A review by JAMES SOUTHALL

Hour of the Gun was the legendary John Sturges's 1967 telling of the old Wyatt Earp / Doc Holliday story, featuring James Garner and Jason Robards in the lead roles, though this time instead of culminating in the gunfight at the OK Corrall, the film opened with it and then concentrated on the events which followed.  The film was released ten years after a rather more obscure western, Black Patch, remembered today for only one thing - being the first movie scored by a certain Jerry Goldsmith.  Westerns were already beginning to die out at the time, though Goldsmith found a fair few to score during his early years as a composer for films, eschewing both the thigh-slapping, singalong style employed by Dimitri Tiomkin and generally the wide-open-spaces style of his nearest American contemporary in the genre, Elmer Bernstein.  Goldsmith's western scores were mostly considerably more gritty and, in a way, realistic portrayals of life in the old west, not concerned with over-romanticising the period.

This album's opening theme may be a catchy tune but it is still fundamentally a dark piece, always in a minor key, without a hint of romance.  Goldsmith employs it through the score almost as a binding piece, linking various segments together, taking fragments of it to form his action music (a technique he has employed throughout his career), which reaches its peak in the terrific "Ambush", the album's standout cue, offering a great contrast in styles between the main theme and some harsh, uncompromising writing for brass, and this starts a sequence of four terrific pieces.

Second among them is "Whose Cattle?", a piece of remarkably florid detail in the orchestration, with an extended percussion section adding intensity and colour to the furious action music, which contains just a hint of Mexican folk music employed to such great effect by Goldsmith's friend and colleague Alex North in his western scores.  The piece has a moving coda, a sorrowful and mournful string figure that is brief, but highly memorable.  Also memorable is the colourful "Painted Desert" featuring a lovely duet between flute and bassoon before the larger orchestra joins in; it's a remarkably vivid tone poem to the desert, though emphasises its uncompromising nature rather than its beautiful expanse.  "The Search" is quite beautiful (but not romantic), with winds and guitar providing a wistful version of the main theme.

Hour of the Gun is a fine western score; not perhaps one of Goldsmith's very best, but it does feature many of the trademarks that make some of his scores in the genre so outstanding.  For sure, it's a particularly gritty score, but is highly-listenable from start to finish, and Goldsmith's technique of constructing thrilling action music and beautiful pastoral pieces from the same thematic material is as evident as it so often has been.  It was released in the early 1990s by Intrada and was actually (I believe) the first of the composer's westerns to reach CD; with that release long out of print, the 2005 release from Varese Sarabande with identical content (though new packaging and liner notes) is welcome indeed.  

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Tracks

1. The Hour of the Gun (2:42)
2. Main Title (4:55)
3. New Marshall (1:07)
4. Ballot Box (3:42)
5. Ambush (2:14)
6. Whose Cattle? (2:48)
7. The Painted Desert (1:34)
8. The Search (2:50)
9. Doc's Message (4:40)
10. A Friendly Lie (4:23)