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