Michael Kamen

Hudson Hawk was an action-comedy vehicle for a post-Die Hard Bruce Willis, directed by Michael Lehmann. Willis plays Eddie Hawkins, a master thief who, on the day of his parole from prison, suddenly finds himself blackmailed into committing a series of elaborate heists. The complicated plot involves the Italian Mafia, an evil international conglomerate, the artwork of Leonardo da Vinci, and a machine that turns lead into gold, but it’s really just an excuse for Willis and his co-star Danny Aiello to engage in various globe-trotting escapades of comic tomfoolery. The film co-stars Andie MacDowell, James Coburn, and Richard E. Grant, and unfortunately was an enormous box-office flop; audiences seemingly couldn’t reconcile Willis’s tough guy persona with the film’s slapstick comedy action, bizarre sound effects, and surreal humor. Musically, Hudson Hawk is an enjoyable oddity. One of the conceits in the story is that the characters played by Willis and Aiello often spontaneously burst into song, as a way to synchronize the timing of their heists. The pair sing several tracks, two of which – Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star” from Going My Way (which won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1944), and Paul Anka’s “Side by Side” – are featured on the film’s soundtrack.

Michael Kamen is a master at capturing nostalgia, especially when the age in question is the bittersweet "tie a yellow ribbon" landscape of World War II. For the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers, Kamen re-visits much of the same territory he explored with fellow sepia-tone junkie Roger Waters on Pink Floyd's The Wall and The Final Cut. Alternately tragic and uplifting, Band of Brothers is a raw, patriotic, and wistfully elegiac tome of swelling choirs, salvation army brass band, and melodious strings that compliment the series' balanced depiction of the horrors of war and the unpredictable sweetness of humanity.

A romantic coming-of-age drama set in the 1950s, Inventing the Abbotts was an early film for its now-famous cast, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connely, Joaquin Phoenix and Billy Crudup. It got reasonable reviews but did little business at the box office and, a decade and a half later, is largely forgotten. The score came from the great Michael Kamen, seemingly making a real effort to avoid action films at that point of his career having made his name on them earlier on. The album opens with “On Springfield Mountain”, a beautiful new arrangement of the folk song (one of the earliest American folk songs) with largely new lyrics and an arrangement by Kamen which features all the trademark panache he brought to so many film songs over the years; Tara MacLean’s vocal performance is beautiful.