Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, 1990’s Memphis Belle tells the story of the 25th and final mission flown by the American bomber of the same name during the second world war. Starring Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz and Harry Connick, Jr., the film attracted only middling reviews and didn’t do much business – it seems largely forgotten today.
What should never be forgotten is George Fenton’s wonderful score, one of his finest and most stirring. It is all about one theme – a multifaceted piece which dominates the whole score and reaches its apotheosis in “The Final Mission”, which is one of the most extraordinary pieces of film music I’ve ever heard.
Fervently exciting, the piece soars to ever-greater heights as Fenton crams an extraordinary dramatic journey of thrills, patriotism, danger, devastation and everything else you could think of into four minutes. It is just unbelievably good: emotion seeping from its every pore, I call it a “theme” but in fact it contains so many distinct melodic fragments, each of which sticks in the memory for a long time after it finishes.
The bulk of the relatively brief score is built from those fragments – the elegy near the end of the opening piece, the agony of “With Deep Regret…”, the bleak emotion of “The Bomb Run”, the sense of pride in “Limping Home”, the rare restraint of the touching “Resolution” – it may not be very long, but the composer makes every moment count.
Amongst this Fenton offers interpolations of the Londonderry Air in both the opening and (exceptional) end title pieces and most stirringly in “Crippled Belle: The Landing” (and it appears in its more familiar vocal form, “Danny Boy”, at the end of the album) as well as “Amazing Grace” in “Prepare for Takeoff”, each of which is seamlessly blended with his own music in highly elegant fashion.
At the time he scored this, Fenton was known for his elegant and frequently understated music for period drama in particular, and later in his career of course he left an indelible mark on nature documentaries – his opportunities to flex his muscles with this sort of grand action/adventure music were relatively sparse – and if truth be told, not many films could sustain music as big as Memphis Belle – but here he found an opportunity to remove all shackles and push everything as far as it could be pushed. If the rest of the score doesn’t quite live up to “The Final Mission”, this is only because really, nothing ever could – it’s a remarkable piece of work, deservedly one of the great composer’s most popular.
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