Barbaric Music

I've never seen the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian. Not all of it, anyway. It's of course been run on TV more times than I could count, and I've seen several scenes from it over the years, out of order and edited of violence to be made TV friendly. Some day, I'm sure I'll get around to actually watching the film.

But one thing that caught my attention in all those bits and pieces was the musical score by composer Basil Poledouris. Despite the fact that Poledouris never quite became a consistent A-list movie composer, aficionados of film music know him well -- and for his Conan score arguably most of all.

For years, the film's complete score was one of the handful of holy grails for film music fans. The first soundtrack album released contained only some of the movie's nearly 100 minutes of music. And subsequent attempts to release an expanded version didn't work out; the original recordings for the movie had been lost, and efforts to locate them had come up empty. Finally, eager to put out something, an orchestra was assembled to re-record the complete score, and a 2-CD set was released a few years back.

But then, last year, the soundtrack company Intrada made a breakthrough. They were able to locate the original master tapes -- not lost after all -- and undertook and effort to release the authoritative Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. Their 3-CD set at last presents the complete score (from the original tapes), a half-disc full of alternates and outtakes, and just for good measure, a reassemblage of the original soundtrack album (with its various truncated cues). This complete set was enough to finally push me to add the soundtrack to my collection.

The score for Conan the Barbarian is a bit dated, but to a large extent that's because a great deal of film music that followed took its inspiration from here. The music is bombastic in every way, just as sweeping and broad in its quieter moments as it is tribal and militaristic in its action sequences. There are also a good number of "source" cues in the score (music meant to seem as though coming from an on-camera source), and they feel like they set the tone not just for later movie music, but for every Renaissance festival that's been held in the last 30 years. Lilting flutes and whistles, simple tambourines and drums, and gentle string instruments both define and embrace cliché at the same time.

Of course, if pulse-pounding action music is your thing, the soundtrack has plenty of that too. The epic "Battle of the Mounds" sequence is a three-part music suite totaling more than 10 minutes. And that's just the climax of a score that include brutal pit fights, wicked cultist chants, and grandiose montages. There's even a bonus item on the set, the opening prologue score complete with the over-the-top narration used in the finished film.

I'm obviously not even a fan of the film, yet I have thoroughly enjoyed the score. If Conan the Barbarian is a cult classic for you, I can't imagine you'd want to skip out on this new album. I give it a B+.