Some film composers' careers go through real slumps when they get typecast in a certain genre - like Elmer Bernstein, who for a time was forced to score ever more dreary raucous comedies after the success of Animal House and Airplane - or more recently Cliff Eidelman, who found himself scoring one tender family drama after another until even they dried up - but Basil Poledouris was fortunate enough to get typecast into scoring historical epics, surely the most fertile ground on which the film composer can walk.  Precious few are made these days, and so for a composer to get to score as many as Poledouris did in the mid-1980s was quite something.  And he rarely disappointed - the most notable success was probably Conan the Barbarian, but Flesh + Blood, Paul Verhoeven's debut American feature, must come close.

The whole score is very striking, but the main theme that opens it is a clear highlight.  Portentous and booming, it sets the stage for the thrilling ride that is to come.  Poledouris tries to echo Miklos Rozsa's approach to such films as Ivanhoe and Knights of the Round Table, and amazingly enough his music is barely behind the all-time-master of this sort of thing.  While the score is dominated by thunderous action music, there is inevitably romantic material here and there - perhaps my favourite example being the beautiful "Martin and Agnes Love Theme" (though it does seem to have a - presumably unintentional? - similarity to Nino Rota's legendary Romeo and Juliet theme).

The score has a slightly odd history in terms of albums in that it has been released by both of the major "CD Clubs" issuing modern-day material, namely Varese Sarabande's and Prometheus's.  Varese released about 40 minutes of it back in 1992 and ten years later, Prometheus added half an hour and issued it again.  The problem with the latter is that, while the extra material is good, it is presented as ten bonus tracks (no doubt for the same MGM contractual reasons that made the recent James Bond score issues so disappointing) which makes this an exceptionally difficult album to listen to as presented.  It desperately needs resequencing, but I'm not a record producer so I don't know how best to do it.  Perhaps someone could tell me!?

Despite that, though, even if you only listen to the first 40 minutes of the album (ie the original sequence), you're in for an absolute treat.

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