Man vs. Ape: Fact Trumps Fiction

A scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The five original movies in the Planet of the Apes series, which came out between 1968-1973, were entertaining fun, though only the first one, Planet of the Apes (1968) – which was loosely based on  Pierre’s Boulle’s novel La planète des singes (Monkey Planet – 1963) – could actually be called a quality film. Yet as enticing as the concept of apes taking over the Earth with mankind reduced to the status of ‘animals’ was, the films copped out when it came to explaining how apes actually came to dominate our planet. In a nutshell, Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) saw three apes escaping from future Earth when it was destroyed by a nuclear bomb and reaching our present day Earth through a time warp. While there, one of them gave birth to a son, who, in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), eventually led the rebellion that brought the apes to power. But how apes gained super intelligence and learned to speak was never dealt with since the time travel scenario neatly avoided that subject. It was one of those wrap-around puzzles – human astronauts travelled into the future and landed on a planet run by apes, eventually destroyed the planet but not before some intelligent apes escaped and came to present-day Earth and created the future where apes ruled until human astronauts landed on the planet. It never made real sense. The latest movie in the Apes series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, aims to remedy that conundrum. But though it offers a (tepid) explanation for how and why the evolution of the apes began, it’s not a very satisfying answer (I won’t spoil that revelation for you), much like the film itself. 

War for the Planet of the Apes: World of Wonder

This review contains spoilers.

The beginning of War for the Planet of the Apes, in which U.S. soldiers attack apes on horseback on a wooded hill, has the breadth and specific detail, the terror and excitement and pathos, of a classic battle sequence by D.W. Griffith. Like the opening scene of the last movie in the series, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), where apes on horses hunt down a herd of deer, it’s sumptuously shot and grippingly edited, and its bold visual conception is thrilling. (The cinematographer, Michael Seresin, and the editors, William Hoy and Stan Salfas, all worked on Dawn as well.) Matt Reeves, who helmed both these movies, directed a variety of TV episodes before making his first picture, Cloverfield, nine years ago; at fifty-one, he’s too old to be called the best young filmmaker in America, but since War is only his fourth picture it’s tempting to think of him that way. (After Cloverfield he made Let Me In, the remake of the Swedish child-vampire film Let the Right One In.) He’s a master storyteller and an ace director of actors, and unlike most of our filmmakers, who think only in terms of images and effects, Reeves thinks in terms of complete sequences. That’s not to say that he can’t dream up beautiful, memorable images as well and frame them magnificently: he has a remarkably sophisticated sense for the tension between foreground and background, periphery and center. And he imbues his sequences with so much feeling that you walk away from both his Apes movies shaken up.

Human Make Good Movie: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

2016: a virus (dubbed “simian flu”) is transferred from apes to people, and signals the collapse of human civilization. Now, ten years later, only isolated pockets of survivors remain to comb through the overgrown wreckage of San Francisco, fighting to stay warm, get someone on the radio, and turn the lights back on. To the latter end, a group led by Malcolm (Jason Clarke) ventures across the Golden Gate into Muir Woods, where a hydro dam might still be salvageable for power, and where – unfortunately for all involved – a generation of hyper-intelligent apes has begun to form a society led by Caesar (Andy Serkis), the chimpanzee whose marvelous mind was gifted to him in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The two fledgling cultures come to realize that their differences might be too profound to overcome, and the stage is set for monkeys to wield machine guns while riding bareback through pillars of flame. No, seriously.

Apocalypse Man: Charlton Heston Revisited

In 2008, when actor Charlton Heston died from pneumonia at the age of 84, he had already long characterized himself in movies as something of an icon of American strength and endurance. His profile before the camera always seemed as if it were chiseled in rock and eventually destined for Mount Rushmore – a formidable figure built to scale heights and widen movie screens. Which is why he was the perfect candidate for epics: whether playing the patriarch Moses in The Ten Commandments, the noble Christian Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar in El Cid, or Judah, the Jew who converts to Christianity, in Ben-Hur, he had the broad-shouldered physique and authority to carry the weight of their piety. Even if you could always dismiss the movies, you couldn't quite reject Heston. But his strength was paradoxical. While the strong, silent heroes like John Wayne and Gary Cooper wore stoicism as their badge, Heston brought a grandeur to his roles, as if he truly believed he were a prophet delivering the word. The disappointment and the pain of defeat in the face of failure were equally epic. Charlton Heston was not be a man to go quietly into the dark night. By the time he was addressing the National Rifle Association at their convention in 2000, holding a raised rifle over his head to declare to Democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore, that he would have to take his gun "from my cold, dead hands," it wasn't simply political rhetoric. Heston's defiance was theatrical in its intent and scaled as large as the movies he made.

