Music Album Review: 'Clear and Present Danger: Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack'

On August 2, 1994, the Los Angeles-based label Milan Entertainment released Clear and Present Danger: Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on compact disc and cassette. The album presents 10 selections from composer/conductor James Horner's score for Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Tom Clancy's best-selling novel. Reflecting the film's focus on a covert military operation in Colombia against a notorious drug trafficker loosely based on Pablo Escobar, Horner's music is more martial and eerie than his previous score for another Clancy-based film, Patriot Games. 

The late Horner (who died in a single-plane crash on June 22, 1995) had written a score that in album form would have contained 31 tracks for a grand total of 88 minutes' worth of music, but like most record labels, Milan only released an album with a running time of only 50minutes and 35 seconds. (19 years later, Intrada Records, a label that specializes in film and TV music albums, released an expanded album with Horner's 88-minute score, along with three bonus tracks, presented on two CDs.)

The 10 tracks in the original Milan Entertainment album are:

1. Main Title/A Clear and Present Danger
2. Operation Reciprocity
3. The Ambush
4. The Laser-Guided Missile
5. Looking for Clues
6. Deleting the Evidence
7. Greer's Funeral/Betrayal
8. Escobedo's New Friend
9. Second-Hand Copter
10. Truth Needs a Soldier/End Title

The Intrada expanded version has, according to the label's website, a total of 34 tracks. Sadly, the two-CD album is sold out so I won't bother with the tracklist.) 

My Take

Milan Entertainment released Clear and Present Danger: Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on June 2, 1994, one day before Paramount Pictures' action-packed movie starring Harrison Ford as CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence Jack Ryan hit theaters. I saw the film on Opening Day because I'm a fan of Clancy's novels, and I bought the compact disc sometime later. 

I have always had mixed feelings about the album, even when I was holding the CD in its still-pristine jewel box case at Camelot Records in the Miami International Mall before purchase. I don't remember the price, but I do recall feeling uncertain if I wanted to pay that much money for less than an hour's worth of Horner's music. 

In the end, I bought it because I liked Horner's nautical-military march for Clear and Present Danger's main title sequence in which a U.S. Coast Guard cutter intercepts a hijacked yacht named Enchanter. 

Interestingly, the paucity of music in the 1994 album was not a corporate decision but rather one made by Horner, who in addition to composing, conducting, and even performing in some of the selections served as the soundtrack recording's producer. 

In the Intrada listing for the now out-of-print expanded edition, CD producer Douglas Fake writes:

James Horner fashioned one of his longest film scores for Clear and Present Danger. Although he would typically include the majority of a score’s important cues on his soundtrack albums, for this one he selected just over half of the music recorded for the picture. Interestingly, many of the cues for the last section of the movie (after "Second-Hand Copter") were absent.

Why Horner decided to leave out so many tracks from the Milan album remains a mystery. Perhaps he thought most listeners would not like a longer, more complete recording, or maybe he was on a deadline for release and picked his favorite 10 tracks. The '94 album's info insert has no liner notes from the composer, only a track list on one page and an album credit list on the other. 

 I suspect, though, that Horner's practice of borrowing materials from his own previous works might have been at play, at least in part. In this case, Maestro Horner repurposed several tracks from 1983's suspense film Gorky Park, although he changed the orchestrations so they would sound different in Clear and Present Danger. 

Stylistically, the score resembles that of two other films Horner scored during his career: Star Trek II and Apollo 13. In fact, when Universal Pictures commissioned the first teaser film for Ron Howard's 1995 film about the nearly-disastrous 1970 Moon flight, the music used as underscore was the main title from Clear and Present Danger.

As I said before, I love Horner's work for Noyce's second Jack Ryan film, but I do wish that he'd given us a better soundtrack album than this "Best Hits From..." collection of themes and action cues.


Source: Producer's Note, Expanded Edition of Clear and Present Danger Soundtrack