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Dragon's Domain Records presents THE ALBERT GLASSER COLLECTION, VOLUME 8: FILM NOIR THRILLERS II. The 1950s were Albert Glasser's busiest as a film composer, scoring many films across multiple genres. With this eighth collection of the composer's music, we are pleased to explore two films focusing on film noir that Glasser scored in the1950s: 1954's DRAGON'S GOLD and 1956's FLIGHT TO HONG KONG.
Released in 1956, FLIGHT TO HONG KONG was directed by Joseph M. Newman, written by George Callahan, Gustave Field and Leo Townsend, starring Rory Calhoun, Barbara Rush, Dolores Donlon, Pat Conway, Werner Klemperer, Mel Welles and Paul Picerni. A trans-Pacific airplane carrying a shipment of industrial diamonds is hijacked and forced to land at a remote airstrip. The passengers include a famous novelist, Pamela (Rush), and her handsome seatmate, Tony (Calhoun). He turns out to be in charge of the Macau-based arm of the international crime syndicate responsible for staging the theft. The passengers eventually arrive in Hong Kong, where Pamela is swarmed by the press, and Tony is reunited with his girlfriend, Jean (Donlon), who works at the nightclub owned by his adopted mother, Mama Lin (Soo Young). Albert Glasser scores the film with his usual vigor, peppering several orchestrations with an exotic-sounding instrument,which seems to be equally at home in both the Far East or outer space. Glasser was also responsible for the background music in the club sequences.
Released in 1954, DRAGON'S GOLD was directed by Jack Pollexfen and Aubrey Wisberg, written by Wisberg and Pollexfen, starring John Archer, Hillary Brooke, Noel Cravat, Philip Van Zandt, Marvin Press and Dayton Lummis. DRAGON'S GOLD follows Mack Rossiter (Archer), an investigator for a bonding company sent to Hong Kong tofind out if one of their clients actually stole $7,000,000 worth of gold. No sooner does he arrive than he becomes entangled in a web of murders, intrigues and double-crosses that include the client's wife, Vivian (Brooke), another man posing as the client and someone else claiming that he's the legitimate owner of the gold.
Born January 25,1916, Albert Glasser was a composer, conductor and arranger of film music. One of the most prolific B-movie composers, Albert Glasser started off as a copyist in the music department at Warner Brothers in the late 1930s, learning the art of film scoring from scratch while working under Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He graduated to orchestrating, and by the mid-1940s was composing his own scores. He scored approximately 200 films during his career, many for American International Pictures and director Bert I. Gordon. For the US War Department, Glasser composed for Frank Capra's Special Services Unit and for Office of War Information radio shows for overseas broadcasts. For television,he composed the score for THE CISCO KID. For radio, he composed scores for HOPALONG CASSIDY, CLYDE BEATTY, and TARZAN.
Dragon's Domain Records presents THE ALBERT GLASSER COLLECTION VOLUME 8: FILM NOIR THRILLERS II, featuring the premiere release of original music composed by Albert Glasser for DRAGON'S GOLD and FLIGHT TO HONG KONG, mastered by James Nelson at Digital Outland. The booklet contains liner notes written by noted author David Hirsch.
- BSX
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