ALIEN (1979)
Music composed by Jerry Goldsmith, conducted by Lionel Newman
The National Philharmonic Orchestra

Intrada MAF 7102, 2 Disc Set, TT: 76:54 (Disc 1) / 49:26 (Disc 2), Stereo

A Holy Grail to soundtrack collectors for the past 28 years, Jerry Goldsmith’s complete underscore to the classic ALIEN is finally here thanks to the ever diligent Intrada label.

The score is something of a legend, not just because of its musical quality, but because of how little of it was actually used in the final film. Despite his odd praises of Goldsmith’s efforts today, director Ridley Scott and his influential editor Terry Rawlings took a cold hatchet to the underscore as they were mixing the final cut, eliminating major sections, repositioning cues where they weren’t intended and favoring temp-track filler in key places that had no thematic association with Goldsmith’s work. The result was a directionless patch job that nevertheless worked due to the film itself being strong enough to withstand their tinkering with the non-diegetic aspects. Viewers at the time, of course, had no idea what they were missing.

One of the most lauded of Hollywood film composers, Jerry Goldsmith had already earned nine Oscar nominations by 1979 and one win for his dark-choral masterwork THE OMEN (1976). Though he often went on record to say he wasn’t fond of horror films (mainly because he was easily scared by them), Goldsmith had a special knack for the genre as evidenced by his inventively hackle-raising tones for the television shows THE TWILIGHT ZONE and THRILLER, plus the feature films THE MEPHISTO WALTZ, THE OTHER, COMA, PSYCHO II and the aforementioned OMEN and its big-screen sequels. Science fiction was another genre he excelled in, with PLANET OF THE APES (1968), THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, LOGAN’S RUN, CAPRICORN ONE, STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE and TOTAL RECALL among his estimable credits.

A combination of horror and science fiction, the superbly designed ALIEN inspired a key work in Goldsmith’s canon, a dark, modern symphony that evokes the loneliness and cold terror of space travel while serving as a conceptual opposite to his heroically uplifting STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE of the same year. His original Main Title was dropped in the final film, revised to not include the main theme, a melody that is played forlornly at the outset by a solo trumpet. Standing for the Nostromo, a cargo towing vessel in deep space, the motif is sadly romantic and has a nautical ring to it, though it is bereft of any sense of adventure. The music becomes grander as we’re drawn closer to the vessel, only to dissipate once we cut to the interior. Pounding timpani takes us into the bowels of the ship, providing a doom-laden rhythm as the camera traverses a series of empty corridors. A new motif on high winds sounds on top, a two-note pattern that repeats itself and dies out like an aural forecasting of the warning beacon that eventually lures the film’s characters to their deaths.

Though Goldsmith released an LP at the time of the film’s release and included much of the music that Scott and Rawlings deleted from the film, the next track on the CD (Track 2: “Hypersleep”) didn’t make that initial album. A marvelously impressionistic piece, it speeds up the two-note “beacon” motif until the music “blossoms” in almost hushed ecstasy as the petal-like lids of the Hypersleep chamber open up. As the crew stirs out of their cryogenic slumber, the Nostromo theme returns, underlining the crew’s solidarity. Track 3 (“The Landing”) is a dramatic highlight where the melancholic romantic theme forms the basis. Tremolando strings and suspended lines evoke the weightlessness of space in a piece that feels like a slow movement from some lost Vaughan Williams symphony before tense cellos and basses strike the “engine” rhythm from before and the music turns dark and violent as the ship lands in the midst of a storm.

The next section of tracks depict the astronauts’ time on the asteroid and their excursion into a derelict alien spacecraft. It’s a wholly new and altogether chilling soundscape marked by dissonant string clusters (like the multitudinous legs of spiders skittering across metal) and what became known to the filmmakers as the “Alien Sound”—the electronically altered sound of air passing through a conch shell. Inside the alien craft, Goldsmith introduces echoplexed string plucks and percussion hits to evoke a sense of intruding, echoing sound in a vast, lifeless space—it’s a device he used effectively before in PATTON (utilizing trumpets) and PLANET OF THE APES.

The relative quiet of the score’s first half is dramatically contrasted by an increasingly frantic second half as Goldsmith vividly illustrates the astronauts’ various deadly encounters with a hitchhiking, shape-shifting alien monster. Here, the composer pulls out all the stops, treating us to a wild, modernistic musical ride that shares a similar rhythmic barbarity to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Ancient acoustic instruments like the Australian derigidoo and the serpent (a medieval horn that reminded composer David Raksin of “a donkey with emotional problems”) give voice to a creature that is otherwise silent on screen. The juxtaposing of these feral “alien” sounds within the context of a modern symphony orchestra creates a musical portrait of something that is not only evil, but something that is older than any of us can imagine. It’s the kind of music that should some day underscore the works of horror author H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote of the Old Ones, a race of malevolent, gold-like beings, forever waiting on the boundaries of reality to return to this world and destroy us.

After the alien menace is finally vanquished by the last remaining crew member, peace returns to the music, though not without its subtle shades of doubt. The melancholic romance of the Nostromo theme returns for the end credits, giving the score and this album a closure the film did not have after Scott and Rawlings dumped this beautiful, impressionistic ending in favor of a needle drop of Hanson’s Second Symphony.

Fans have been pining for years for a complete ALIEN. One of the DVD releases included an audio channel with Goldsmith’s score isolated, though some of the music was not in the right place and some of it no longer timed out correctly with the picture due to Scott’s last minute re-editing of the film. A bootleg CD was culled from this isolated DVD track and hit the black market some years back, but the sound quality was not very good. An official commercial release was then deemed impossible because of the poor quality of the only known sources—that is, until recently when disc producers Mike Matessino and Nick Redman unearthed a hitherto unknown first-generation master tape that eventually led to this glorious CD from Intrada.

In addition to the complete underscore in chronological order, Intrada offers alternate recordings of cues that Goldsmith made in a last-minute effort to appease his disappointed bosses, including the film version of the Main Title that forsook his romantic theme for some “Alien Planet” atmospherics that Goldsmith later groused took “about five minutes” to write.

If this wasn’t enough, we get a second disc presenting the original 1979 album, which is considerably shorter than the full score, but has tracks arranged differently (in some cases dovetailed) and makes for a somewhat different listening experience—at least it’s the listening experience the composer himself preferred us to have. Following this are a few more odds and ends, including some unused takes and Goldsmith’s arrangement of the film’s one bit of source music, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The sound quality throughout both discs is astonishingly clear and dynamic, rendering any previous CDs and vinyl editions meaningless.

Intrada’s deluxe 2-disc edition of ALIEN is not a limited edition, so it should be on the market for years to come. But, honestly, what film music buff can wait another second for this?

Check it out at www.intrada.com.

– Bill Cooke

You can contact Bill Cooke online at williamtcooke@yahoo.com. If you are a disc producer and would like your CD reviewed by Shameful Cinema, send review material to Bill Cooke c/o Shameful Cinema, 3007 Columbia Ave., Columbia, SC, 29201.