Albert Glasser

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 such big guns as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He graduated to orchestrating, and by the mid-'40s was composing and directing his own scores. A hard, fast worker, Glasser found his musical skills put to the test in the frantic, down-to-the-wire world of B-picture making. He scored a staggering 135 movies between 1944 and 1962, not counting at least 35 features for which he received no credit. In addition to scoring 300 television shows and 450 radio programs, he arranged and conducted for noted American operetta composer Rudolf Friml and orchestrated for Ferde Grofé Sr. (with whom he first collaborated on the sci-fi classic Rocketship X-M (1950)).