long with significant social and political turmoil, the 1960s also offered stunning scientific and technological achievements. Composer Leonard Rosenman's well-regarded score to the classic science-fiction adventure Fantastic Voyage exemplifies one of the more astute methods Hollywood filmmakers used to suggest the decade's developments and turbulence. Film Score Monthly magazine, through its "Silver Age Classics" CD series, recently issued a disc devoted to the inventive music heard in the movie, offering listeners an opportunity to experience the ingenuity and brilliance of this previously unreleased soundtrack.
In crafting the tale—which concerns a team of medical technicians reduced to microscopic size and inserted, within a tiny submarine, into the bloodstream of a dying scientist—director Richard Fleischer eschewed all harmonic accompaniment during the early scenes. The opening credit sequence consequently does not feature a traditional musical overture; instead, as heard on the CD's initial selection, "Main Title Sound Effects Suite," noises including a heartbeat, a ticking teletype machine and weird, echoic pings are highlighted.
Rosenman's melodies debut only after the Proteus sub is injected into the ailing scientist. At that point, selections such as "The Proteus," "Pulmonary Artery," "Pleural Cavity" and "Proteus in Inner Ear" present various incarnations of the movie's main motif, an engaging, four-note theme that nicely augments the picture's audacious atmosphere. At the same time, cues like "Group Leaves" and "Cora Trapped" incorporate flowing strings and strong percussion to emphasize the dangers posed by antibodies in the blood, while "The Human Brain" showcases, in part, contemplative violins and woodwinds. The album is complemented by a 16-page booklet which provides extensive information about the production and a track-by-track analysis of the score.
Creative Cold War compositions
More than three decades after its debut, Fantastic Voyage remains a fascinating motion picture. Created at the height of the Cold War, the film takes the accouterments of the era's high-tech outer-space race—complete with fears of saboteurs and unknown alien dangers—and places them within the human body. Rosenman's accompaniment to this "inner-space" adventure marvelously reflects the confusion of the times, combining atonal unease with familiar orchestral sounds to produce, as the composer writes in a brief preface to the liner notes, an "inside the vein symphony" that was truly "revolutionary for a 1966 film."
"Proteus Moving Through Sac" is wonderfully striking and sinister, employing silky strings, soft horns and mellow bells to generate a cautious yet wondrous air before plucked violins and ominous bass (signaling the dangerous pleural sac fibers) impart an agitated, menacing tone. This atmosphere is charged even further when nervous woodwinds emerge, indicating the arrival of hungry—and deadly—antibodies. "Get the Laser" is equally vibrant, utilizing piano, rousing brass and quivering strings to embellish the simultaneous struggles taking place aboard the Proteus and
within the body of the dying scientist.
Due to the truncated use of music in the film, the total running time of the disc is understandably short. Perhaps owing to this abbreviation, there is little "fluff": Nearly all of the 13 cues are thoroughly forceful and effective. Rosenman's Fantastic Voyage compositions may not be the most famous SF movie themes of the 1960s—the scores for Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey likely vie for that honor—but they are superbly successful at evoking both the excitement of the story and, on a far more subtle level, the uneasy sentiments of an era filled with wondrous hopes and perilous hazards.
