Under Jerry Goldsmith's baton, Alex North's soundtrack for Carol Reed's 1965 film about the life and artistic conflicts of Michelangelo gets a second wind. North's epic sweep and his mixture of Renaissance musical forms, somber religious chords, plainsong melody, and march beats congeal into a symphonic grandeur faithful to the film's equally larger-than-life subject matter--inspiration's heavenly ...
As Hollywood's only true expert in Mexican music, Alex North was the only credible choice to score Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952). North absorbed the country's musical culture in 1939, when he worked as a member of the Anna Sokolow dance company and as a student of Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940). Zapata! shimmers with invention, though always in ways tied closely to ...
Jerry Goldsmith's landmark score for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) is a true science-fiction classic. The film, which put both Scott and actress Sigourney Weaver on the map, concerns the crew of the spacecraft Nostromo, which brings an alien being on board--only to discover that the species' response to other forms of life is unrelenting murder. Much of Goldsmith's score was reworked through ...