Jack Beaver

Although little-remembered today, Jack Beaver enjoyed one of the more long-lived careers in film music in England, contributing to 30 years' worth of movie scores, including Alfred Hitchcock's first huge international hit The Thirty-Nine Steps (for which Beaver received no credit) and Vincent Sherman's 1949 hit The Hasty Heart, right up through Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's It Happened Here (1965). Beaver worked at the music department at Gaumont-British Studios under Louis Levy during the 1930s, and was hired by Warner Bros. to run the music department at their British studio at Teddington in the early '40s. Apart from The Hasty Heart, none of his British Warner Bros. work involved movies that had a high profile outside of England, although Beaver did write the scores for a pair of interesting historical dramas, The Prime Minister (1941) and Showtime (1948). Beaver's music for the 1939 thriller The Case of the Frightened Lady is regarded by some scholars as the first notable piano-based score for film, and a short suite derived from it (titled "Portrait of Isla") has been released by the Naxos label on its collection Film Piano Concertos. - Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide