I haven’t seen it in a while, but when I was younger I loved this film, which was a staple of late night and weekend television. The climactic scene, when the Allied soldiers blow up their own fuel depot to halt the German tank advance, was sensational, and I have no doubt that the film owed much of its vividness to Benjamin Frankel’s spectacular music. If there’s a better example of classic war movie scoring, I’m not aware of it. I’d personally rank this above Malcolm Arnold’s Bridge on the River Kwai, and if you like that brilliant piece of work, then you’ll love this. Frankel’s music has an intensity, angularity, and contrapuntal brilliance that permit it to stand alone with total success. The very nature of the film, with its extended battle sequences, encouraged the composer to write large stretches of continuous music. The symphonic accompaniment to the final battle, for example, plays for nearly seven minutes and is almost a tone poem on its own. At the same time, Frankel never over-reaches. He completely avoids the temptation to descend into bombast, and though there’s plenty of snare drumming and marching about, you can always count on him to provide a kink in the melody, the harmony, or the instrumentation–something that lifts the music well above the routine. Werner Albert leads a brilliant performance of this important score, which hopefully won’t be CPO’s only dip into the vast legacy of film music that Frankel left us. An essential purchase for film buffs everywhere! [8/2/2000]