Underappreciated Performances from 2014: A Selection

Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man.

It’s in the nature of movie awards to underscore the work that’s already receiving a glut of (often unmerited) attention and neglect the worthier achievements that slipped by unnoticed. And these days, when there’s so little difference between the movies that get nominated for Academy Awards and the ones that are recognized by critics’ groups, there are fewer chances than ever to bring fine neglected work into the limelight. Since more than any other element in movies, it’s the acting that excites me – and since no movie year, however dim in other respects, is without its long list of impressive performances – the sidelining of deserving actors during awards season always puts me in a funk. Of course, some of the actors who win praise deserve it, like the Oscar-nominated actors from The Imitation Game, Wild, Boyhood and The Theory of Everything. The ones showcased below deserve it too, however, and weren’t so lucky. Since I reviewed some of the performances I liked best on Critics at Large in the course of the year, I won’t recycle my impressions of Al Pacino in The Humbling, Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in Get On Up, Keira Knightley in Begin Again, Jessica Lange in In Secret, Mia Wasichowska in Tracks, Agata Kulesza in Ida, Kenneth Branagh in his own film, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Annette Bening in The Face of Love, and the three stars of The Last of Robin Hood (Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon and Dakota Fanning).

The Hindsight of Time: Ben Affleck’s Argo

Ben Affleck's Argo

There are a number of good reasons why many of the post-9/11 movies (In the Valley of Elah, World Trade Center, Reign Over Me) have failed to come to terms with the aftermath of that tragic moment and the subsequent wars that followed. Besides depicting those events through conventional melodrama employed only to stir audience empathy, these films actually leave little to the imagination.While trying to make sense of a time that is still being played out, each movie leaves scant room for reflection. This might be why Zero Dark Thirty, a movie about the mission to kill bin Laden, fails to resonate with the power the subject warrants. Despite all the heated debate about the picture’s point of view on torture, for example, director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) actually backs away from the dramatic core of that subject.

While I think it’s clear that she isn't endorsing waterboarding as a means of getting information, she also isn’t delving into why it would be a considered means of interrogation for tracking down the mastermind of 9/11. Her picture simply depicts the steps of that quest, the full facts not withstanding, but she leaves out the dramatic ambiguities that would give the story a quickening pulse. The performances in the movie are also so attenuated, so inert, that the actors can't take us into the larger, more disturbing questions which means they never get engaged (despite the media hoopla). Zero Dark Thirty fails, for instance, to even bring to light how national policy has changed significantly from the era of the Cold War (where two superpowers with the ability to incinerate the planet tried to avoid that catastrophe) to the post-9/11 period (where the enemy isn’t concerned with what happens in this world, but rather the possibility of salvation promised in the next one). These uneasy examinations of interrogation, international security and the subject of terrorism (which has a whole different cast when seen in the context of religious fundamentalism instead of the secular kind offered by Communism) are not being explored in these 9/11 movies because the thinking in them hasn't moved past the tropes of the Cold War years. They may be contemporary films about post 9/11 but they end up feeling stuck in the past.

Departures and Arrivals: Watching Movies on Airplanes

Due to a family emergency, I recently spent the equivalent of 34 hours in the air flying overseas to Goa, India and back. Fortunately, I have no fear of flying, but when you spend that much time in airplanes there is only so much sleeping and reading that you can do. I’ve never been one to stare off into space during air journeys, so I watched a lot of movies. Jet Airways, an Indian-based airline, is a very modern service with comfortable seats, good service and individual seat-back video screens. They offer a full array of movies from Hollywood and Bollywood. I’ve never been that much of a Bollywood fan, so I really wasn’t in the mood for those long films with the out-of-the-blue ubiquitous dancing and singing scenes – don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some of the pictures and have liked them, but there’s only one I can hands down recommend, even though it is over three hours long: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), directed by Adiya Chopra and starring Bollywood’s Tom Cruise, Shahrukh Khan – so I brought up the list of Hollywood films. There were a lot.

