The film franchise was created by the trio behind the brilliant classic Airplane! -- David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. The hallmark of their comedies was a deadpan seriousness by all the actors involved, and this aesthetic extended to the musical scores as well. For The Naked Gun, they brought back Ira Newborn, the composer who had worked with them on the short-lived Police Squad! TV Series on which the films were based.
Newborn's scores for the trilogy are a to listen to because they're only barely self-aware of belonging to a set of comedies. They're all solid dramatic scores, turned up to a slightly over-earnest degree. Everything is grounded in the cliché jazz band style one associates with "hard-boiled detective" noir: extra bluesy when the hero is out on the beat, cutting loose with a screaming brass theme for action scenes. You might be able to pair this music up with the images from classic detective films and never notice anything amiss; knowing it's meant for a comedy, you sometimes smile at how damn serious it can get.
The CD set devotes one disc to each film, each providing a complete score. They're do bleed together to some extent, each a continued exploration of the same style and the same set of melodies. But there are a few differences in each film too. The original Naked Gun's plot thread involving brainwashed assassins makes for a fun recurring "mind control" motif. The third film features a bogus trip to the Oscars, which lets Newborn compose parodies of the schlocky, sweeping music that accompanies award shows.
Also included are a number of songs and source cues from the films. Some of them are the sort of thing most people would expect on a "soundtrack album," like the poppy "I'm Into Something Good" that got prominent montage treatment in the first movie. Other tracks aren't something you're likely to listen to regularly, but are interesting inclusions, like a series of common baseball game melodies rendered on authentic organ, for the first film's ball game climax. (I now know that the songs you hear several times a game are called "Las Chapanecas" and "La Raspa.") There's also a track or two to instantly call to mind ridiculous scenes from one of the movies, like Leslie Nielsen's irreverent and off-key take on "The Star-Spangled Banner."
I was persuaded to buy the score when I listened to a few samples of the music online. But to be honest, entertaining though it is, 3 CDs' worth of it is probably a bit much even for me. A lot of the music reinterprets the same two core music themes -- one for the main title, and one for the character of Frank Drebin. It sometimes feels like there's really only around 1 CD worth of music here if you boil it down to the essentials. The result is an album that's great to come up on shuffle mixed with other music. Listening to it all alone in one go gets a bit repetitive.
So in all, I think I'd give the set a B-. It's probably not even for every film score enthusiast's collection. But I regard it as a fun oddity that I'll enjoy having in mine from time to time.
No comments:
Post a Comment