Eastwood Soundtrack selection #3

Eastwood Soundtrack selection #3

Jerry Fielding (born Joshua Itzhak Feldman; June 17, 1922 – February 17, 1980) was an American jazz musician, arranger, band leader, and film composer who emerged in the 1960s. Fielding created boldly diverse and evocative Oscar-nominated scores, primarily for gritty, often brutally savage films in the western and crime action genres, including the Sam Peckinpah movies The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971). 

It was his composing for a contemporary made-for-TV Western, Noon Wine, directed by then-unknown Sam Peckinpah, that led to Fielding's breakthrough score for Peckinpah's first critical and box-office hit, The Wild Bunch (1969) as well as a volatile but ultimately fruitful collaboration between the two men. A neo-noir Western with a wordless, staggeringly violent final shootout still imitated to this day, The Wild Bunch's quartet of taciturn, bitter gunmen, led by William Holden, are given power and voice largely through Fielding's brilliant score. The soundtrack brought his first nomination for an Oscar for Best Dramatic Score.

"The Wild Bunch gave me a chance to illustrate to the public, and the entertainment industry, that if a composer is given real freedom to create, he can produce a score that is unlike any other ever written", Fielding said later.

(Above: The promo CD, Screen Archives Entertainment JFC-1)

The following year, in Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), a troubled production starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Fielding's score was removed from the final picture. It was replaced by music of Quincy Jones, much to Fielding's shock and dismay, an ordeal documented in a short film by his wife, Camille and daughter Elizabeth Fielding in 2007.[citation needed] Peckinpah then asked Fielding to compose alongside songs by Bob Dylan, for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). In Peckinpah's surreal anti-Western, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) Fielding again expresses the despairing subtext and unspoken whimsy of his frequently inchoate collaborator, this time in a film whose exercise in futility seems a personal statement by Peckinpah indeed. "In many ways, Sam doesn't know what the hell he's talking about", Fielding said of the director, whom he considered a close friend. "In other ways, he's a fantastically gifted man." Fielding claimed the two used to sort out their differences in fist fights.

(Above: The original Soundtrack LP Warner Bros. BS 2956)

Fielding had fruitful and rather less stressful relationships with two other leading 1970s action directors, Michael Winner and Clint Eastwood. His collaboration with jazz-loving Clint Eastwood began when Eastwood chose Fielding to compose the score to The Outlaw Josey Wales. Fielding, assuming he was scoring a popular young people's Western novel, researched and included Irish folk tunes from the Civil War, creating another newly explored direction for period films and winning his third and final Oscar nomination. On that Oscar night, Fielding was up against Jerry Goldsmith's The Omen, Lalo Schifrin's Voyage of the Damned, and the two final scores by his former hero in 1930s radio, prolific Hitchcock favourite Bernard Herrmann, for Scorsese's Taxi Driver and de Palma's Obsession. Goldsmith would win on the night.

(Above: The Outlaw Josey Wales, Original Warner Bros white label test pressing LP)

In his next two films for Eastwood, Fielding employed urban scores featuring living jazz musicians for The Enforcer (1976) and The Gauntlet (1977). He rounded off his career with Clint on Escape from Alcatraz (1979). 

Fielding died far too early at the age of 57, from a heart attack followed by congestive heart failure. He was in Toronto where he was scoring the motion picture Funeral Home (also known as Cries In The Night). He is interred in Crypt 30 at Glen Haven Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

I’ve selected a track here from The Outlaw Josey Wales - a firm favourite among Eastwood fans. The original soundtrack received an LP release on Warner Bros Records (Warner Bros. BS 2956) in 1976. Consisting of some 36 minutes, the album was painfully short. In 1994, a quite wonderful promo appeared on CD (Screen Archives Entertainment JFC-1) which ran for a much more satisfying 58 minutes and in pristine quality. Yet, still there has been no official / commercial release of this version - which is truly a travesty. The promo release (as a result) remains a very expensive collectors piece.

On the subject of collector’s pieces, some years ago I was very fortunate to acquire a very rare white label Warner Brothers test pressing on vinyl. Usually pressed in a very limited quantity for ‘in house’ quality check purposes, the album remains a treasured piece in the collection and sits very comfortably next to a Lalo Schifrin Kelly’s Heroes white Label test pressing LP. They don’t come along too often, but when they do surface - they are certainly worth fighting for. 

Jerry Fielding The Outlaw Josey Wales Main Title