Indelible Ennio (Primo); 7 Giallo Classics on Prime (Morricone Scores Pt. 1)

top: Forbidden Photos of a Lady above Suspicion / bottom: Black Belly of the Tarantula

Thinking of why he's so many leagues above the rest, I'm reminded of the bit in Amadeus when the king tells Mozart to add more notes. You hear the hackneyed Salieri-style orchestrations of lesser composers for whom this adage is gospel, determined to justify their 100 piece orchestra by having every instrument involved in big elaborate sweeping gestures and micro-managerial helicopter (or 'mickey mouse') scoring. Ennio never uses any instrument when none would be better. His is a kind of intuitive drive and love of cinema that transcends scores as we know them today.

There are only a few working composers that get the Morricone touch, that continue and expand his approach in unique directions (away from classical and jazz influences and more towards avant garde and modernist) such as the great Hans Zimmer. But even he knows - Ennio rule (see Zimmer's "Ennio Morricone- My Inspiration"). 

His music is so intensely personal and seems to speak to the individual. Much more than grand pieces that seem to speak to a crowd of people, each piece Morricone writes seems to be personal to the individual listening to it, and that’s a really amazing achievement. (full)

And the best news about Ennio: there are a great many of his scores on LP and on engines like Spotify and Amazon Music, and a bunch of his movies are on Prime, to the point I can't even cover them all in one post. So there shall be three. First: these 7 groovy giallos, all from 1970-75, and all with decent HD or very good SD image on Prime... then, an equal number of westerns, then crime/corruption/communism! After all that, maybe you too can annoy your co-habitants with your obsessive swooning over his masterful use of music to enhance any scene until they too ask 'why Ennio?'

(PS -  Some of these have more than one upload -Autopsy and Cat O'Nine Tails for two- with different quality sources, so if you get a crap/SD/compressed one, try again)



What could have been just another super weird Mimsy Farmer-goes-schizo movie ala Perfume of a Lady in Black (1974 - Dir. Francesco Barilli) where tricks are played with narrative to undo murders and create seemingly random conspiracies just for the hell of it (and no Morricone), Autopsy (Italian title is better: Macchie Solari - but I can see why they didn't call it 'Sunspots' as that sounds like a comedy about a misfit girls' soccer team). is a zippy giallo that, not unlike A Quiet Place in the Country, understands that hallucinations are examples of paredolia amplified by lack of sleep, drugs, withdrawal, mental illness or high fever, and structured by desire and fear, the way a musician on a song might bend and warp the LP you're listening to into the shape of a grooved, spinning golem rising from the turntable mud. Sure, it's just a hallucination - yet it's in far more dimensions than just that 2-D groove you were carved into, that illusion of music, that ghost you called the real world.

The grisly title kept me away from this charmer for a long time, for I thought this was the German medical thriller I'd already seen, or any of the other zillion shows called Autopsy. A pox on lame namers of things Autopsy!

Farmer is playing, for a change, a total professional - she's the one doing autopsies. And due to sunspots there are a ton of suicides in town, which means--for a doctoral candidate in post-mortem medicine doing her thesis on real vs. artificial (really murder) suicides--she's too busy cutting dead people open to stay sane. Her hallucinations and being prone to violence are all understandable due to the stress, the long hours, the sinister way everyone seems to be plotting against her, and being in leering macho rapey Rome. As with Perfume she has a handsome rich boyfriend whom she pushes and pulls with her love/hate psycho killer closeted aversion to sex, prioritizing her doctoral studies. She likes long walks on the beach and lapsing into strange reveries. The lighting is generally better in (at least the second half) of Perfume, but Autopsy makes more linear sense. I don't know why I have to compare them just because Mimsy Farmer is in both. She's the queen of giallo! Or maybe... the king?
 

Barry Primus is Father Paul - not your average priest, he used to be a race car driver - who quit after his last collision killed 12 people. Today Farmer works in the effects department! Coincidence? Morricone's score builds on sustained drones that slowly build and then end in moans and gasps from two women who are either dying or orgasming or both, then the drones start back up again, like the wheezy noises that might creep up from the grave of a murdered organist. Other places Morricone's crew stays busy like little flights of bees trying to keep their buzzing volume down so they can get at the nectar before it's taken by some bullying hummingbird. Piano keys hammer like late-added semi-colons trying to find their place in the ghostly lines of a letter long since sent. Then, whirling dust storms of bird coos thrown through a dissecting machine. More moans, it just keeps delving deeper into that line - the heavy-breathing, dilated line you can taste on your tongue about 20-30 minutes after you drop acid.

The Prime print is a strange beast. It looks beautiful-or adequate (non-HD but at least anamorphic). but I saw TWO uploads of Autopsy on Prime - so keep trying if the one you click on is all messed up, compression-wise. There are TWO.

