Gerald Fried Limited Edition CD Horror Set (featuring Return of Dracula, I Bury The Living, The Cabinet of Caligari (1962), and Mark of the Vampire)

 

Sound: B-     Music: B

 

 

Gerald Fried is one of the unsung heroes of music composing in film and television, the kind of composer who was all-around great at adding credibility and depth to genre work in Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy.  His music for Stanley Kubrick’s early masterworks The Killing (1955) and Paths of Glory (1957) alone more than prove the incredible film music he was capable of in substantial filmmaking.  When he went into B-movie scoring, the smartest thing he did was not take for granted the films, just because they were low budget films in genres that did not have much respect.  That is evident in a recent, limited edition CD double set, offered exclusively by the music label of Film Score Monthly Magazine (which can be ordered at www.filmscoremonthly.com) that collects four of Fried’s most interesting Horror feature film works.  This one will be limited to only 2,500 pressings!

 

Disc One offers The Return of Dracula and I Bury the Living (both 1958) off of acetate discs that are lucky to have survived.  These original sound sources have been meticulously restored, offering the music stand-alone in its original monophonic sound.  The two things that strike the listener is the intensity, energy and bravado in which Fried carries the music off.  This is immediately involving, like scores for such films where more suspension of disbelief than usual is needed.  I was also reminded of Robert Cobert’s work on the 1960s TV Horror soap opera Dark Shadows, for which Fried music like this seems an influence.

 

Disc Two offers his score for the 1962 remake of the 1919 German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Caligari (dropping “doctor” from the title of the 1919 original), and Mark of the Vampire (1957), this time coming from master magnetic tapes.  The quality improvement is noticed, but these scores are also monophonic.  The Caligari score is the most removed from the four, due to the psychology that has to be addressed in this particular film.  Dan O’Herlihy, the great character actor known to current generations as the head of the sinister Omni Consumer Products in the original Robocop films, has the title role.  Maybe by dropping “doctor”, the producers thought they could come up with some extra surprise or even meaning for new audiences and the film, but having O’Herlihy is good enough alone without any gimmicks.  It is a tricky business remaking classics, though, but the film is interesting and you can read a review of the DVD elsewhere on this site.

 

Mark of the Vampire does not repeat Fried’s Dracula score, instead, offering a less gothic feel.  Because of the drug angle, Fried tries to address that aspect of the film, not needing to adjust himself “back up” to “serious” movie music.  As to whether the alternate conventions of melodrama are used to heavily here or not will have to wait for a review of its DVD release.  This was issued on the 12” LaserDisc format, but this critic has not seen it since he was very, very young.

 

The sad thing to read was that the Kubrick scores are probably lost forever, so we will not be seeing soundtracks for them, according to the smart, extensive liner notes.  Fried went on to do music for certain episodes of TV classics like Lost in Space, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the original Star Trek and with Quincy Jones on the landmark mini-series Roots, as the liner notes explain.  He also went back to feature films in an irony the liner notes missed.  Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969) was another knock-off of Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), but that did not phase Aldrich, who had him scoring his film Too Late The Hero the following year.

 

The PCM 2.0 16Bit/44.1kHz sound is pretty good for its age, but cannot totally avoid some harshness older mono scores run into, reminiscent of Varese Sarabande’s collection of Robert Cobert TV music for Dan Curtis that includes post-Dark Shadows work like Night Stalker, Night Strangler, and Trilogy of Terror.  With that said, this is a remarkable release, saving some fine music that could have been lost forever.  Some would foolishly argue that since the music is still in the films, its not lost, but those tracks could not just be retrieved on their own.  That is especially true on monophonic pictures, made worse by whether they have been restored or not.

 

Plus, why not have the luxury of having them available stand-alone?  That what makes this set so much fun, the kind of joy only soundtrack fans seem to get.  This set is a gem that no extensive movie music library can do without.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo