Basil Poledouris - Conan The Barbarian

I think it's a crying shame that Basil Poledouris' score to Conan the Barbarian will never recieve the credit it deserves, simply because the film will forever bear the reputation as a bit of a cult trash flick. Regardless of the film's quality (I thought it was gorgeously shot and a mini masterpiece of visual storytelling), the score is truly special and stands up there with the very finest cinematic works.

The film's producer originally planned for a rock soundtrack, but John Milius (Apocalypse Now scriptwriter and the director of Conan) obviously knew how important a strong score would be to the type of film he was making, and recruited his old pal Poledouris. The film product is largely what stands the film up: without it the minimal script and epic visuals wouldn't be nearly as impressive. However, the score isn't just a cinematic tool: it's just as good when you split it from the source material and examine it as pure music.

The music to Conan touches upon many themes, but it's always evocative and hugely epic. The title theme (Anvil of Crom) is full of martial drums and a monstrous horn section, making a true chest-beating signature piece that has all the martial overtones you'd expect from Conan the Barbarian. The true masterpiece here is the duo of Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom, which begins softly and builds into a Carmina Burana style operatic giant, full of intense drama. In the film this is the music that tells the almost totally dialogue-less story of Conan's childhood, as he grows up with his tribe before Thulsa Doom destroys everything he knows. Such a strong and impacting piece magnifies the personal tragedy which sets up Conan as a character. It's a glorious piece of music which has been used on many trailors and adverts. Interestingly, Poledouris reprises it for Battle of the Mounds, where Conan finally gets his revenge on Doom, linking back to personal significance of the violence.

Other excellent pieces include the gorgeously exotic and decadent The Orgy ("Is this heaven?") and the sad yet imperial Atlantean Sword, where Conan finds the remains of a once great civilisation. The music is always evocative of the personal struggles and pain depicted in the music: the unrelenting march of Wheel of Pain or the sad emptiness of Orphans of Doom/The Awakening from the end of the film, where Conan finally finds himself with his destiny in his own hands.

The music is always brilliant and captures the essence of the film in many ways. At times it's tribal and martial, at others choral and operatic. Unlike a lot of motion picture scores, the music in the film is almost constant: put to disc it tells the film's story rather than being a series of snapshots (love scene, action scene, tension scene) that other scores sometimes sound like when divorced from the visual material. Personally, I feel it ranks alongside the finest works by masters such as Ennio Morricone or John Williams, although the wider world will probably never realise.