Albert Glasser

Albert Glasser received a memorable characterization on Mystery Science Theater 3000 as "the man who holds you down and pummels you with music." Although the remark may lean harsh, it conveys the forceful quality that marked many of his most familiar film scores. He concentrated on B-movie assignments, forging his strongest ties with director and producer Bert I. Gordon, whose 1950s output centered on stories of giants, mutants, and monsters.

Born in Chicago, Glasser studied music before relocating to California and entering the Warner Bros. Studios music department in 1935 at the age of 19. There he worked initially as a copyist, crossing paths with Erich Wolfgang Korngold and later Max Steiner. One of his earliest tasks involved copying Korngold’s overture for Captain Blood. The 1935 project, notable for its ambitious film scoring at a time when such writing remained uncommon, impressed Glasser so deeply that he slipped into the recording session to observe the composer leading the orchestra through the main title theme. The experience shaped his understanding of a composer’s potential contribution to cinema and set his professional direction.

After nine years as a copyist and arranger, Glasser scored his first feature, the horror picture The Monster Maker, produced by Sigmund Neufeld at Producers Releasing Corporation for a fee of 250 dollars. That Poverty Row production launched a career that eventually credited him with music for more than 125 films plus several television series. Among the notable early television projects was Big Town, a popular early-1950s series for which he supplied dozens of cues; his most conspicuous small-screen work, however, stemmed from scores written for two low-budget late-1940s Cisco Kid features starring Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carrillo, music later licensed for the television series that followed at the decade’s end.

Other composers, including Elmer Bernstein, also began in low-budget B-pictures, yet Bernstein advanced to major features within a few years and established a prominent reputation that extended to recordings by the mid-1950s. Glasser never secured that leap; even projects scored for larger studios such as United Artists—Top of the World (1955) and Huk (1955)—remained modestly budgeted independent genre films that attracted industry attention without reaching the broader public or record labels.

Between scoring jobs that sometimes reached a dozen films annually, he arranged for Ferde Grofe on Rocketship X-M, where the two first met, as well as I Shot Jesse James and the 1963 Worlds Fair Suite, and for film composers Dimitri Tiomkin and Johnny Greene, bandleader Paul Whiteman, and composer Rudolf Friml. His speed as composer and conductor, together with his skill at drawing solid results from quickly assembled ensembles, suited him perfectly for B-movie schedules that might allocate only three hours to record thirty or forty minutes of finished cues. Music served these productions as a vital bridge across dramatic and technical shortcomings that might otherwise have been apparent.

Glasser’s science-fiction involvement began with his arrangements for Rocketship X-M, yet he engaged the genre more directly in late 1954 with his intense score for The Indestructible Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr. Release delays postponed that film, and another opportunity arose when he met Bert I. Gordon late in 1955; Gordon, then preparing the independent sci-fi/horror picture The Cyclops that featured Chaney, hired Glasser after hearing his work on Huk. The composer recorded the score in January 1956, initiating a collaboration that produced The Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People, War of the Colossal Beast, and Earth Vs. the Spider over the next two years—all depicting conflicts between humans and oversized creatures or scaled figures. He also scored the unrelated giant-insect film The Monster From Green Hell outside Gordon’s circle. These pictures became Glasser's signature works for postwar teenagers and the subsequent generation that encountered them on television, distinguished by prominent horn writing, driving thematic material, and occasional use of instruments such as the theremin. Standout passages appear in the opening of The Beginning of the End, throughout The Amazing Colossal Man, and in Attack of the Puppet People.

Glasser contributed to Roger Corman productions including Teen-Age Caveman, starring Robert Vaughn, and supplied music for westerns, adventure films, and children’s features such as The Boy and the Pirates, yet the Gordon science-fiction and horror scores remained his most widely recognized. With the contraction of B-movie production in the early 1960s, his film assignments dwindled and he turned primarily to arranging. Between 1944 and 1962 he nonetheless received credit on 135 films, with roughly three dozen additional scores lacking attribution. Outside the film community he received little industry notice apart from his arranging credits, although Starlog Records launched its catalog in 1978 with The Fantastic Film World of Albert Glasser, an album of excerpts drawn from sources ranging from the Cisco Kid features to The Amazing Colossal Man. He continued occasional horror and science-fiction scoring through 1972 and died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in the spring of 1998. His nephew Leo Eylar, born in 1958, works as a classical composer and conductor.