Intrada Soundtrack Forum

INTRADA Announces:



OUR MAN FLINT/IN LIKE FLINT
Composed and Conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 294

The 1960s “spy craze” was more of an explosion -- once James Bond became a phenomenon, movie and TV producers went after everything that remotely resembled an espionage adventure. Composer Jerry Goldsmith played his part with the two-film Derek Flint series Our Man Flint and In Like Flint, combining his own rhythmically driven, cutting-edge action score riffs with performances by a super team of session musicians. The sounds, the colors, the tunes, the excitement…all were dynamically re-recorded by Goldsmith in vibrant stereo for the 20th Century-Fox label back in 1966 and 1967 respectively. The importance of the original albums for Our Man Flint and In Like Flint is difficult to overemphasize. Both albums found the composer soaring with a vernacular previously unheard, a propulsive display of global action, romance, infectious melody, nefarious happenings and super-agent heroics in kind…from the blasts of alto and tenor sax to the ringing of organ and echoing solovox, from the melodious touch of accordion to the power of a full orchestra, Jerry Goldsmith went where no composer had gone before. And enhancing both albums were now iconic covers sporting terrific Bob Peak artwork.

Both of these scores have been mastered from the original elements prepared by the composer and his engineers back in the days, recorded directly onto ½” three-channel tape and mixed directly from those session tapes to create the final stereo record masters. These original master tapes, vaulted by UMG, have survived in beautiful condition and afford today’s listeners with modest improvements in the stereo imaging, especially in the center-channel information.

In Our Man Flint, when a madman named Malcolm Rodney (Edward Mulhare) threatens the planet with devastating weather phenomena from a secret island base, Flint infiltrates the villain’s island after a series of international adventures, Flint rescues his own foursome of gorgeous mistresses and a bevy of similarly brainwashed female victims from a futuristic, hedonistic, secret society cooked up by Rodney and a group of scientists determined to save humanity from itself. In his second outing in In Like Flint, Flint faces the most terrifying threat of all—an army of women determined to take over the world, starting with the replacement of the President (Andrew Duggan) with an impostor.

INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 294
Retail Price: $19.99
Available NOW
For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.9141/.f

Oh yes, at long last! Thank you Doug & Co. I can still remember buying the LP of In Like Flint. I'd just seen the film, & on the first Saturday after, I popped into HMV Oxford Street to buy the Our Man Flint LP (I wanted the Flint theme), well they didn't have it, but they had, In Like Flint (on the EMI Stateside label, mono), & I fell in love with it from the first needle drop (I managed to buy Our Man Flint s/hand a short time later, again mono). Go forward many years, CD arrived, & my LP's were just about unplayable by then. Then in the late eighties Silva Screen re-released the four Fox Goldsmith LP's, The Sand Pebbles, Patton & a Flint two-fer, LP's & cassettes with CD's to follow, but as you know, the CD's never happened (I did phone Silva Screen a few times to ask about it, & may well have spoken to James Fitz.), but at least I had the LP's in stereo! Fast forward a number of years, & Intrada starts to release albums from the UMG catalogue (I think it started with David Shire's The Hindenburg), & I'm thinking, oh yes, here come the Flints, but no...but some fantastic LP's released on CD (I have quite a few of them). It sounds like it was a case of missing tapes, but here they come. I'm going to enjoy the hell out of this CD...& not forgetting: thank you Jerry Goldsmith.

Hah!
Ordered!
The unmentionable which contained VON RYAN'S EXPRESS, also legitimately released by Intrada, can finally be put to rest!

The Varese original score recordings CD release was only highlights?
I hope you guys are working on correcting, remastering and re-releasing that oversight was well.

The thing is, hasn't Mike Mattessino already performed te restoration on the complete score for the isolated Twilight Time Blu-Ray track? So all Varese has to do is put that out on CD for us all, hopefully with some nice liner notes. Same with The Other. It just mystifies me why they're dragging their feet when they have perpetuity rights and the restorations are already done!

Yavar

In all fairness, Varese has stuck to its main business model of acquiring many new scores to release, so at least Townson is not completely stagnant in his efforts.

As for the older stuff that most of us love so much, I've mellowed on the issue as there are dozens of releases a year from the other labels that interest me, including great premieres, restorations, expansions and sensible straight reissues.

I, and I'm sure a number of other soundtrack enthusiasts, can barely keep up with it all as it is. Perhaps that's what Townson sees that has slowed down the older soundtrack releases from his label while thousands of unsold CDs sit around in perpetuity.

Our Man Flint was the first LP I plunked down significant money for in a used record some time around 1981. Never even knew there was a soundtrack album - I didn't start collecting until the mid 70's, and didn't even know there was a secondary market until around 1980. Boy was I shocked when I saw it displayed prominently in the store. (I think I paid around $30 bucks for it, which was astronomical to my young mind.)

Flint was my favorite of the super-spies (and with the name Sean growing up in the 60's and 70's, super-spies were de rigeur), and the Flint theme was one of the first non-song themes I knew by heart.

So, um, ordered as they say.

And now to pick a nit - the description of Our Man Flint has promoted Malcolm Rodney from a third-in-command henchman to the mastermind. This revisionist take on the misguided but well-meaning fascism of Galaxy's team of international scientists can not stand!

Thank you Intrada folk for more wonderful Goldsmith. These perfect albums are such a fun listen and are genuinely 60s cool. The In Like Flint theme remains one of the composer's most infectious themes. Well done all concerned.

_________________
Jason Needs
Webmaster, Jerry Goldsmith Online

Wow, six days to the UK, that was fast! American stuff usually takes over three weeks to come over the pond these days (The Wind & The Lion Blu-ray took just over a month from Amazon). It sounds fantastic, so lovely to hear this in a full rich sound. Thank you.

...& great booklet too, a real labour of love.

This is awesome, nice to have both the film tracks and LP's on their own.
And we really have Island Def Jam to thank (or not, delay.....) for this?
I thought that was funny, wonder how those conversations went!

- Sean

Although OUR MAN FLINT's Blu ray has the score isolated, the marvelous music Goldsmith wrote for Flint's watch activating is not isolated. I'm sure this is a composition by Goldsmith and not a sound effect. Is that possibly the reason it wasn't included?