INTRADA Announces:
THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE BELL/A STEP OUT OF LINE
Composed and Conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH
INTRADA Special Collection Volume 145
The early 1970s were a mini-Renaissance for made-for-television movies, a format that had been developed in the early 1960s. Cinema Center 100 Productions made an early sortie into the made-for-television movie boom, with nine films produced, including the two represented here, The Brotherhood of the Bell in 1970 and A Step Out of Line in 1971. For Jerry Goldsmith, the renaissance of the made-for-television movie happily coincided with a downturn in theatrical film offers after the epochal debut of Isaac Hayes’s Oscar-winning score to Shaft in 1971.
The Brotherhood of the Bell was composed during one of the most fascinating creative periods of Jerry Goldsmith’s career—perhaps the height of his modernistic and experimental impulses. Goldsmith’s score makes heavy use of the jazz idiom, with a plucked double bass line propelling many of its passages. But he combines this with classical baroque stylings to conjure up multiple associations: religion and ritual, antiquity, class and sophistication, frustration and fear. Goldsmith uses what sounds like rapped knuckles, fingernails and drumsticks on a cymbal to evoke the Bell itself, while his astringent, clustered writing for strings, full of dizzying portamenti and rattling aleatoric effects both bowed and plucked, suggest the diabolical power of the Brotherhood and Patterson’s fury and frustration as his life is unraveled.
The Brotherhood of the Bell tells the story of a successful professor whose membership in a secretive college fraternity resurfaces and nearly destroys his life. Glenn Ford plays Dr. Andrew Patterson, who is recalled to the Brotherhood to sponsor a new initiate (Richard Pine). But Patterson discovers he’s been called in to take an “assignment” from the Brotherhood—to blackmail an associate who in turn commits suicide. Patterson decides to expose the Brotherhood—but as he begins his one-man campaign he discovers that the organization’s reach and power extends much farther than he had realized.
In A Step Out of Line, Peter Falk, Vic Morrow and Peter Lawford play three middle-aged friends in San Francisco who fall on hard times and engineer a robbery that they hope will net each of them $200,000. A Step Out of Line builds up to a nail-biting bank robbery sequence that plays out in minute, excruciating detail. Much of the music for A Step Out of Line has a Dave Brubeck-style jazz element, supplemented by striking suspense motifs which add tension to the already taut scenes of the robbery set-up and execution.
But Goldsmith’s main theme, bursting forth after a few moments of nerve-wracking, scatter-shot percussion during the film’s “Main Title,” tells us that A Step Out of Line is really about a masculine, all-American tragedy. A Step Out of Line is filled with evocative and sometimes hair-raising percussive and textural effects teased out of the small orchestra of brass, woodwinds, strings and percussion as well as electric harpsichord, electric guitar and electric flute, and piano.
This release is limited to 2500 units and is taken from the 15 ips mono elements that were in excellent condition, now allowing listeners to enjoy two important works from Goldsmith's 70s output.
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 145
Retail Price: $19.99
AVAILABLE NOW
For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.6741/.f
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