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Multimedia Review
In 1967, Jerry Goldsmith remarked that "The whole style of film-making has changed," and that for scoring a picture, "the idea is not to bombard the audiences and beat them down with sound, not to fill the screen with as much music as there is picture. Composers have learned to save it for the right moments and make them count." 1Coming the year after the release of Seconds, his second collaboration with director John Frankenheimer, these words sum up much of Goldsmith's work in the 1960s.
For the epic war film The Sand Pebbles (dir. Robert Wise, 1966), Goldsmith wrote just over an hour of music for a film lasting over three. And for Frankenheimer's Seconds, a film lasting 107 minutes, Goldsmith scored less than twenty-five minutes of music. Thus, when Goldsmith's music is used in film, it is always to great effect. This is what makes his score for Seconds remarkable and positions it with his other landmark scores of the 1960s, including Freud (dir. John Huston, 1962), The Blue Max (dir. John Guillermin, 1966), and Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin Schaffner, 1968). Unlike in his scores for Freud and Planets, Goldsmith did not employ serialist techniques in Seconds, but the music is no less evocative. Here, Goldsmith swings between gothic horror and soft longing, matching the emotions of the lead character who faces a life of suburban banality before undergoing a Frankenstein-like rebirth (complete with a new identity) only to find that nothing has truly changed within him.
For his score, Goldsmith relies mostly on a string orchestra supplemented with harp, piano, and pipe organ. The organ is featured mostly in the first half of the film, prior to the protagonist's transformation from Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) to Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). The organ builds the sense of gothic horror as Hamilton is faced with troubling phone calls, clandestine meetings, and being led through a literal slaughterhouse before arriving at...