Mort Glickman on AllMovie

Mort Glickman was a mainstay of the Republic Pictures music department for 13 years, in addition to composing for television and occasionally other studios. Born in Chicago, he moved to California in 1939 and joined Republic's music staff soon after. His earliest known contribution to the screen was on the serial Mysterious Dr. Satan, which included one of Glickman's most memorable pieces of action film scoring. "Car Transfer" played beneath a scene in which a hero is desperately attempting to jump between two fast-moving vehicles, and its pounding beat, resounding horn calls, and rapid brass stings made it one of the most exciting cues in the entire Republic music library. Glickman would serve as the music director on more than 40 releases by the studio, and his music was written for or tracked into over 120 titles, among them some of the studio's most celebrated serials, including Nyoka and the Tigermen. Beginning in the late '40s, Glickman was also one of the principal "ghost" composers working with Raoul Kraushaar, and his work done under the latter's name includes his contribution to The Abbott & Costello Show's first season.

Glickman's greatest score, however -- and the only one that he ever got to write for a relatively big-budget movie -- was his last: William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars (1953). The movie was shot on the Republic Pictures lot and used lots of studio personnel. His music for it is eerily expressive and strikingly textured, including a mixed chorus that carries much of the title theme. His main inspiration seems to have come from the use of the chorus in Neptune, The Mystic from Gustav Holst's suite The Planets (at one point, the score even directly quotes a few bars of Venus, Bringer of Peace); but he put intense new twists on the sound and the writing, some of which seems to anticipate György Ligeti's works of the late '50s and early '60s, including Lux Aeterna and Atmospheres (both works that are widely familiar to filmgoers from their use in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey). Glickman died in February 1953 at the age of 54, but thanks to the extensive contribution that he made to Republic's music library, his work continued to be heard in new releases and theatrical and television reissues of older studio titles well into the 1960s.