The Music
This is what we're really interested in anyway. John Barry was in the middle of swinging London—Austin Powers's London—the hip cultural center of the world in the mid-to-late 60s. The Beatles had revitalized the pop music market and focussed attention on Britain. The film industry was turning out the Bond movies, Richard Lester's Beatles films, Michael Caine's Alfie, Peter Sellers was box-office king of comedy, Jaguar was selling the E-type.
So you're Sam Spiegel, producer of blockbuster movies like The African Queen and Lawrence of Arabia, and you're next film is set in the American South, with an American cast, script by Lillian Hellman from a book by Horton Foote, and Arthur Penn is directing. Who do you get to score it? Elmer Bernstein? Alfred Newman? How about Quincy Jones? He's good.
John Barry? The guy who writes music to spy movies and farces like The Knack and The Wrong Box? Are you kidding me?
So The Chase became Barry's first "american" movie—and it had something that was common to Barry scores from that period—a unique sound. Nobody would put The Chase on the record player and immediately say, "oh, yeah—that's the guy who wrote Goldfinger." It doesn't sound like anything else he wrote. And it sounds like it fits an American film. An American southern film.
There's quite a bit of variety here—some of the tracks are background ques to establish the mood, some of it is source music that would being playing on a radio. Personally, I liked the variation—too many soundtracks have so much of the main theme and its variations that it all blends into one long, dull malaise. This album offers tones that are sinister and tense (the main theme), cool and languid ("Call that Dancin'?"), lush ("Look Around") and just plain fun ("I'll Drink to That").
This may be an overlooked movie, but the music should not be. |