Though it's labeled a giallo in the traditional sense, Luciano Ercoli's Forbidden Photos...  has a direct link with the romantic-sexy soaps of the era meant for bored housewives, guilty about even fantasizing infidelity, so needing elaborate justifications, i.e. she needs to cheat with a younger handsomer, more virile man to save her husband's life or business reputation.  Through an elaborate sequence of events, sex with a handsome stranger becomes, not a marital indiscretion, but a noble sacrifice. This time-honored ploy stretches back to the silent age, up through the pre-code era (Blonde Venus) up to the 50s (Jeopardy) and even the 80s (An Indecent Proposal). Oftentimes the night of passion (or afternoon) was depicted as something sexy or enjoyable, but just as often vile and sordid, and only occasionally - as here- both). Still, whether or not she enjoyed her ordeal, or even fantasized about such an overpowering beforehand, is irrelevant - her feelings were her own.

Ah, but there was the alternative, where the woman is so horrified at the changes it's making in her - ala Blue Velvet and this red telephone keeper from director Luciano Ercoli. She showers and showers afterwards, but still feels his pawing.



The cast is relatively small, narrowing down the suspect list, with clingy undersexed housewife Minou (Dagmar Lassander) doing what's necessary to hold onto husband Peter (Pier Palo Capponi) a business tycoon in danger of losing his company. Simon Andreu is the mysterious masterful man with a tape of Peter confessing murder. Andreu's love den black and full of exotic art, like white hands coming out of the wall. "Don't worry, you'll enjoy yourself a lot more than you imagine," he says. "Take off your coat!"
Other suspects include Dominique (Nieves Navarro), who was once a lover of Peter but that's all over, or is it. Another suspect: pills, since Minou is taking Valiums again her erratic behavior may be the result of a breakdown. At least that's what Peter says.

Clearly "mother's little helper" was creating a whole splinter group from the main drag of the Edgar Wallace-centric giallo, beyond its loosening grip lay orgy sex clubs and Satanic sects. In films like Case of The Bloody Iris, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, the married wife left too long at home in bed sexually frustrated while husband's gets menaced by attractive knife-wielding male (or is he just  fantasy) trying to get her to return to the sex club they started.

I'm not a fan of Dagmar Lassander's look here: her stooped, defeated posture, the combo of tacky powder blue frock with matching eye shadow, fake red hair, and pink lipstick, but I am a huge fan of Nieves Navarro as Minou's sexy-cool liberated bisexual swinger friend Dominique, even though she rocks a lot of the same pale blue/pink look. A star of an array of quality if unexceptional giallos, Navarro  always seems to play the same part: a cool liberated character who seems to have created swinging late-60s/early-70s Milan or Rome to suit herself. Some of her ideas may not gel with today's society ("I'd adore being violated") but I don't think that would faze her much; I also like Andreu and his love den ("I must say, your performance has been more than I expected.")


Morricone factor: One of 17 scores Ennio did in 1970 alone, he's just doing a job here, but doing it well: the title theme coos along with the traditional wordless vocalizing (something that no doubt helped with international markets to avoid lyric confusion), with a gentle trumpet part floating high over a dreamy Barcelona netting of strings. Later the suspense builds with the same netting rattled by a single four note refrain, swimming against the grain of trumpet and strings like an incessant, nagging guilty conscience. Elsewhere woodwinds move in and out of mimicking police sirens, funky organs and wah-wah guitars groove in the nightclub scene. And if that scene gets confusing it's because both Minou and Dominique are wearing strange new wigs!



Leaving Prime at the end of the month!


Based on Edgar Wallace's crime novel "The Clue of the New Pin" this beautifully-photographed (and lushly transferred to HD) thriller occurs in that most ideal of all giallo settings, a private Catholic girls' school (in England, supposedly), one foolish enough to hire the devilishly handsome Fabio Testi as a 'phys-ed' and Italian teacher. The girl he's with now os still a virgin so Rassini (Testi) thinks she's once again holding out by saying she saw a knife flash as they drifted past a maybe murder scene. She wasn't, but kind of was. The knife thing as Freudian a fear of penetration excuse is so on point here it kind of cracks the code of what Diane Keaton called that "whole Italian... thing." Also, nothing is more gross that lying in the bottom of a boat, I don't care how dry it is, it's not dry.

Morricone's score builds on a mournful bottom note single-hand piano refrain that slowly builds into two hands, wordless cooing vocals hitting dreamy high notes and strings cascading sadly like a waterful trickle of circling hawks. The girl insists there was a murder - the score gets really weird, pitch bending to a kind - lazily drifting downstream. Turns out there was a murder but how can Rassini explain being at the scene of the crime without getting fired? But soon the killer knows he and his star pupil saw something and the murders begin anew...someone is killing off the girls in his class, it's up to Rassini to stop it, with the cops running parallel and intersecting investigations.

A slinky Morricone bass line, brushed drums and honking off-key trumpet mute (expertly blending into the honk of a BMW car horn) let us know this is going to be a touch Hitchcockian as well as sordid, even cop show at times, like a kid smashing a funky TV cop show score into a Herrmann-esque thriller then recording the crash, and riffing off the dying honk of the steering wheel, viola!

