TV REVIEW : ‘Moviola’ an Intriguing but Incomplete Hour

The word romantic pops up a lot in “John Barry’s Moviola,” an hour dedicated to Barry’s three decades of work as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand film composers. (This installment of the PBS “Great Performances” series airs tonight at 8 on Channel 28.)

Barry even uses the term once himself, self-consciously, “for lack of a better word.” But there is no other word: His scoring tends to be ravishingly emotional, lush with strings a lovestruck soul could sink deep into and disappear within.

Sometimes this is the case even when it’s not the most obvious choice for the movie: Director Sydney Pollack recalls here how he expected a light, larkish accompaniment for the flying montage in “Out of Africa” and instead got from Barry a “soulful, spiritual” love theme that completely changed the scene’s tone. And who else but Barry would’ve had the chutzpah to take the gritty, profane “Midnight Cowboy” and--oddly, but appropriately--come up with one of the half-century’s most memorable romantic riffs?

Unfortunately, from this intriguing but incomplete hour, you’d guess that that’s all Barry is capable of. The special never even mentions, for instance, that Barry has scored most of the James Bond pictures, which, while full of love themes themselves, also offer dramatic suspense cues of the sort sorely needed to break up the monochromatic mood here.

Between interview segments, Barry conducts the Royal Philharmonic (seen only in silhouette) in pieces of sweeping scores from “Africa” and “Cowboy” plus “Dances With Wolves,” “Chaplin,” “Somewhere in Time,” “Body Heat” and “Born Free.”

While universally lovely, these pieces are all so rich with romance the effect is like an hour’s worth of dessert--to the point you might start yearning for some shrieking “Psycho”-style violins just for balance.

Still, film scorers so rarely get their due that it’s mostly a treat, and while true movie-music buffs might find most of the documentary overly elementary, there are occasional interesting tidbits about the collaborative process in interviews with directors Kevin Costner and Richard Attenborough.