While one could hope that there would be crossover in
melodic structure between the Sondheim songs, one of which won an
Academy Award with Madonna's help, and Elfman's score in
Dick
Tracy, no such coordination was realized. The five Sondheim songs
are decent and certainly rooted in the swing of the era, but they are
not among the composer's best by any measure. More importantly, they
really differ from two of the three functional modes of Elfman's score,
so you sometimes have immediate discord between elegant crooning of
vintage Sondheim and knock-off
Batman music from Elfman. Add to
this problem the fact that no adequate soundtrack album has ever
attempted to combine these disparate parts into one proper presentation
and you have a total mess of a soundtrack. In the evolution of Elfman's
superhero themes,
Dick Tracy ended up being the odd man out,
never quite fitting into the rest of the composer's developing career
like his better known efforts. Elfman's approach to
Dick Tracy
was different from that of
Batman because it is evident from the
start that he realized the need to inject some character and life into
the otherwise restless macho vehicle for Beatty. He did his best to whip
up a frenzy of stomping, heroic pomp laced with occasional swinging,
jazzy rhythms, deferring when possible to an earnest effort to raise
George Gershwin from the dead for his bloated, melodramatic theme of
romance. In part because of Elfman's role as a bridge to connect the
songs, and in part because of the manic editing of the movie, the music
for
Dick Tracy operates at a slapstick, cartoonish speed and,
without the accompaniment of the film, it becomes a collection of cues
that are only loosely held together by Elfman's general style of writing
at the time. That style borrows heavily from
Batman and
Darkman, attempting at every turn to balance the tragedy of those
other figures with the flightier needs of
Dick Tracy. To that
end, a certain amount of
Pee-Wee mayhem is to be heard. But with
such a schizophrenic score as this one, you can go from the swinging,
explosive energy of "Crime Spree" to the tragic
Darkman motifs of
"Slimy D.A." at any moment. The remainder of the score, with some nudges
from Shirley Walker, sounds like leftovers from
Batman. With
Dick Tracy, you never know what you're going to get next, and it
is that lack of cohesive identity, despite some solid material from
Sondheim and promising raw ideas from Elfman, that ultimately restrains
the soundtrack as a standalone listening experience.
The strangest aspect of
Dick Tracy is its
inability to establish the film as one of major crime. Elfman relies
instead on a few select, wacky character cues of off-the-wall spirit
and, of course, the occasionally overblown string themes of romance.
Those efforts allow Elfman to achieve a film noir effect in the score,
but many of his ideas along those lines are interrupted by the
composer's second, more chaotic action stance. The main theme that
Elfman assigns to Dick Tracy is pompous, extravagant, and sometimes
downright annoying in its tendency to begin its progression but never
finish it and leave you hanging. (This is another technique at which
Elfman succeeded better in
Batman.) The softer interludes and
self-contained ideas composed for the two female characters are much
more interesting, and they easily develop the heart that Tracy's
character never realizes. The slurring of ascending notes in a lush
string ensemble is definitely a "tip of the hat," as Elfman calls it, to
Gershwin's vintage style of the story's era. Tess's Theme is a lovely
one in many ways, intentionally overwrought compared to the theme for
Madonna's Breathless character, which Elfman carefully leaves
inconspicuous as means of tying it to the story's villains. The
Breathless theme doesn't hold a candle to the Tess theme of Gershwin
inspiration, though the score is so disjointed in construct that you
might not even know than an intentional dichotomy existed there.
Elfman's two most zany compositions, "Crime Spree" and "Kid Montage,"
were dropped in the edit in favor of Sondheim music. The former is one
of Elfman's most original compositions and has inspired a few
interesting re-recordings on compilations. The delightful fun exhibited
in this cue proves that Elfman could have really generated a storm of
vivacity to help move this score at a great tempo had the opportunity
presented itself. Unfortunately, most of this discussion is moot when
considering the score's terrible editing in the film itself and the
non-existent satisfactory soundtrack album. The on-screen failure is due
to Beatty's meddling (Elfman called this project an "insane"
experience), whereas the album situation is a rights and ownership
conundrum. No album has ever presented all the Sondheim songs together,
Madonna releasing three of them and the other two stuck in limbo. A
song-only soundtrack album contained none of them or the score. The
original score-only product was a decent summary of the longer cues, but
any score-only product for this film is destined to fail. Intrada
Records extended the score-only agony to two CDs on a limited 2016 set
that includes the many of the endless alternate takes. Even if a
mythical, totally complete song and score album someday existed for this
film, don't expect it to convince all collectors of Elfman or Sondheim
of its merits.
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