Buy it... if you'd be electrified by a superb throwback to the style of classic, melodic Elmer Bernstein and Franz Waxman romances of the Golden Age of film music.

Avoid it... if you aren't acclimated enough to the melodramatic tones of the Golden Age to warrant a search for this rare album.

Jarre

The Bride: (Maurice Jarre) There have been dozens upon dozens of Frankenstein adaptations to the big screen over the past 80 years, but by the mid-1980's, a while had passed since the last monster thriller involving the famed creature. Columbia Pictures decided at the time that audiences were ready for a modern Frankenstein interpretation, and they as usual wanted it to cater to young, pop-oriented audiences. Thus, they brought two enormously popular stars of the early 1980's onto the project: Sting (Dune) and Jennifer Beals (Flashdance). Unfortunately, these two leads of The Bride had no screen chemistry from the start, both seemingly out of place in an oddly baroque-turned-modern setting. More problematic was the simple fact that the film also failed to do what all Frankenstein stories are supposed to do: scare people. The end result of the film was a pseudo-sequel to the original Mary Shelley tale, and there wasn't enough serious horror or silly playfulness (a la Young Frankenstein) to make The Bride work. As such, the boring film slipped away into obscurity, as did the acting careers of its two stars. Arguably, the only redeeming aspect of the entire project was Maurice Jarre's score. The composer had the musical sensibilities of the era from which Frankenstein films experienced all their glory, though even this juxtaposition between the pop culture appeal of the stars and the almost perpetually flowery Golden Age music in the background was yet another curious aspect of the production. Jarre was still in demand in the mid-1980's, scoring several high profile projects in 1985 alone, including the award-recognized Witness and A Passage to India. His job on The Bride was made all the more difficult by the film's multiple, concurrent storylines and jagged differences in settings. To provide a comprehensive score, Jarre needed to choose a sound that was appropriate enough for all of the aims of the film, bringing the entirety of these elements together under one musical roof. Ironically, while the resulting music is gorgeous, it embodies all the failures of the project as well, mostly relating to a lack of convincingly sustained tension or truly frightening interludes.

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Considering all of the pop icon appeal that the studio was attempting to inject into the project, perhaps Sting himself would have been a better match for the soundtrack for The Bride. Jarre took the film in the opposite direction, returning to the vintage, black and white days when Frankenstein was at his scariest, but without the terror. He provided a score straight from Hollywood's Golden Age, with all the thematic rapture as Elmer Bernstein's great, dramatically sweeping themes emulating the same era. The parallels to Bernstein's style in The Bride are aplenty, with the use of the ondes martinot instrument at the forefront. Both Jarre and Bernstein were wearing out the eerie tones of that instrument in the mid-1980's, with Bernstein's use of it in Ghostbusters remaining the best known in modern times. But Jarre's employment is a clear tribute to Franz Waxman's similar treatment in Bride of Frankenstein several decades earlier. Waxman would have been proud of Jarre's score for The Bride, for it has all the same string-quivering, brass layered, slowly paced themes of grandeur that once conveyed high romance. A solo violin performs a Waxman-like subtheme of passion in the midsection of the score as well, though the plentiful full ensemble statements of the title theme (summed nicely in the concert arrangement, "The Bride") are the undeniable highlight. As beautiful as Jarre's score is (and it will please any Golden Age film music collector), you can't help but wonder about its disjointed marriage with the goal of the film. Jarre's work thus functions as an independent tribute to a different time, with deep, dramatic sensibilities that translate better onto album than on screen. Its first ever album presentation is short by the standards of the Varèse Sarabande Club products of the early 2000's, but The Bride, the thirteenth of the second generation of Club titles, was the first of that newer group of limited releases to sell out (in May of 2003). With only 1,000 pressings of the score, The Bride would become a significant catch at online auction houses for several years, with Golden Age film score fans desperately gobbling up what few copies remained at specialty outlets. The album may not be worth the hunt for every soundtrack enthusiast, but Bernstein and Waxman collectors will lament letting it slip through their fingers. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download