted: |
Apr 11, 2020 - 11:02 AM
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By: |
MikeP
(Member)
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Saw the movie once, it ran in HBO or Cinemax, and man oh man, what a clumsy, awkward film. Virtually nothing works dramatically, every scene feels stilted, like high school drama graduates at work.
But the score - it seems like I'm gonna be alone here, but it's one of my favorite Goldsmith works. Hugely thematic, with what are to me, some of his best melodies. The performance is fine, a bit shaky at times, but overall it sounds just fine. That "King Richard" cue is one of my all time favorites, all the themes get a final playoff and ending that a really beautiful rendition of the main theme.
We really need a Deluxe Edition of this. The complete score would just fill a single disc ( the reprise of the end titles in The Future can be edited out ) . That reissue from Varese was fine to get the music back on the market, but is missing around 15- 20 minutes . Since a rerecording won't ever happen the best we can hope for is a reissue 
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Posted: |
Apr 11, 2020 - 4:50 PM
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By: |
connorb93
(Member)
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This film has mystified me for years. I'd listened to the score, one of the first I ever bought, time after time, and it still gets multiple plays from me. It may be my favorite score from my favorite composer!...but it belongs to this movie?
Finally got my hands on the DVD and was optimistic given Leonard Maltin's review (his guide was always a go-to when I was really getting into studying movies) but WOW is it underwhelming. Considering the talent involved in writing, producing and directing it's a real marvel to watch. It seems, as evidenced by a LOT of music editing, that this project was either hacked to death in editing or was misguided from the start. It's slow, the dialogue is paper-thin, and the storytelling is murky.
Not the worst film Jerry scored but, like many of the worst, it's quite boring. My friends and I do have a lot of inside jokes about it though after we included it in a few of our bad movie night watch parties. I would love a well-researched review of the production, as I'm sure this was meant to be much more than realized.
But on its own, this score is an absolute marvel. Performance issues aside, it's one of Goldsmith's most thematically layered and inspiring works.
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So curious how the quality of Schaffner's films was like a faucet that turned off after the 70s. It's not like The Boys From Brazil is a great movie, but the stuff he made in the 80s barely registers a pulse. I remember doing a lot of pre-Internet research on his movies back in the day, but I never found an explanation for the decline. There are probably some aborted projects he would have rather been doing. I think Schaffner was a bit unlucky in that he was old enough to be seen as part of the old studio system, so even though he did two movies that were pretty edgy in the early 70s (one of which was written by a "new Hollywood" director, Coppola), he never overcame being seen as a director of big-studio chaff like Sphinx and Yes Giorgio.
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I'd like to offer one additional thought: that Jerry really wanted to offer something special to a driector he obviously admired. In that sense Jerry was creating music that was in itself a love letter to a friend.
Yes, I get the sense that this score was one of the more special to the composer -- mainly because he was reunited with Franklin Schaffner after nearly a decade, but also because he had never previously had the chance to score a medieval epic.
I saw Goldsmith interviewed on TV around that time and he remarked how nice it was to be able to score a medieval subject which had no modern sound effects to contend with.
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One of my favorite Jerry Goldsmith scores!
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