The Bride of Frankenstein

Okay, so I am a old black and white movie freak.   And it is Halloween weekend and last nite Claire and I went to a great Halloween party hosted by Kelly and Justin (daughter and son in law) that had all the trappings.   TCM is usually the only thing I can stand to watch on TV (well maybe the Buffalo Bills when they are winning) these days, and I do enjoy a lot of the music in the old classics.

So this morning I tuned in and saw that  the Bride of Frankenstien was on AMC (ugh commercials!) - now the first Frankenstien was brilliant, but as the Irish might say, this was genius.  Not going to review the movie, cause we all know it.   Today I couldn't help but  tune into the music.  Franz Waxmans score is so imaginative, always in sync with the scene, and has many really creative uses of music to coreograph some of  the action scequences.   It kept getting better and better as the movie rolled along.



My favorite scene in the whole movie is when the blind man picks up his fiddle to play a tune for Frankenstein and the monster starts doin some foot tappin - too cool.   How Mel Brooks let that get away from young Frankenstein is beyond me.   But I couldn't get Peter Boyle and Gene Hackman out of my head watching this scene.   When will some around here put these two films togehter on the same bill??

But throughout the movie I kept noticing the music - how good it was and how well it fit the scene, so I had to do a bit of research.

From Gary S Dalkin, who says it way better than I could

" A graceful minuet, pastoral music, a melancholic ‘Processional March’ (with the Ondes Martinot, here, suggesting the diabolical reason for its progress), storm music (a mix of Beethoven and Dukas), marvellous headlong excitement in ‘Village Chase’ and comical/lugubrious material – the quirky, inebriated ‘Bottle Sequence’ with organ gravitas and bugle calls - provide contrast to the monster music. And in the early cues like ‘Monster Entrance’, Waxman draws attention to the loneliness and isolation of Frankenstein’s creation in music that speaks of pathos as well as the grotesque and the horrific. Adding further characterisation, Waxman leaves us in no doubt how derisive are the female monster’s feelings for her supposed mate (‘Female Monster’). "

If you want to give it a listen here is a link to a youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzJqNUOm030

Now I gotta check this out on a big screen with surround sound!!!