Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The blizzard goes on but still they must fly", May 13, 2007
I'm sure you remember the opening sequence. A lone German transport aircraft flies past snow-capped mountains. The credits appear, in a blood-red Gothic font. We hear martial drums that slowly gather in volume, and then with a loud blare the orchestra starts playing a grandiose melody that sounds as cold and forbidding as the scenery. Where Eagles Dare is a suspenseful, exciting film, and the music really lifts it up.
This is a two-disc release of Ron Goodwin's soundtrack, put out by Film Score Monthly, and available both here and on their website. It is a limited edition, but it is not too expensive, and it is still in print. It sounds great on headphones. The second disc has Goodwin's music for Operation Crossbow, I film I have not seen. I have only skimmed through the second disc. There is some source music from Where Eagles Dare at the end of the disc, and two alternative takes, which have different percussion arrangements to the original tracks. The album has several pages of annotations and a little biography of Ron Goodwin. I like to smell the booklet.
The music for Where Eagles Dare can be divided into two halves. The first half of the disc has the most variety, and is the easiest to listen to in one sitting. The second half of the disc suffers from having too many minor variations of the Main Theme. It is a wonderful Main Theme, though. It consists of a dramatic brass fanfare followed by a loud Morse code freak-out towards the end. Both of these elements are used throughout the score, although with a "suspense theme" that appears most purely in the "Intermission Playout". "Before Jump / Death of Harrod", "Death of Radio Engineer", and "Smith Triumphs over Nazis" are quiet and cold and mysterious, with churning strings and rumbling kettle drums. A lot of the music reminds me of John Williams' score for Raiders of the Lost Ark; perhaps Steven Spielberg asked Williams to channel the still-living spirit of Ron Goodwin.
Whereas the first half of Where Eagles Dare has lots of suspense, the second half of the film consists of gunfights and chases and explosions, and the music reflects this. Unfortunately the second half of the disc is a bit numbing, because it is basically a rehash of the music from the first half of the disc. The two elements of the Main Theme are repeated several times, with only minor orchestral variations. "The Chase", "Journey Through the Castle" and "Escape from the Cable Car" are all cut from the some cloth, and they don't add anything to the music you have already heard. The only real deviations are "Chase to the Airfield" and the slower "Descent and Fight on the Cable Car". "Chase to the Airfield" is a variation of the Main Theme, but it is a creative variation rather than a slightly shorter repeat. You could easily condense the album down to half an hour of core musical material.
Still, this is nitpicking - you don't have to listen to the album all the way through (it's one and a quarter hours long). With the right sequencing it is a cold, atmospheric piece of music that barely sounds almost forty years old.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Complete Soundtracks, August 2, 2008
This compilation is actually two soundtracks that you would otherwise expect to find packaged separately. According to the packaging the CD was limited to 3,000 copies. If so it is certainly a shame because these are soundtracks that many of us have been in search of for years. This CD includes the complete WHERE EAGLES DARE and OPERATION CROSSBOW soundtracks. In the case of WHERE EAGLES DARE it also inlcudes musical cues and other incidental music.
In all honesty my primary reason for buying this CD was to acquire OPERATION CROSSBOW. Some years ago I bought the WHERE EAGLES DARE soundtrack under yet another limited run production. However, this current copy has almost double the music of the original CD. The set also includes a small booklet with production stills and information about the movies.
Finding these soundtracks is something of a 40-year quest. For those of you of my generation, war movie soundtracks were not something you sought on 33 rpm vinyl records as a pre-teen in the 1960s. A majority of the war movies I enjoy now were films that I did not have the opportunity to see when they were first released in cinemas. By the time classic war movies, such as WHERE EAGLES DARE, KELLY'S HEROES, OPERATION CROSSBOW, and others began appearing as midday or late night movies the accompanying soundtracks had already been retired. What snippets I had were recordings on my compact cassette recorder taped directly in front of the television set. Those were the days when I adhesive taped a handwritten sign to my closed bedroom door stating "Quiet, Recording."
With combined WHERE EAGLES DARE and OPERATION CROSSBOW CDs I now have the complete scores minus the dialogue. Quite a jump forward from the days balancing a tape recorder at just the right angle in front of my Philco-Ford black and white television set.
These soundtrack CDs are a great find. I am hopeful that the limited 3,000 run is an understatement. The search is on for other war movie classics!
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Where Eagles Dare / Operation Crossbow, September 30, 2005
Ron Goodwin is one of my very favourite composers and the release of two of his recordings is definitely cause for celebration. These are original recordings thus the sound quality betrays its age. Nevertheless, it is highly recommended if only for what I believe is the very first release of the Operation Crossbow soundtrack. You can almost feel yourself strapped in the tiny cockpit of a V-1 manned flying bomb, or tremble at the terrible sight of the first V-2 ballistic missile liftoff. If anything, Operation Crossbow should be the subject of a new recording (Where Eagles Dare already has).
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Interact With Your Music: Discover, listen to, and buy new music, all from the pages of SPIN's digital edition, free to Amazon customers.
See all 20 tracks on this disc
by Ron Goodwin 
