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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.
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: CD or
Download
The limited edition Varèse Sarabande album has its usual
standard of excellent, in-depth analysis of the score and film.
