I don't remember much about this film, having seen it many years ago on VHS. But one thing that stuck with me all these years was Hans Zimmer's beautiful score. I've been looking for it for years and finally found it on a CD called Hans Zimmer: The British Years. It also features the scores for Burning Secret, My Beautiful Laundrette, A World Apart, and Fools Of Fortune. I'm so glad to finally have this music, it's awesome.
shareThanks for that, funny guy! It's going straight on the wishlist!
The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won't get much sleep.share
I saw this film on video when I first arrived as a student in the UK in 1989. I thought it a charming, very sweet, strangely moving film - very much of its time too (the twilight Thatcher years, a then-still grubby Liverpool, the days in England when the gay age of consent was still 21 etc). It also somehow struck a chord with me as a young gay man, then only 19.
But, you are quite right, the music by Hans Zimmer was simply beautiful and really stuck with me all these years. Particularly beautiful was the score at the close of the film when the young girl and boy set the dolphin free in Brighton - achingly beautiful music.
Just two more points I wished to raise in alliance with this thread:
1. It was really at that time that Hans Zimmer started coming to the fore for me as an avid moviegoer with a string of outstanding and beautiful music scores, many of them for British or European co-productions of the late 1980s - films like Paperhouse (a brilliant, evocative co-score with Stanley Myers), Burning Secret (very lush, spot-on perfect for the period drama that film was), A World Apart (the music of which really stirred me as it reminded me so much of South Africa, from which I had emigrated a few years before at that time) and, of course, The Fruit Machine. Those to me were his golden years, in my humble opinion. Capped, by the way, by his brilliant and often overlooked work in Thelma and Louise - a very American film directed by a Brit.
And...
2. Is it just me, but were not the mid- to late-80s and early 90s very possibly the best period for film scores? I say this because at that time it seems even the most mundane and fairly average films had simply excellent, stand-apart film scores. I rarely find this the case these days, for some reason. Anyone agree with me???
Try the '40s -Miklos Rozsa, Steiner, Korngold, Raksin. Every film noir had a haunting score (adding much to the downbeat mood of these '40s classics) and the big-budget romances and adventure films were given classic treatments. I saw virtually every film released in the '80s and early '90s (I was a film critic at the time) and you will find that while outstanding music sticks out there was endless crap at the low end, the small features that eventually became (by default) direct to videos, but most of which I saw theatrically or in screening rooms. This film was from Vestron, one of the smaller companies, and had a great Zimmer score, but if you look at a cross section of films from other indies, Shapiro, Hemdale, Skouras, Scotti Bros. (say no more!), New Horizons/Concorde, etc., etc., you will be plowing through junk. Also, the major studios had many pastiche rock & roll compilation scores of dubious value -I guess my all-time favorite Vanishing Point was the trailblazer in this regard, but by 1990 hundreds of films were just wish lists of pop hits from one era or another.
share