At last! A film music CD with a booklet that offers an insight into the music
and the composer’s intentions! Gods and Monsters could bring
Oscar glory to Ian McKellan, as James Whale, the legendary Hollywood film
director /producer of such classics of the horror genre as Frankenstein,
The Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and The Invisible
Man. The director of the present film, Bill Condon, makes the point that
when James Whale commissioned Franz Waxman to compose the music for
The Bride of Frankenstein, he asked of Waxman, "Nothing will
be resolved in this picture. Will you write an unresolved score for it?"
Carter Burwell, one of Hollywood’s more individual composers, and best
known for his collaborations with the Coen brothers, has produced music that
would have fulfilled this brief. Rather than going for the obvious variations
on the original celebrated Franz Waxman score, or opting for electronics,
he uses a spare palate, a restrained, understated, and string-driven score
that is mostly melancholic and meditative, often employing long sustained
chords.
Burwell cleverly creates a sad, demoralised, desolate waltz that he associates
with the horrors of the trenches in World War II, and, by implication, it
is a dirge for the old European culture that war destroyed. The waltz in
"Lucky Man" seems to stick in one phrase and one note seems to be an anguished
cry for help. It transmogrifies into another horror of Whale’s creation
- Frankenstein’s monster. This metamorphosis becomes clear in the cue
"Frankenwhale" which is the only real crescendo in the score with its heavy
tread and suggestion of the threat of the monster and its awful power. It
is only in the final cue "Friend?" that the waltz shows any warmth.
An imaginative score but not one that many would chose for repeated listening,
as music per se, it is too gloomy and spends too much time dwelling
in dark places.
Reviewer
Ian Lace
OST
