Press Release from Dragon's Domain:
Dragon’s Domain Records presents THE ALBERT GLASSER COLLECTION, VOLUME 4: SCIENCE FICTION: ATOMIC MUTATION I. With this fourth collection of the composer’s music, we are pleased to explore two films that he scored for director Bert I. Gordon in 1957. Most of Gordon’s celebrated work is in the idiom of giant monster films. Albert Glasser consistently made musical magic out of limited resources and onrushing deadlines as one of Hollywood’s most prolific B-movie composers. THE ALBERT GLASSER COLLECTION, VOLUME 4 features expanded releases of Glasser’s music for THE CYCLOPS and BEGINNING OF THE END.
The years 1957-58 were Albert Glasser’s busiest as a film composer, having scored fifteen B-movies that saw release in 1957, and ten in 1958. The films included Glasser’s celebrated science fiction/monster films MONSTER FROM GREEN HELL, THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN in ’57, and GIANT FROM THE UNKNOWN, ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE, WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, and THE SPIDER from the following year, as well as a slew of Westerns, adventure sagas, crime, and juvenile gang movies.
THE CYCLOPS tells the story of Susan Winter (Gloria Talbot), a young woman who undertakes a mission into remote Mexico to find her fiancée, missing for three years after a plane crash. She and her unlikely cohorts – scientist Russ Bradford (James Craig), pilot Lee Brand (Tom Drake), and a uranium mining expert with his own agenda, Martin Melville (Lon Chaney Jr.), fly into unknown territory and soon discover a lost world of oversized animals and, of course, Susan’s surviving fiancée, now grown to gigantic proportions due to radiation in the area.
BEGINNING OF THE END was made after THE CYCLOPS but preceded it into theaters. Intrepid journalist Audrey Ames (Peggie Castle) is determined to get the scoop on enormous grasshoppers that were accidentally created at the Illinois State experimental farm, and she races to save Chicago despite a military cover-up. For its day, the film was a typical but below-average giant-insects-versus-humanity drive-in film, but its internal story logic and special effects have not weathered the years well.
Dragon’s Domain Records presents THE ALBERT GLASSER COLLECTION VOLUME 4: SCIENCE FICTION ATOMIC MUTATION I, featuring original music composed by Albert Glasser for THE CYCLOPS and BEGINNING OF THE END, mastered by James Nelson at Digital Outland. The booklet contains liner notes written by noted film music journalist and author Randall D. Larson.
