Lalo Schifrin’s crossover to synth-pop was up-front and centre in Sudden Impact (1983), but the composer’s final Dirty Harry score is an oddly mellow, if not a smooth elegy for what Schifrin and Eastwood knew would be the last adventure of Detective Harry Callahan on the big screen.

Schifrin gives special focuses to the quiet lament that closed the first film – that soft keyboard piece where Callahan stood by a small pond and tossed his badge into a watery oblivion – and its prominence in The Dead Pool (1988) is perhaps a sub-textural effort by Schifrin to signal Harry’s imminent resignation from the world, as though the decades have finally exhausted this rogue cop, and his final menacing case will be the last straw before his big film exit.

Schifrin’s use of brass in the CD’s opening track, “San Francisco Night,” is strikingly plaintive, particularly in the second refrain, where a pair of trumpets plays the first bars in a pinched, almost traumatic fashion, rising to sharp peaks. The effect is a blend of smooth tones over-cut by sharp, sometimes sterile notes, and the impression is of a tired figure surrounded by the gloss and coldness of a fancy yet cruel city that’s carved many hard lines in Harry’s face – probably the reason Schifrin used same arrangement to close the film in “The Pier, the Bridge, and the City.”

The film’s “Main Title,” however, starts off as another synth-pop fusion, and while it’s heavily infused with keyboard emulations that are pretty goofy today – Schifrin emphasizes a cyclical pattern of fuzzy notes to mimic a computer’s thought patterns – it’s also evocative of the small robotic car the film’s killer uses to torment Harry in one sequence. After some synth flourishes that include whooshing noises (distracting, but not as silly as the squeaky toy racket in Laurence Rosenthal’s Logan’s Run TV series theme), much like in Sudden Impact, the score settles into a more refined orchestral design, with slight nods to the urban jazz sound of the seventies through synthetic filters.

The message for those who haven’t seen The Dead Pool and are wary of an all-out synth-pop score is: relax. This score is very safe and worth snapping up, because there are some wonderful, tightly written suspense cues amid source cuts and a surprisingly low count of action cuts.

The album features around 40 mins. of music – the whole score – and as producer Nick Redman explains in the liner notes, it’s a sparse score with short cues that had to be edited into chronological suites.

As with Schifrin’s best works, it’s the nuances he applies which remind one of his expertise in crafting tense music using a minimum of instruments. “The Pool,” for example is primarily a cyclical piano motif with chord shifts tied to eerie strings that swirl and eddy, and Schifrin’s construction of his ‘Swann theme’ also seems to be a veiled tribute to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho (1960) theme, with the piano evoking the Herrmann’s furious string bass, and strings playing within similar harmonic parameters. The cue finishes off with a gliding note from a waterphone, squealing and withering away before a shift to a punchy percussive segment with drums, electric guitar, and support from muted brass and strings. Schifrin doesn’t go all-synth at any point in the score, though; he recognizes specific moods come from a deeper concentration on orchestral, synths, or rock-styled percussion.

Simple motifs – solo harp in “High and Dry” – imply a twisted mental (internal) condition, whereas the addition of various strings infers a malevolent plan at work, and a threat to a character’s personal security. The layering in of rock elements is Schifrin’s substitute for the urban jazz combos of the early seventies, and it’s equally effective in propelling a scene using a hard rhythm and sharply rendered notes (like an electric guitar subbing in for banks of brass) that accent danger or near-death twists and turns during a chase or stalking sequence.

The rock-synth tenor of “Something in Return,” with its Asian melody is a good example of tension scored with a contemporary sound, and it’s arguably no different than the rock-jazz sound conceived by Schifrin for some of Enter the Dragon’s action/combat sequences; the question is basically whether Schifrin’s fans appreciate this stylistic upgrade. Even mellow cues like “The Rules,” with it electric guitar and soprano sax intro, is very eighties, but it works as an upbeat lead-in to the solo piano version that comprises most of the cue.

Early into “Harpoon,” Schifrin also quotes thematic bits from the first Dirty Harry – the two-note bass motif and descending notes keyboard – but they’re more perfunctory and brief. Also different are the source cues that vary from synth pop (the middle section of “The Car”) to easy jazz (“Something in Return”), but they don’t disrupt the score’s narrative, nor Schifrin’s sharp orchestral and percussive rock versions of the Swann theme (heard in final third of “The Car”).

Even though one may wish each instalment would contain meaty chunks of the vintage urban style from Dirty Harry, the trade-off is hearing how the themes, like the character, has evolved through the years, and how Schifrin himself started to embrace new sounds. Dead Pool has a slight thriller/suspense edge because by 1988, the composer had a keen interest in string textures, particularly the colours created by contrasting layers of low and high notes, and an emphasis on gliding tones. It’s what makes The Amityville Horror (1978) such a fine score, as well The Fourth Protocol (1987), and the giddy Abominable (2006).

Aleph’s CD is a fine mastering of the close-miked score, and the cue edits and use of brief pauses soften the transition between some of Schifrin’s shorter cuts. Redman’s notes don’t really get into the score’s design in great detail, and his emphasis is on contextualizing the score and film within the series.

With The Dead Pool finally out on CD, the musical saga of Dirty Harry Callaghan is finally complete. May Dirty Harry rest in peace.

© 2009 Mark R. Hasan