: (John Williams) Extraordinary talent
from across Hollywood was assembled to produce the immense visual and
sound effects for the 1974 disaster spectacle
. Coming
at the height of the public's interest in such displays of civil
destruction, the movie featured an ensemble cast that is shown in all
their usual states of societal disarray in Los Angeles when a
(technically impossible) 9.9 earthquake absolutely levels the city and
kills much of the cast. Charlton Heston is the lucky lead, comfortable
in his "when everything goes wrong with the world" mode but whose
character is also allowed to fornicate with a younger woman not his
hysterical wife. Most of the characters in the movie have uncomfortable
faults as annoying as those in the earth itself, which is why you can't
blame people for hoping the planet kills as many of these nincompoops as
possible. The massive audiences that made
an immense
success were not as interested in those sideshow stories; they wanted
devastation, and the film did not disappoint. It was long heralded for
its fantastic visual effects for the era, augmented by the use of
"Sensurround" subwoofers that made theatres feel like they were shaking
during the various earthquake scenes. Unfortunately, despite the
positive reviews for "Sensurround," the feature proved too expensive for
most theatres to physically install, and the effects didn't amuse people
trying to watch
in adjoining showings. The
concentration on tiresome character stories was typical for all of these
visual effects-laden films in the 1970's, and that strategy strongly
influenced John Williams' score for the picture. The composer was the
easy and logical choice for
because of his ongoing
collaboration with the studio and director at the time, not to mention
his reputation as a disaster topic specialist between 1972 and 1975. Of
all these assignments, though, this one is impacted the least by its
Williams score because of the understandable choice to allow the
Sensurround element to thrive in the mix with traditional sound effects
during all the shaking scenes. That decision left the music to fill the
main titles and character and suspense scenes primarily, with only a
small handful of action cues applied to late scenes as people audiences
might care about get swept to their untimely deaths. These spotting
decisions also forced Williams to create a very different album
arrangement for the score.
To a degree, the basic ingredients of the score for
Earthquake are identical to those of the immediately succeeding
The Towering Inferno, the orchestrations also largely the same. A
roughly 60-member orchestra is augmented by the composer's usual pop
ensemble that lends similar contemporary tones to both
The Towering
Inferno and
The Eiger Sanction amongst the more stoic
orchestral elements. While Williams suggests early on that woodwinds may
be a representation of the shifting earth itself, he never really runs
with that idea after teasing it with the help of some electronic effects
in "A Crack in the Dam." Instead, that effect extends to "Jammed Door
and the Death of Jody" in largely a simple reprise. Meanwhile the
societal depravity is given a rambling piano motif in the bass along
with almost primal percussion in "Refugees and Looters" and a few
moments thereafter. The duo of "The Tunnel" and "Washed Away" is
orchestrally underwhelming, though the latter does intelligently convey
the two most major themes in the work. Williams' choice to divide out
the thematic attributions in
Earthquake between the various
character sets was a major error that causes the score lose all
cohesion. It's a score that really demanded one overarching identity
that could be applied for both the illustrious early scenes of bustling
city life and later the deconstructed adversity to follow. Williams does
actually write such a theme and convey it prominently over "Main Title."
It's a fairly decent Williams idea, one that would in its first half
experience an adaptation into
The Towering Inferno and, in its
final bars, strongly suggest the composer's Krypton theme for
Superman. He explicitly meant for this idea to represent Los
Angeles, but it largely disappears after its primary statement up front,
only tangentially occupying a scant number of cues before the finale. It
offers structural hints to "Motordrome/Miles on Wheels," "Aftermath"
(very barely on chimes), and with fragmented panic in "Washed Away." The
idea is also only barely touched upon in "Earthquake - End Titles,"
stewing at the outset of that cue but then developing into a somewhat
differently harmonized set of similar progressions, suggesting the
transformation of the city. When Williams went back to rearrange his
score for the album release, he greatly expanded the scope of this main
theme, turning it into an elegant piano-led piece in "City Theme" and
including a rejected version of the closing cue as "The City Sleeps"
while also conveying the more mysterious take on the same idea in
"Finale, End Title."
The most prominent secondary identity in
Earthquake exists as the love theme for Heston's lead and his
mistress. This idea is a standard, flowery romantic expression for
Williams during this era, rather light on substance but nevertheless
quite pleasant. In the score proper, it's mostly confined to "Stewart
and Denise (Love Scene)" and then supplied one moment of fateful
realization near the start of "Washed Away" when death quickly ends that
affair. This idea is given its own concert arrangement as "Love Theme"
for the album, though it's largely redundant with "Love Scene." The
other motifs that Williams self-identifies as "themes" are one-off ideas
tracked into scenes with certain characters as appropriate. The
motorcycle storyline is summarized in "Miles on Wheels" in the film and
on album, and the two renditions are significantly different, the album
version infusing the main theme impressively into the action. Beware the
wretched 1970's stylings in both, however. With a touch of Latin flare
is the effortless keyboard over shaker and bass in "Something for Rosa,"
and this instance is a rare one in which the film version has more
instrumental spirit than the album rearrangement. Tacking off in the
1950's Henry Mancini direction is the theme for the lead's hapless wife
in "Lunch with Remy," a flugelhorn taking the performance with piano in
the much different "Something for Remy" version for the album. More
coherent in the score is the dark motif established for the troubled
national guard character in "Jody's Trophies," electric harpsichord
performing a simple, menacingly ascending motif over the tribal
percussion for society's demise. This motif recurs in "Jody Loses
Control" and "Jammed Door and the Death of Jody" to wrap up that
character arc with a nearly Western-like flavor. All these motifs,
however, never come together to form an adequate narrative in
Earthquake, the film version of the score completely aimless. By
expanding the main city theme and love theme for the album recording,
the work sounds far more cohesive than it actually was in the picture.
The album version had been available for decades in a few variants that
included degrees of sound effects and sometimes omitted "Something for
Remy" to feature even more such effects. The effects aren't anything
special nowadays given their archival sound, but they are somewhat cool
in "Main Title." The outstanding 2019 expansion on album by La-La Land
Records fits both the film and album versions on one CD with three
alternate takes at the end, including a true stereo mix of the film's
"Main Title" whereas the rest of that presentation is mono-derived.
After the shaking stopped, the album version of
Earthquake
remained much superior to the thematically wayward version heard in the
film.
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- Music as Written for the Film: **
- Music as Heard on Album: ***
- Overall: **
| Bias Check: |
For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.68
(in 91 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.54
(in 363,716 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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