In the past year, I’ve really have been remiss in seeing the new offerings out of Hollywood (I'm told I haven't missed much), so this journey became an ideal opportunity to catch up on some films I’d intended to see, but never got around to them. Little did I know until I got home that the pictures I watched actually fit two themes that reflected both my journey to Goa and back. The films on offer ranged from ‘70s classics, Chinatown, to hits from 2011 such as Dolphin’s Tale and Puss in Boots. There is a certain restlessness when you are stuck on an airplane, so as I flipped through the list, I ticked off a few I was interested in seeing. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to watch anything I’d already seen (bye bye, Chinatown). So I settled in to watch a number of films, some that both Shlomo and Susan reviewed in Critics at Large when they were first released.

White Knight: The Batman

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman. (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.)

In his 1957 architectonic study Anatomy of Criticism, structuralist Northrop Frye sketches a taxonomy of literary heroes. Those of the Mythic mode, he argues, are gods: they’re superior in kind to other characters and to their environment. They defy the laws of nature and possess divine gifts. Examples include Zeus, Bacchus, and Shiva. In a tragic narrative, they die. In a comic one, they rejoin the heavenly realm. (The Christian narrative is neither tragic, nor comic, but ironic: Christ is crucified, yet raised to the Father on the third day.)

The heroes of the Romantic mode are superior to others and their environment only by degree. Their actions are marvelous, but they themselves are human beings. In tragedy, their deaths are elegiac and tied to the decay of the created order (think Beowulf). In comedy, they ride off into a pastoral setting (e.g., the cowboy in a Western).

Following this schema, contemporary superheroes dwell in a gray area between the Mythic and Romantic modes. Some, like Superman, are gods – different from us in kind. Others, like the X-Men, are mortals but possess mutations that give them supernatural powers. And still more, like Iron Man, don’t have genetic enhancements so much as advanced technology, making them more Romantic than Mythic.

The Mustang: Soothing the Savage Spirit

Matthias Schoenaerts in The Mustang.

The first images of The Mustang, of a herd of wild mustangs racing vainly across a western expanse while choppers buzzing overhead round them up and vans cut off their escape route, is reminiscent of scenes from the great 1953 Albert Lamorisse short White Mane. It’s a hell of an opening: majestic and unsettling in equal parts. And it lays the groundwork for the story, which juxtaposes one of these magnificent wild creatures, a restless, apparently unbreakable horse named Marquis (pronounced “Marcus”), with a violent criminal named Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts, Gabriel Oak in the 2015 remake of Far from the Madding Crowd) who’s just been released into the general prison population at the Northern Nevada Correctional Institute after years in solitary. In his session with the prison psychologist (Connie Britton), Roman refuses to answer her questions; he looks like he’s about to implode, and he very nearly does – though she’s a veteran, firm and fearless, so his resistance to her doesn’t impress her. (Britton only has two scenes in the movie, but she makes the most of them.) Finally he gets out “I’m not good with people,” so she assigns him to outdoor work. Where he ends up is the Wild Horse Inmate Program, whose director, Myles (Bruce Dern), with the help of an inmate handler named Henry (Jason Mitchell), teaches prisoners to tame mustangs so they’re fit to be auctioned off for a variety of purposes, including border patrol. The Mustang is about how Roman and Marquis, in effect, tame each other – after a very shaky start. Roman gets so exasperated with the horse’s reluctance to let himself be subdued that, in an astounding scene, he beats him with his fists until Myles has him dragged off. Myles, not surprisingly, proclaims that he never wants to see this inmate again, but Roman manages to redeem himself in an emergency and is re-enlisted in the program.

