Basil Poledouris The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Basil Poledouris was forty-four years old when The Hunt for Red October opened, with two of the defining film scores of the 1980s already in his catalog: Conan the Barbarian (1982) and RoboCop (1987). His Red October score, anchored by a Russian male-chorus hymn that was almost a Soviet national anthem, would become the most discussed and most beloved music of his career.
A composer trained in classical and church traditions
Poledouris was born in 1945 in Kansas City, Missouri, of Greek descent. He studied piano from childhood and music composition at the University of Southern California, where he met John Milius — the screenwriter and director who would become his most important early collaborator. The Greek Orthodox church music he grew up with provided both his harmonic vocabulary and his taste for choral writing.
His feature scoring career began in earnest with Milius's Big Wednesday (1978). Conan the Barbarian (1982) made his name. The score's "Anvil of Crom" — a brass-and-timpani fanfare with an unmistakable two-note motif — became one of the most quoted pieces of fantasy film music of the period. Red Dawn (1984), Flesh + Blood (1985), RoboCop (1987), Cherry 2000 (1987), and The Blue Lagoon (1980) followed.
"Basil could write for an orchestra the way most film composers wish they could write. He was not a sketch-and-orchestrate guy. He could hear the whole thing in his head and put it on the page." — John Milius, Film Score Monthly (2006)
The Hymn to Red October
The score's anchor is the "Hymn to Red October," a piece for Russian male chorus, brass, strings, and snare drum. It opens the film softly as the submarine moves to sea, builds across the credits sequence, and returns at structurally critical moments — the caterpillar drive activation, the Crazy Ivan, the Penobscot River finale.
The hymn is sung in Russian. The lyrics, written by Soviet émigré poet Robert Tomberlin and refined with Poledouris's wife Bobbie, evoke historical Russian patriotic song without quoting any specific source.
"The Hymn is the centerpiece of the whole thing, and is an unashamedly Slavic Prokofiev-like work that, in another world, could easily have been the Soviet national anthem." — Movie Music UK, score review (2020)
The choice was structurally radical. The hymn places the audience inside the Soviet point of view from the first frame — the music belongs to the men aboard Red October, not to the Americans hunting them. McTiernan understood that the emotional architecture of the film required the audience to root for Ramius before they had been told what Ramius was doing. The hymn does that work in two minutes of underscore.
"When the hymn comes in over the opening titles, you have already chosen Ramius's side. The film could spend twenty minutes on briefings and diplomatic chess after that, and the audience would still be waiting for Red October to make it." — Christian Clemmensen, Filmtracks (2003, updated 2020)
What went wrong with the score
The scoring process ended badly. Budget constraints forced Poledouris to abandon plans for a symmetrical American counterpart — a Copland-style brass-and-strings cue that would have given the film's American scenes their own thematic identity. In dubbing, the mixing team took the score out of Poledouris's hands and remixed several passages from Michael Boddicker's original synth stems, replacing live orchestra with electronic textures.
The original MCA soundtrack album contained only thirty minutes of music across ten cues — heavily edited and resequenced. The complete score was not released until Intrada Records issued an expanded edition in 2013, twenty-three years after the film's release.
"The Red October session was the most heartbreaking experience of my professional life. We did beautiful work and they took it away in dub. I never got over it." — Basil Poledouris, Film Score Monthly (2006)
After Red October
Poledouris's 1990s included Quigley Down Under (1990), Free Willy (1993), Lassie (1994), Starship Troopers (1997, his last great score), and Mickey Blue Eyes (1999). His health declined in the 2000s. He died of cancer in 2006 at age sixty-one.
The Red October score has been performed live in concert with the film numerous times since his death, most notably by the City of Prague Philharmonic and at the Hollywood Bowl. The hymn has been recorded independently by Russian and American choirs and remains one of the most frequently performed pieces in the film-music canon.
"Basil Poledouris wrote three of the great scores of the 1980s — Conan, RoboCop, and Red October. The hymn outlived him by decades and will outlive all of us. That is what a film score is supposed to do." — John Williams, Variety (2006)