Thank god then, for the Morricone score which provides a cacophonic counterpoint whenever it can. You don't even need a story when Ennio is at the top of his game like he is here. All crumbling electric guitars, atonal mashes of the keyboard, deep breathing and wheezy organs, he catches and balances the woozy mise-en-scene the way a patient friend might help a stumbling drunk to his car.
Considering the by-the-numbers direction of journeyman-hack Paolo Cavara (Mondo Cane) and the fact that Tarantolo's screenplay was written by woman (Lucille Lans) it's perhaps no surprise that a) the film is lacking the drive and momentum that toxic blend of male Catholic guilt and seething sexual frustration can provide, and b) its strengths lie in its 'weaknesses,' in its swooning, feminine sexuality, which we guilty scholars will note is almost completely free of voyeuristic "eye"-conography. The stripping nude of the female victims and the paralysis method seem to set the stage for kinky trauma, but the editor knows that when they stop screaming and act dead, the tension goes out and it just becomes mannequin-jabbing necrophile boredom. We have Spasmo for that! (Another great Ennio score in that one, but it's not on Prime).

With so little suspense or empathy generated by the killings, the big mystery becomes how a cop as foggy and strung-out as Giancarlo Giannini's Inspector Tellini ever made it to homicide in the first place. He should be handing out parking tickets, at best. From a surrealist standpoint the detective's confusion and rank incompetence puts him in the rarefied realm of somnambulist shamuses that have been knocked into weird zones between realities: Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart; Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense; Asia Argento in The Stendahl Syndrome; Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly-characters who may or may not be already dead, as if they awoke from a dream into the film and don't really remember a damn thing about investigative protocol. But at least in those films the target always turns out to be someone or something intrinsically tied up with the pursuer. In Belly, the final disconnect becomes more of a Dirty Harry sort of "this time it's personal!" punch out, which illuminates our hero's darkened path not a watt. Oh well, if you're so xanaxed out you don't even know where or who you are it helps to have some really weird Morricone to help you home. One psychedelically twisted note of discordant guitar and you know that you're safe in the beloved giallo genre, where druggy amnesia isn't only forgiven, it's practically essential. (see full -6/09).


Franco Franco Nero smolders and drinks valiantly against the rushing tide of fatalistic Ennio Morricone-scored vocalizing and surging drones in this fine giallo, an example of how you can dip into the tricks and trappings of the Argento-via-Hitchcock paintbox, rather than be merely derivative, create something vivid and cool, vibrant and alive. Partially excavating the deep roots of childish lack of impulse control beneath macho vanity and alcoholism, Nero plays an ex-husband womanizer journalist who still loves his ex-wife (Silvia Monti) even though he's shacked up with cute blonde Pamela Tiffin. Teetering between Keitel Bad Lieutenant transcendental-abusive and Nick Nolte Affliction DT-delusional, Nero follows clues leading him to murder victims that he knew, and so forth. I've seen it six times and I still can't follow how any of these people are supposed to even know each other. Maybe Rome is very small, so when you hang out at a bar one night (the opening swinging nightclub scene, cracked to bursting with stares, slinky electric organ music, and possible leads), everyone you meet will have all sorts of interconnected secrets. As long as modernist international architecture leads to wild post-modernist compositions like these, baby, you go right ahead.

A highlight is Ennio's dreamy music for a passage that finds Nero spying on through a side window on some languid afternoon sex show being filmed in silhouette on a wall shot through glass beads, laden with queer innuendo as one realizes the extent being gay in the 60s-70s meant continuous exposure to blackmail, so everyone had to sneak around, drawing the eye of curious detectives and journalists following up any random clue. Here we get glass beads, strange hungry looks, and Ennio so breathy perfect time stops altogether in a fairie bower haze.

it's all in fun

As in so many detective thrillers of its time (when the real-life "Zodiac" was big in the public eye), astrology factors into the murders. We realize the killer only strikes "on a Tuesday, sacred to Mars, favorable to Aires!' (The Italian title translates to 'Black Day for Aires") Light through Venetian blinds, the roving camera, crisp sets, good dubbing, a sense of the phoniness inside the souls of the characters that not only excuses phoniness in the film but resembles Antonioni-esque fatalism as much as it does Argento diabolism. Even when the crippled heiress (the ever-glowering Rosella Falk) is being terrified, crawling across the floor like a snake towards her distant wheelchair, she's framed beautifully by a stone lion, dark yellow curtains, and a gray cat, Morricone's organ fugue underscoring her funeral even as she's still alive.

Debits for the heavy reliance on day-for-night in the stalking/killing sequences, as if they all occur in some heavy gravity zone of deep blue eternal concrete twilight, where all light sources, tunnel roof lights etc, glow with a deep azure-green halo like you're just watching with very dark sunglasses on. Were they shot by the AD while Bazzoni was lining up his international style architecture lines and making sure the light gleans deep and merciless into Nero's weeping, drunk crystal blue eyes?