Benjamin Frankel

(b London, 31 Jan 1906; d there, 12 Feb 1973). English composer. He studied at the GSM while working as a jazz violinist and worked as an orchestrator and film music composer. He produced over 100 outstanding film scores while also writing orchestral and chamber music in an individual style influenced by Shostakovich, Bartók and Sibelius. In the 1950s he began using serialism, notably in his eight symphonies (1958-71).

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• Active: '40s-'60s
• Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
• Career Highlights: Footsteps in the Fog, The Seventh Veil, The Prisoner
• First Major Screen Credit: The Singing Cop (1938)

Biography

Benjamin Frankel was part of a generation of important English composers who spent a major part of their careers writing music for movies (other notable members of this group included William Alwyn and Brian Easdale). Frankel was born in London in 1906 and decided on a music career in his early teens, following a year spent as an apprentice to a watchmaker. Following studies in England and Germany, he embarked on a career at age 17, while still studying at the Guildhall School of Music, playing violin and arranging for various bands on London's burgeoning mid-'20s jazz scene. He later joined the BBC Dance Orchestra and became the assistant to its leader, Henry Hall. At the end of the 1920s, he became a musical arranger for the theatrical productions of Noël Coward and Charles B. Cochran, and by 1934 -- with the introduction of incidental music to talking pictures -- he joined the British film industry as a conductor and arranger. Frankel was principally a conductor of film music until the mid-'40s, and only started composing for the screen after he'd written his first concert works, including various chamber pieces and one major orchestral piece. Frankel's early scores were for relatively modest British productions, intended principally for domestic distribution in England and appropriately unambitious -- he moved into much higher-profile British studio productions with a pair of psychologically-based dramas: Compton Bennett's The Seventh Veil (1946) and Anthony Kimmins' Mine Own Executioner (1947).

Frankel enjoyed what should have been a major career breakthrough when he was assigned to score the 1950 British 20th Century Fox production Night and the City, directed by Jules Dassin. At the time, Dassin was in trouble in Hollywood, owing to his alleged leftist sympathies, and was allowed by Fox to continue working in England on this very important picture. With a cast led by top American stars Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney, and major British actors Herbert Lom, Francis L. Sullivan, and Googie Withers, the movie was as big a production as Fox or any other American studio mounted in England that year, and it had the added advantage of achieving a major reputation in the field of film noir. The movie's production, however, ended up hopelessly confused in the transition between England and America, and got caught up in a conflict between British and American copyright law where the ownership of the music was concerned. Under British law, the score's copyright belonged to the composer, whereas American law said that the studio owned the music copyright, and Fox decided to have the entire movie rescored in Hollywood by Franz Waxman. In the course of all of the reconsiderations, two completely different edits of the movie were prepared with different music scores, one for England and one for the rest of the world, and only English audiences saw it with Frankel's music on the soundtrack. Additionally, after 1962, the British edition was withdrawn from circulation even in England, and was only rediscovered in 2003. The removal of his score from the international version of Night and the City was a major disappointment to Frankel.

Over the next few years, however, Frankel found himself working on some of the best movies made in England, including the thriller The Clouded Yellow, the Alec Guinness fantasy-satire The Man in the White Suit, Anthony Asquith's brilliant drama The Browning Version (all in 1951), and Asquith's Victorian satire The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). Frankel's scores for these films touched on a multitude of idioms, from period Victoriana in the case of the latter movie (introduced with a frothy string orchestra piece reminiscent of those delectable light classical "lollipops" that Sir Thomas Beecham liked to program into his concerts) to denser and more modernistic in the case of The Browning Version. Frankel's film work became less frequent after the late '50s as he turned his energies and attention increasingly to composing concert music, which shifted into an atonal mode very abruptly at this point in his career and eventually included eight symphonies and an opera, among other works. His score for the 1961 chiller Curse of the Werewolf is generally regarded as the first definitive atonal soundtrack ever written for a full-length British feature, and his later work included the score for William Castle's ill-starred remake of The Old Dark House (1963).

Despite being less available, Frankel was still regarded as one of the top movie composers in England, and in 1964, he was chosen to score MGM's release of John Huston's production of The Night of the Iguana, based on the play by Tennessee Williams and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the height of their fame. His most visible and popular movie work was still ahead of him, however; soon after, Frankel was selected to write the music for the sprawling international production Battle of the Bulge (1965), directed by Ken Annakin. The movie was deeply flawed on several levels, despite an all-star cast, a huge budget, and a good sense of dramatic pacing, but no one faulted Frankel's music, which was built on original material but also successfully incorporated elements of the "Panzerlied," the battle song of the Wehrmacht Panzer division officers (which Frankel initially resisted utilizing, despite its use as a sung dramatic device onscreen). Those last two projects were also the first of Frankel's film scores to get released as commercial soundtrack albums, and were re-recorded by a proper symphony orchestra in the 1990s for a CD release. Battle of the Bulge was Frankel's final movie score, and he spent the remaining eight years of his life composing for the concert hall and battling the heart disease that finally claimed him in 1973, at the age of 67. Frankel was fortunate, in terms of his legacy and reputation, that many of the movies he worked on from 1946 onward were heavily reshown across the decades on broadcast and cable television and have also seen video, laserdisc, and DVD release, thus keeping his name and music before the public. This helped lead to a rediscovery, reappraisal, and new recordings of his concert and film music in the 1990s, culminating in 2003 with the unearthing of his long-neglected complete score for Night and the City and its release on CD. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Battle of the Bulge Buy this Movie	The Night of the Iguana Buy this Movie	The Curse of the Werewolf Buy this Movie	Surprise Package Buy this Movie
A Kid for Two Farthings Buy this Movie	The Prisoner Buy this Movie	The End of the Affair Buy this Movie	The Paris Express Buy this Movie

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