In my other life, when I'm not in a theater watching whatever art films manage to find their way down to San Antonio or in front of my TV watching obscure experimental films I scared up from Netflix, I am also a music critic. And there's one area where my two favorite forms of opinionated bloviating come together: in the OST, or "original soundtrack". Music has been a big part of the moviegoing experience since before there were talkies, and a good score or the right selection of a song on the soundtrack can make a film memorable just as certainly as an overbearing and obvious score or the use of a trite, predictable song can make a film irritating. On occasion, we'll take a moment to review some of our favorite soundtracks or scores, starting off this week with Basil Poledouris' score from Conan the Barbarian.
The movie itself — directed by John Milius and written by Oliver Stone — is a lot better than most people give it credit for. Arnold Schwarzenegger's lead performance is pretty goofy at times, and the movie is as subtle as a broadsword decapitation, but it delivers on its action scenes like nobody's business, it has a much better script than you might expect from such a movie, and is very close in spirit to Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories. Similarly, the score, by the prolific and talented Greco-American film composer Basil Poledouris, is perfectly pitched to its material: grand and sweeping, but never over-the-top or bombastic, and dynamic and tense without being screechy or noisy. It's also got a remarkably diverse set of musical markers and cues — a little bit of Oriental mysticism here, a sprinkle of Teutonic grandeur a la Wagner there, and touch of exotica from time to time, making it that rarity, a film score that's interesting enough to listen to apart from the film. In fact, the score's reputation has rather outpaced the reputation of the film it was made for; few people would count Conan the Barbarian as one of the best movies of all time, but many music critics have singled out the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack as one of the best film scores ever released. So influential has Poledouris' score become that it's often used as a temp track for timing out scenes before actual soundtrack work is completed; it also shows up from time to time in trailers and elsewhere because of its wealth of effective cues and powerful stings. Anyone interested in building up a film soundtrack collection should make this one a building block.
BEST TRACKS: The bold, percussive, stunning main theme (also known as "The Anvil of Crom"); the repetitive, despairing, almost minimalist surge of "Wheel of Pain"; the decadent, playful exotica of "The Kitchen/The Orgy", with its goof on Ravel's Bolero.