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THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN – James Bernard
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
In 1956, having enjoyed success with their sci-fi film The Quatermass Xperiment the previous year, esteemed British film studio Hammer Film Productions decided to embark on an audacious new enterprise: resurrecting the horror film genre, which had suffered a decline after WWII. For their inaugural film, they decided to retell the story of Frankenstein. The threat of a lawsuit from Universal Pictures forced the studio to abandon using Boris Karloff as the Monster, shoot in black and white, change the film’s title, and rewrite the planned screenplay. Anthony Hinds was assigned as producer with a modest $270,000 budget, Jimmy Sangster was hired to write the screenplay, and Terence Fisher was given the reins to direct. The cast included Peter Cushing as Baron Victor von Frankenstein, joined by Christopher Lee as the Monster, Robert Urquhart as Paul Krempe, Hazel Court as Elizabeth, Valerie Gaunt as Justine, Noel Hood as Aunt Sophie, and Paul Hardtmuth as Professor Bernstein. Read more…
James Bernard, 1925-2001
Composer James Bernard died in at his home in Jamaica on July 12, 2001, at the age of 75.
Although his career included radio, theatre and occasional non-horror films, Bernard is remembered above all as the musical voice of Hammer Films. Over an association lasting almost two decades, his pounding rhythms, abrasive harmonies and muscular brass writing helped define the sound of British Gothic horror, accompanying Dracula, Frankenstein and many of Hammer’s other celebrated monsters.
Bernard was born on September 20, 1925, in Kochel am See, Bavaria, Germany into a British Army family, He later re-located to British India with his family, before moving back to England in the 1940s. He was educated at Wellington College, where he met Benjamin Britten while still a teenager, and Britten encouraged his interest in composition. After wartime service in the RAF, Bernard studied with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music and later worked as a copyist and assistant on Britten’s opera Billy Budd.
Before becoming a film composer, Bernard had already won Hollywood’s highest honor, although not for music. With his partner, writer Paul Dehn, he devised the story for the nuclear thriller Seven Days to Noon (1950), for which the pair shared the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story. Bernard subsequently concentrated on music for radio and theatre, and his score for a BBC production of The Duchess of Malfi attracted the attention of Hammer musical director John Hollingsworth.
Hollingsworth recommended Bernard for The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), beginning the relationship that would dominate his career. Working initially with just strings and percussion, Bernard produced a tense, dissonant score whose unusual sonorities perfectly suited Hammer’s stark science-fiction horror. He followed it with X the Unknown (1956), Quatermass 2 (1957), and then the film that transformed Hammer’s fortunes, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Read more…
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