The cry was MUTINY... and the decks ran red!

CLIFTON PARKER – DAMN THE DEFIANT! aka H.M.S DEFIANT (1962)

There’s been a discussion over at the FSM message board about this score, since they plan to release it as part of their next Colpix double-header. They were looking for a mint copy of the stereo lp to master from, so I pulled out my copy I got from ebay a few years back. Unfortunately it’s far from being mint as you’ll hear. Anyway it’s quite a nice score.

Clifton Parker may be best known for being the composer of Disney’s Treasure Island in 1951. He was kind of a specialist of sea adventure movies and thus was the perfect choice for this British Mutiny on the Bounty starring Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, Maurice Denham, and Nigel Stock.

The ‘Main Title’ introduces the two main themes : a rhythmic sea-shanty melody in minor mode followed by a lush and triumphant theme for full orchestra somewhat reminiscent of Bronislau Kaper’s Bounty theme. The music is very elegantly written, with very English-sounding harmonies and nice modal passages in the suspenseful tracks (check ‘The Defiant Reaches Corsica’).

The sound is nice crisp stereo (you can even hear someone coughing in ‘Unrest Among the Crew’) but, as I’ve noted earlier, my copy contains quite a large amount of pops and clicks. The album sequencing is also a little bit odd since it repeats the same track three times under different titles. This makes side 2 a little repetitive. I haven’t seen the movie so I’ve no way of telling if it’s repeated the same way in the film but it might also have been made by the producer to have a longer album. Colpix producers apparently had no qualms about repeating identical tracks to make an album longer as they did on the Lawrence of Arabia OST. Even so, the album runs a brisk 27 minutes. But it's great music. Enjoy!

Tracklist :
1. Damn the Defiant! Main Title
2. Vizard Theme
3. Midnight on the Defiant
4. Sailing with the Tide
5. Unrest Among the Crew
6. The Defiant Reaches Corsica
7. Meeting at Rochefort
8. The Mutineers
9. Aboard the Defiant
10. Crawford at Vizard's Deathbed
11. The French Retreat
12. Damn the Defiant! End Title

http://rapidshare.com/files/479224/damn_the_defiant.rar.html