M*A*S*H: Novel into Film into Sitcom, and Notes on the Long Run

The cast of Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), based on the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker. (Photo: IMDB)

“Richard Hooker,” whose real name was Richard Hornberger, had been a surgeon in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH unit, during the Korean War. Failing to interest a dozen or so publishers in his sheaf of random anecdotes about cutting soldiers and cutting up in America’s least-understood modern conflict, he partnered with sportswriter W.C. Heinz, who took a hired gun’s silent pay to whip the sheaf into shape. It was published, in 1968, as MASH: A Novel of Three Army Doctors, and a few days ago – for no reason other than that an episode of the associated sitcom was on television, and that I was eager to avoid doing some actual work – I retrieved the paperback of the novel that I’d had since high school. I remembered some things about the book and had forgotten others. Remembered: the characters, while similar to those who populate Robert Altman’s 1970 film adaptation, bear almost no resemblance to those of the long-running (1972-83) TV version. Forgotten: the style and matter of the novel are cool and mordant in a mostly appealing way – albeit with much of the sexism that makes the Altman film offensive, but without a hint of the sanctimony that so defined the series in its last several seasons.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold – Let Fly the Hammers of Justice!

Batman and Plastic Man battle some super-intelligent apes in Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Batman has long been my favourite superhero. And I’m not alone: Hollywood has long favoured the Caped Crusader – giving us a half dozen major motion pictures in the past two decades alone. In five days, the long-awaited conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s brilliantly intense, philosophical Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, will open in theatres worldwide. But Batman’s life on the small screen has been just as varied. Beginning with the famously campy Adam West series in the mid-sixties, and reaching perhaps its zenith with the classic Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995), Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego Batman have been a television staple for more than four decades. Last August, the more recent Batman: The Brave and the Bold ended its three-season run on the Cartoon Network – but I confess that it was only over the past few weeks that I finally gave the series a real look. And with Nolan’s sure-to-be blockbuster movie waiting in the wings, this is as good a time as any to let you know why you should check it too.

Based on the long-running DC comic series of the same name, The Brave and the Bold is unique among the many Batman titles in that it specifically focuses on Batman teaming up with other heroes of the DC universe. The animated series follows this same mandate, bringing Batman together with one or more other costumed heroes in his famous battle against villainy and evil in all their incarnations. But Batman: The Brave and the Bold (hereafter BtBatB) was unique in another way, in that it controversially marked a return to the lighter, more tongue-in-cheek Batman stories of an earlier generation. It’s brighter in tone, snappier in dialogue, and unapologetically cartoonish in its animation style. And truth be told, in 2008 when I dutifully tuned in for its premiere episode, I hated it. 

Two Servos, With Love: Broadway's Maybe Happy Ending and Gypsy

Helen J Shen and Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending.

The musical Maybe Happy Ending is first surprising, then charming, and finally touching. It’s a romantic musical about robots written by Will Aronson (who composed the music) and Hue Park (who collaborated with Aronson on the book and lyrics), that comes to Broadway by way of Korea. The two protagonists, Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen), live across the hall from each other in apartments in the Helperbot Yards in Seoul, where they were left after their owners “retired” them – though Oliver is under the impression that his, James (played by Marcus Choi in flashbacks), will be coming by any day to pick him up and ferry him to his home on Jeju Island. It’s been twelve years, but Oliver continues to live in happy expectation, watching the movies James taught him to love and listening to the classic jazz that is his special legacy from James. (James continued Oliver’s subscription to Jazz Monthly when he departed.) Oliver’s only companion is a plant he’s named HwaBoon – another gift from James – until one day Claire knocks on his door and asks him to let her use his recharger. At first, true to the conventional romantic-comedy set-up, they don’t like each other, but they warm up and eventually realize that, in defiance of the way their manufacturer created them, they have begun to have feelings for each other. And since Claire’s owner left her with her old car, the bots are able to embark on the archetypal romantic-comedy journey, to Jeju Island to find the long-gone James.

Magic Season – Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Eddie Redmayne and Callum Turner in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

We can all agree that the more franchises crowd the multiplexes, the more difficult it is for other sorts of pictures to get seen – indeed, to get made at all. Still, some of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had at the movies this year have been at the latest entries in various series: Incredibles 2, Mission Impossible: Fallout, Ant-Man and the Wasp, even the much-maligned Solo. However, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald towers above the others. It confirms that, visually and emotionally, this particular franchise is on the same level as the recently concluded Planet of the Apes trilogy.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain: Victorian Surrealist

Claire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, which had a brief life in art houses and is now available on Amazon Prime, evokes the great Victorian and Edwardian children’s stories, like the Alice books and the Mary Poppins books, though it’s mostly for adults (children who aren’t knocked off kilter by sad tales will love it, too), and in other ways it recalls the nutcake Ealing comedies of the fifties. It tells the true story of a Victorian eccentric, the illustrator Louis Wain (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), whose whimsical, proto-surrealist sketches of cats – initially inspired by a stray he and his wife Emily (Claire Foy) discover in their garden in the rain, adopt and fall in love with – alter the perceptions of English people when they began to appear in The Illustrated London News in the 1880s. (Strange as it seems, felines have not always been cherished as household pets.)

