Robert Farnon

Canadian-born composer Robert Farnon came to film composition in England after nearly a decade spent establishing himself as a serious composer in the concert hall, interrupted by army service. By the second half of the '40s, he'd moved into light classical music and soon after joined the British film industry with his score for the Val Guest-directed comedy Just William's Luck (1947), a low-budget production distributed by United Artists and intended primarily for British audiences. He then moved up to Herbert Wilcox's more elegant productions such as Maytime in Mayfair, and in 1951 scored his first major international release, the British Warner Bros. production of Captain Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck. From that point on, for most of the next decade, he usually had one film assignment a year, many of them comedies such as Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, The Little Hut, and Expresso Bongo. His movie scores tended to be highly melodic and usually had at least one big sweeping theme to carry them, along with elegant and clever orchestrations. Farnon's film work slackened off during the '60s, and he moved into working in the adventure genre with The Truth About Spring (1965) and Shalako (1968). His most widely seen and heard scores of the '70s dated from the end of the decade and were done for television productions of A Man Called Intrepid and Mary and Joseph: A Story of Faith.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide