Remembering Basil Poledouris.

News of the death of Basil Poledouris hit me like a body blow. It was like losing someone I knew. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was losing someone I knew. Oh, I've had favorite movie composers over the years, starting with a mania for Miklós Rósza in my teens, then a passion for Ennio Morricone and the whole school of spaghetti western composers, and along the way the occasional fling with John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and a lasting admiration for Bernard Herrmann. But I never felt I knew any of those guys. I don't talk to them while listening to their music.

I do that with Basil Poledouris. The first time I heard the "Battle Montage" on the recently released enhanced edition of Farewell to the King, I said right out loud, "Oh my God, Basil!" And at the crescendo of Cherry 2000's "Lights On": "Basil, you magnificent man, how do you do these things?"

I've lost a friend - even though I met him only once, ever so briefly. That was at a reception at the Seattle International Film Festival right after the premiere of Flesh + Blood. I already knew his work from Conan the Barbarian, and having just heard the Flesh + Blood score for the first time, all I could think of was how it out-Rószas Rósza. Fear of gushing kept me from doing anything more than shaking his hand.

But talking to a guy's music, having a dialogue with him, is possible only when the music is personal, and that's what Basil Poledouris's music is - in spades. Andrew Wright, in a superbly insightful four-sentence Poledouris obit, writes of the composer's "gloriously large, blissfully unironic work in the action genre." This is what I mean by personal. Honest. What you hear is what you get. To those who expected Conan to be a comic-book movie, it was Poledouris's score that announced that this was the real thing, no goofing around (notwithstanding Arnold punching a camel), a whole-hearted celebration of the days of high adventure. When people who know of my admiration for Morricone ask about my favorite film score, expecting it to be one of his, they're always astonished when I reply Conan the Barbarian.

That score more than any other displays the range, majesty and passion that characterizes Poledouris's best work. With roots as diverse as Rosza and Prokofiev, and unapologetic choral bombast, the Conan score wrote a new page in movie music history. What a rich, seemingly endless variety of melodic ideas and orchestral innovations! Every new cut on the Conan the Barbarian recording holds new discoveries. Scarcely a theme is repeated. The film's score is a timeless treasure. Even when he turns to that most overworked of musical clichés, the Dies Irae, for the brooding aftermath of Conan's final revenge ("Orphans of Doom"), it's as if no one had thought of it before. Other composers' uses of that theme wax eye-rollingly tiresome, but Poledouris makes it fresh and new.

He always gave a score everything he had, no matter what the movie was. Even the goofy sequel, Conan the Destroyer, gets a lush, magical score that makes one think, at least momentarily, that the movie is actually better than it is.

But all of this is not to say that Poledouris wrote only straightforward, earnest music that asked you to completely trust the film around it. When the circumstance called for it, he was capable of high irony, and sometimes laugh-out-loud comedy. Witness the marches and logo tunes for mock-TV broadcasts in Paul Verhoeven's satirical futuramas, such as "Nuke 'em" from Robocop, or the "Fed Net March" that opens Starship Troopers. Or the send-up newsreel fanfare "Movietone" from Cherry 2000. Or the sitar number ("Cosmic Indifference") in Big Wednesday, with which Poledouris caricatures the holistic vegan deli where Matt has lunch with his wife and wonders what's happened to the world he knew.

That last score was his first big success and deserves some special comment. It would have been so easy for Poledouris - or John Milius without him - to have opted for "surf music" to score this gentle tale of a generation, of friendship lost and regained and of what surfing means to those who live it. Instead, Poledouris created a hauntingly beautiful full-orchestra score that balances two main themes, one a humble, simple tune celebrating friendship, the other a slow, stately march that, in a seemingly infinite series of variations, captures the changing moods and rhythms of the waves (and of riding them), the bright and dark sides of the sea in different seasons. And, as if to emphasize the importance of the musical choice he and Milius made for the film, Poledouris includes in the score one of his best, and darkest, musical jokes: "Liquid Dreams" lampoons what passes for surfing music in a documentary that, under the guise of celebrating the great surfers, compresses Matt's life to a footnote.

Speaking of dark jokes, listen to Farewell to the King for a British military march that could so easily have punctured the naïve enthusiasm of Capt Fairbourne's Zed Force but instead celebrates that same enthusiasm, and turns out to be the best, most infectious military march composed for a film since Maurice Jarre's "Voice of the Guns" in Lawrence of Arabia. And then contrast it with the oh-so fragile and precise little "Imperialist Waltz" that underscores the clean, out-of-harm's-way lifestyle of the British high command.

If Conan the Barbarian remains Poledouris's defining work, I am partial to Farewell to the King as his masterpiece - not only for the subtle ironies noted above, but also for the straightforward, heartfelt power and beauty of the main theme ("South China Sea"), the majesty of "Night of the Living," the exuberance of "Battle Montage" and its stirring evocation of "Rising of the Moon," and the elegiac "This Day Forth" and "The War is Over." If it doesn't moisten your eyes, you're made of stone.

Once I'd recovered from a few days of shock after hearing the news of Basil Poledouris's death, I thought I should do something special to commemorate him. Maybe I'd spend the week listening to all of my Poledouris recordings. Then my other voice said, "Don't be silly, Bob. How would that be different from any other week?"

I have recordings of eleven of his scores. That's not enough, and for that I am grateful. There are still scores I don't know, still discoveries to be made. Farewell, my king. I'll see you - or rather hear you - tomorrow.

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2006 5:20 AM