The Hunt For Red October: Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
The Hunt for Red OctoberandCrimson Tidemark the swan songs of a long-standing genre: the cold-war-theme action thriller (and its subgenre, the nuclear-submarine-threat potboiler). Given the music here, composer Basil Poledouris must have sensed the end was nigh, for he pulls no punches.  Poledouris (who seemingly wrote the score toRed Dawnas a warm-up exercise) has created a full-bodied orchestral swashbuckler with a male chorus (singing in Russian, of course) to boot; a modern take on the Erich Korngold/Errol Flynn film sensibility that ably demonstrates there's still life in those traditions.--Jerry McCulley