Customer Reviews

Taking of Pelham 1-2-3

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're into funky, thumping, jazz oriented 70's stuff, then this is the CD you've been dreaming of. It's intense, chaotic, and yet suprisingly structured, too. Lots of brass, heavy bass, drums, and spacey marimba. I listen to it over and over and over - it's hypnotic and high energy. I wish it were longer - that's my only gripe. This goes great with the soundtrack to The Omega Man, if you can find it!

By any stretch of the imagination, the 1974 subway hijacking thriller THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE-TWO-THREE is an exciting and suspenseful ride, with plenty of fine performances, salty dialogue, and more than a little jet black humor. And a lot of the film's success with critics and audiences is owed to the propulsive score that David Shire composed for it.

With the film's setting being the urban jungle of the Big Apple, it is only fitting that Shire should compose a score that is extremely urban and jazz-influenced, and, as a reviewer has said, fairly influenced by the twelve-tone methodology of Arnold Schoenberg, transposed into a Hollywood film score setting. Shire's writing for the brass sections in certain places is not only jazz-influenced, but also resembles in some small ways the iron-clad and lowering brass chorales of Bruckner, as well as the jazz-rock fusion that was so popular during the mid-1970s. The whole score in general serves the film extremely well, and is a high point in thriller music writing that one rarely hears anymore in ultra-high-budget Hollywood spectaculars anymore.

Although he did not achieve the huge superstardom accorded fellow film music composers John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith, Shire nevertheless carved out a niche in the ensuing years, with his scores for ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, portions of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, and 2010. The score he composed for PELHAM was what helped establish his reputation, and its arrival on CD is something that a lot of people have been waiting on for ages. One listen to it is enough to convince.

After the collected horror-film scores of Italian composers, Goblin, the best SINGLE film score of all time has got to be David Shire's "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three."

The urgency of the drums, scratchers and trumpets will make you sweat with nervousness (like the hostages on the subway train)!

If you like thumping 70's funk, acid jazz, or even classical twelve-tone composition (!) you will be in heaven listening to this soundtack, which is, unbelievably, an utterly unique amalgam of all three!

Shire's score is a living, breathing, menacing character in the film, and one that you will not soon forget. I first saw the film when I was 12 or 13 and have never been able to get the sinister melody-line out of my head. And now it's FINALLY available on CD!

Want the recipe for one awesome aural cocktail? Put "The Goblin Collection 1975-1989," "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" and the Beastie Boys' "Ill Communication" (for their bass-heavy, funk-jazz samples) into the CD player and press "shuffle" or "random"---then Lose Yourself!

Influenced by Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone method, Shire set to work on this soundtrack. It's damn great! Even apart from the film, the music is strong. In the film, the score was great, and avoided the sort of listless tension music that prevails in action movies.

When Denzel Washington and John Travolta were barely little high school tewrps in 1974, there was a film called Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 staring Walter Matheu and Martin Balsam.

Now I gotta admit I never saw either movie. Which shows you what a dumb little tewrp I was. All those Saturday afternoons as a ten year old in New Jersey in 1979 moaning about being bored, when I could have been watching movies like Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 on New York's WNEW, Metromedia 5: movies which I feel lucky to be able to find for rental now.

But I bet you one thing: this soundtrack stands feet tall over any modern remark soundtrack. David Shire composed this. Now, if you can picture the largess of Issac Hayes, the drive of Funkidelic, and Shire working with horns the same way Barry White did with strings, you get some idea of how BIG this music is.

Actually this music does not sound, directly, like any of the music I compared it too. But it is electric and orchestral and funky. If Shire was not listening to the above music, soaking it up as a nuance if not actual sound, I'd be very surprised. Funk, all stripes, was all over TV, film, program music during the mid-70s, and this music is a big representation of much of it.

Or, as they might have said in '74, Everything Is Everything, Baby.

Great soundtrack that gives you the sound of New York hustle and bustle. Hard-edged, and gritty like the NYC of the 70s; really missed a score that captured the City in the remake.

This is great fun. It's also very odd, and not quite the kind of 1970s police film soundtrack you might be expecting; although a couple of tracks sound like Dirty Harry ("Blue and Green Talk", for example), it's mostly a weird but funky musical experiment. It's best listened to as one long single song, in which case it becomes a bit like Kraftwerk's "Autobahn", in that it's a series of variations on a single theme.

And what an odd theme it is. The main melody sounds completely random, and apparently it was created with some kind of mathematical process. Most tracks involve variations on a swinging brass beat in the background with this random-sounding melody over the top. It's a bit like Jerry Goldsmith's music for "Capricorn One" in its mixture of atonality and brute force.

Sometimes it slows down (the end of "Moving Again Blues"), sometimes it goes real quiet ("Dolowitz Gets Killed"), and sometimes it gets very loud (the beginning of "Money Montage"), but it's recognisably the same piece of music put through a blender. "Smoking More, Enjoying it Less" and the opening titles are the swinging-est, the end title is basically the opening title but not as good, and "Blue and Green Talk" is the most conventional-sounding 70s cop show track, with that wooden scraper thing that was all over the place at the time. "Dolowitz Takes a Look" is a bizarre mixture of aggressive brass funk and cocktail jazz music, and sounds like something from a weird spy thriller.

I can barely remember the film, which was a minor classic of its genre. It was a police procedural with a dash of caper film. All I know of David Shire is that he went on to do some of the music for "Saturday Night Fever". This soundtrack is nothing like that, and it's worth owning for the opening title alone, which swaggers like a magickist.