MovieChat Forums > Will Penny (1968) Discussion > Love this movie, but the music

Love this movie, but the music

posted 14 years ago by !!!deleted!!! (2212087)
9 replies | jump to latest

I love everything about this movie. Everything was great; performances, script, direction etc. There are a couple of scenes that can still bring me close to tears even after repeated viewings.

However, I thought the music was awful. Overblown and like the worst TV shows of the era. It doesn't ruin the movie, but was a distracting and didn't compliment the movie. I compare it to the music in Charlton Heston"s earlier "The War Lord" which I love and where the music added so much to the characters' development. I remember Bronwen's theme absolutely making me melt.

As I said, I love this movie, I just think that this was an area that could have lifted it into the realm of being a classic for the ages.

[–] bigkingtut2000 14 years ago

bongos and westerns don't seem to match do they. I wondered the same thing too. Would this movie have benefitted from a better score than what it got? Or did it help to give it an edgy feel to it? Sure would like to have it scored more traditionally though.

Just snake a tube down her throat and I'll be there in about four hours! caddieshack

[–] bastasch8647 14 years ago

Composer David Raksin was one of the Hollywood greats, scoring Laura, Across the Wide Missouri, The Day After, and 110 others, but he just missed here. The music needs to be muscled up, masculinized, and Westernized (more in the tradition of Bernstein's Magificent Seven, Hallelujah Trail, Morross' The Big Country, etc.). As it is, the score sounds uninvolved and a bit namby-pamby. Still... it's several cuts above anything by Leonard Rosenman and one of the worst scores ever written - Ryan's Daughter by Maurice Jarre.

[–] bigkingtut2000 14 years ago

certainly have to agree with your assessment's. Jarre's Ryan's Daughter was a weak score for an even weaker movie. It's funny how you can tell a specific composer's work, I was watching a Jimmy Stewart movie High Road or something like that...and couldnt wait for the end credits to appear to confirm that Jerome Moross had been the composer. I wonder if Raskin had just canned the damn bongo's on the score for Will Penny? I just can't picture cowboys around a campfire playing bongos. groovy baby.

Just snake a tube down her throat and I'll be there in about four hours! caddieshack

[–] bastasch8647 13 years ago

Sorry for the late reply, but yeah, bongos do not fit the Western genre at all :)

[–] athomed 12 years ago

I think the music was worse in Planet of the Apes than in Will Penny. To each his own. I've seen different people really appreciate the music in both. The only problem I have with this score is the song played over the credits. It didn't seem to fit. Perhaps the filmmakers didn't know what they had, Paramount Pictures certainly didn't.

_______
Stripping under the name Malcolm Sex, I pleased the ladies by any means necessary.

[–] JumeirahSun 12 years ago

The song playing over the end credits makes my skin crawl.

[–] sgcim 11 years ago

You six must be completely tone deaf. The main theme music was the best thing about this film. It captured the bleak, vast expanse of that life perfectly.

[–] bastasch8647 9 years ago

The theme music sucked to high heaven, or to low hell. Bongos suitable, perhaps, for South American gauchos... Goldsmith should have been given the chance if he was available. Raksin simply missed the Western musical genre target. He did have a sweet little theme for scenes associated with "the Button", and - very unusual for any film, especially for a Western - he ended the final note on a minor chord, which underscored a lasting sense of Will's fate as The Lonely Cowboy. But other than that, the score was intrusively atonal at points and anemic at others.

[–] kevin-bergin 9 years ago

Otherwise I did not mind it.