Giving the Gift of Culture: Presents for the Holiday Season

Being Jewish I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I often feel sorry about the financial pressures the holiday imposes on so many of my friends and co-workers. They simply cannot afford to purchase gifts for so many different people on their gift list. Fortunately, I do sense that the trend of late has seen them cutting back on spending, opting for inexpensive books and the like. In that spirit, I herewith offer some suggestions, many off the beaten track, for presents that won’t break your bank account.

Waitress: Lowest Common Denominator

Jessie Mueller (right) & Dakin Matthews in Waitress, at the American Repertory Theatre. (All photos by Evgenia Eliseeva)

Waitress is the latest in a series of new musicals and revivals that American Repertory Theatre’s artistic director, Diane Paulus, has been shepherding through the tryout phase in Cambridge with an eye on opening them in New York, and nearly all of them have made the move successfully. I have decidedly mixed feelings about Paulus’ using A.R.T. as a clearing house for New York-bound projects – it’s not as if A.R.T. was such a great place in the days when it housed allegedly cutting-edge productions by prestigious guest directors – but I might feel less ornery about these shows if they seemed to be working toward some balance of art and commerce. But last season’s Finding Neverland was a bald attempt (mostly on the part of hands-on producer Harvey Weinstein) to home in on the audience for Disney stage musicals, and Waitress is aimed at the crowd that goes wild at down-home musicals like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and 9 to 5.

The Thickness of a Thought: Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth

As humanity grows well past seven billion people, our small planet begins to feel smaller. Many millions of us cluster around densely packed urban centres, with personal space – let alone land – an uncommon luxury. But what if the opposite were suddenly true? Instead of one Earth, we could walk between millions, with possibility of one day waking up as the only human mind on an entire world?

The Long Earth springs such an event on us one not-so-distant tomorrow, with the consequences explored by two renowned British imaginations: Terry Pratchett, known for his other, more fantastic alternate world in the Discworld series; and Stephen Baxter, a science fiction author with several trilogies under his belt (you may also have heard of his previous co-author, some fellow named Arthur C. Clarke...). Their first collaboration, The Long Earth brings out some of the best elements of each author's style – although those expecting the sillier, more outlandish aspects of Pratchett's fantasy won't find it here. Instead the novel follows a solid, if somewhat predictable science fiction exploration of how humans cope with the technological development of "Steppers": devices that allow instantaneous – if slightly nauseating – shifts from one version of planet Earth (and surrounding universe) to another. When the designs for such a machine get posted online, everyone from tech geeks to inquisitive children start building a way out of our congested world. With gold and natural resources now aplenty – but un-Steppable iron suddenly needed – the traditional ideas of value and wealth get turned on their heads. In search of both, people set out across a line of Earths that are much like ours, but with one small difference... none of them appear to have humans.

Breathe: Lifeline

Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy in Breathe, directed by Andy Serkis. (Photo: David Bloomer)

Early in Breathe, there’s a moment that recalls The Sea Inside, Alejandro Amenábar’s superb triumph-of-the-spirit movie about the efforts of Ramón Sampedro (played by Javier Bardem), paralyzed and confined to his bed for years, to get the government of Catholic Spain to grant him permission to kill himself. Like Ramón, Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) in Breathe – another real-life character stricken with paralysis, in his case from an attack of polio in the late 1950s – imagines himself getting up from his bed. But those mind escapes are a motif in The Sea Inside; in Breathe it happens just once, when Robin, in the depths of depression, has essentially retreated from life. Breathe is the anti-Sea Inside. It’s about how Robin’s wife Diana (Claire Foy), who refuses to allow him to give up on life, which would also mean giving up on her and their baby son Jonathan, engineers his liberation from the hospital where he’s being treated like a virtual corpse – and then, with Robin’s input and the aid of a delightfully imaginative and proactive group of friends, including the inventor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), devises a series of strategies to give Robin a mobile and fulfilling life. They progress from a ventilator set up in their bedroom in a wonderful old country house Diana buys on the cheap to a ventilator-fueled wheelchair to an automobile built to accommodate Andrew and his needs.

