The Bruce Broughton Collection, Vol. 1 (1982/1981) ****
BRUCE BROUGHTON
Dragon’s Domain DDR844
29 tracks - 75:13
By the early 1980s, Bruce Broughton was steadily transitioning from episodic television—credits including Quincy, M.E., Dallas and Logan’s Run—to scoring made-for-TV movies. Two of the latter are featured on The Bruce Broughton Collection, Vol. 1 from Dragon’s Domain, offering a valuable glimpse into the composer’s formative years.
In One Shoe Makes It Murder (1982), Robert Mitchum plays a private eye hired by a mob boss (Mel Ferrer) to track down a missing woman—though, unsurprisingly, things are not what they seem. With Mitchum’s character seemingly echoing his Out of the Past (1947) persona, Broughton’s “Main Title” takes a fittingly noir approach, featuring sultry saxophone, piano and swooning strings. The main theme surfaces at the 1:05 mark, setting the tone for what follows.
Tracks like “Shill and Fay” build on this moody texture with keyboard and double bass, while “Ride to Vallejo” introduces vibraphone and a lounge-style variation of the theme. “Finding Caroline” contrasts warm strings and sax with percussive hits and screeching violins in “Caroline’s Fall,” signaling a sharp tonal turn. The melancholy melody reappears in “Drink and Talk,” now shaded with resignation.
Elsewhere, shimmering harp in “The Next Day” deepens the mystery, and low-end piano in “Back to the Lodge” shifts the tone again. “About Caroline” offers introspective strings and light piano, while “Back to Los Angeles” weaves sneaky jazz rhythms with brushed percussion and bass.
A violent “Confrontation” bursts forth with pounding snare and cello, before the smoky “Burning the Film” returns to jazzier textures. The final cue, “Return to Charnock,” closes the score with a last breath of noir, as saxophone and bass fade into the distance.
A year earlier, Broughton scored Killjoy (1981), a darker, more psychological drama involving the murder of a young woman and the unraveling lives of an ex-boyfriend (Robert Culp) and a morally dubious doctor (Stephen Macht). The grim premise gave Broughton the opportunity to explore a moodier, more atmospheric soundscape.
The “Main Title” introduces a dissonant palette of sustained strings and unsettling percussive accents. A lonely keyboard line, eventually echoed by strings, forecasts the composer’s later work in thrillers like The Presidio. “The Murder” features sliding string glissandi and sharp anvil strikes to chilling effect.
The ominously jaunty “Laury Drives” is closely followed by “Into the House,” with the main theme returning in a deliberate, string-led fashion. The strings continue in “Devious Plan/Photo Album,” before harp and pizzicato join in halfway through.
Low and high strings fight for prominence in “Joy Morgan.” The suspense continues in “The Morgue/Searching the House,” broken up by a furious string run. In “Coming Home/Joy’s House,” suspense melts away to romanticism on keyboards.
The pervading atmosphere is such that even “Soap Opera Muzak” is tinged with darkness, making acoustic guitar and flute sound very downbeat. Quivering string figures punctuate the reappearance of the main theme in “Tailing Laury.” Meanwhile, “The Real Joy Morgan/Finding the Body” buries fragments of the same theme in layers of effects and textural unease.
In “The Hospital,” rolling piano figures and sustained keyboards offer a ghostly reprise of the theme. The final cue builds from creepy string passages to an ambiguous, unresolved close—an appropriate end for a film mired in psychological complexity.
The album closes with a generous selection of bonus tracks. The alternate version of “Soap Opera Muzak” is much lighter, favoring clarinet and electric guitar. The soft rock of “Bruce’s Bar” and “One More Drink” and the light jazz-rock of “Time to Party” make for welcome respites from the darkness, though the funky “Closing Time” finds the album trailing off instead of coming to a firm close.
For fans of the composer, The Bruce Broughton Collection, Vol. 1 is an insightful look at the earlier years of his stylistic development. Here’s hoping that it leads to future volumes detailing more of the obscure scores on Broughton’s resume. —Tor Harbin
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