The Grand Experiment – Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War

Josh Brolin as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.

Note: This review contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.

In the production logos that precede Disney and Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, the “io” in “Marvel Studios” slowly morphs into the number 10, signifying the real-life decade that has passed since Iron Man was released in 2008, when this whole “cinematic universe” experiment began in earnest. It is not overstating things to say that this process, whether or not you’ve enjoyed following its peaks and valleys, is unprecedented in cinematic history, and that fact in itself anchors Infinity War in a sense of tangible accomplishment. Much ballyhoo has been made about the fact that the film doesn’t make a lick of sense if you haven’t seen the Marvel movies leading up to this (and if you haven’t, then what exactly is driving you to buy a ticket for this one?), but that attitude belies the mind-boggling time and effort that has gone into setting up these dominoes, so that this film can concern itself primarily with knocking them down. Experiencing the setup is worth it, because Infinity War is nearly three hours of pure payoff.

Notes and Frames II: Interview with Composer Jerry Goldsmith (1982)

Where the original Hollywood composers who pioneered film music, such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Alex North, either came from classical music backgrounds, or continued to do concert work while plying a trade scoring movies, Jerry Goldsmith always wanted to be a film composer. Born in 1929 in Los Angeles, he studied piano at six and by the time he was thirteen began having private lessons with the legendary concert pianist Jakob Gimpel. While studying counterpoint and theory with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (who also tutored Henry Mancini and John Williams), Goldsmith happened to see Hitchcock's Spellbound which was scored by Miklós Rózsa and he was hooked. Goldsmith would soon enrol and attend lectures Rózsa gave at the University of Southern California until he began more practical studies in scoring at Los Angeles City College.

By the Fifties, Jerry Goldsmith began work in radio and later scored live CBS television shows such as Climax! and Playhouse 90. Soon he was scoring multiple episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. In 1961, composer Alfred Newman became deeply impressed with Goldsmith's work on Thriller and recommended him to Universal Pictures who needed a composer for their new modern western Lonely are the Brave (1962). From there Goldsmith mapped out a career that spanned over 40 years.

Most film composers have a style that makes their work recognizable from the very opening notes, but Jerry Goldsmith's work was eclectic and unpredictable. More than any other composer, perhaps save Henry Mancini and Ennio Morricone, Goldsmith employed elements of both pop and classical sounds into his work. And the films he scored, both good and bad, were as motley as the soundtracks he created. On John Huston's Freud (1962), for instance, Goldsmith didn't write a score in the style of Mahler or Strauss (which would have been the composers of Freud's time), but instead the more modern serialist atonal music of Schoenberg or Berg which better reflected the turbulent journeys into the unconscious mind. In 1968, Goldsmith would even write a complete 12-tone score for Planet of the Apes. He was a master of adaptability and without ever losing his individual voice whether it was composing epic pictures like The Sand Pebbles (1966) and Patton (1970), or intimate dramas like A Patch of Blue (1965) and Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). He had a distinctive touch with period dramas either being sweepingly romantic as in The Wind and the Lion (1975), delicate and moody in Chinatown (1974), or using pop and orchestral sounds to evoke an era as in L.A. Confidential (1997). Despite the wide range of pictures from the good (Six Degrees of Separation, The Russia House, Under Fire), the bad (Papillon, Damnation Alley, Outland), and the ugly (The Swarm, The Boys From Brazil), his work remained consistently intelligent and imaginative. He would win only one Academy Award for his beautifully foreboding chorale score to the dreadful, The Omen (1976), while being nominated a record 18 times. Goldsmith would die in 2004 from colon cancer.

When I spoke to Jerry Goldsmith in 1982 for CJRT-FM's radio show, On the Arts, he had just finished scoring the Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg horror thriller Poltergeist and was in Toronto to speak at a Film Music Symposium. At one point in the interview, we started discussing his thoughts on a variety of pictures and that section is what's included below.