Over the past few years I’ve been going through a vague, cyclical phase were I have a period of watching a lot of giallo films in a short period of time. This is now happening again, now that the Criterion Channel have a new Giallo feature on their site with a good number of great films I’ve seen but a few I’ve never come across as they’re sort of hard to find.
Such is the case with a giallo I recently watched, 1972’s All The Colors Of The Dark (Tutti i colori del buio), directed by Sergio Martino and starring the raven-haired French-Italian actress Edwige Fenech, who appeared in numerous films of this genre and around this time period, including Five Dolls for an August Moon, The Case of the Bloody Iris and the ridiculously, long-windedly named Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. She also appeared in some rather camp music videos in the 1980s after this period, including a bubblegum cover of the Ghostbusters theme tune.
The soundtrack to All The Colors Of The Dark was done by Bruno Nicolai, who is a rather well-known scorer of soundtracks, mainly in Italian cinema and mostly in the 1970s. For me I’m aware of five main film score composers that pop into mind from Italy around this period: Nicolai, the prog rock band Goblin, Nino Rota (who scored most Fellini films), Riz Ortolani, and of course probably the most well-known with hundreds of film credits to his name, Ennio Morricone.
The film has some cool cinematography, including some lens-based optical effects for the more trippier parts of the film. At some point the main character (Edwige Fenech) gets introduced to an occult cult (nice alliteration there) in some moody, old mansion where a forcefully psychedelic yet theatrical ritual takes place. This is all soundtracked by a rather weird piece by Nicolai that caught my attention so I listened to it a few more times on its own afterwards, and therefore it’s now here in this Track Of The Day thing.
With giallo and a lot of Italian films at this time there was a great interest to include elements of pop music into the scores — often funky, jazzy or some weird proggy fusion thing. Likely because the whole bulk of films share the same smaller pool of composers, you see a lot of the same names scoring the films, especially Morricone. There’s a lot of pieces that have this pop-meets-choir thing going on, like some breezy, 60s pop/lounge tune and then a massive choir singing over that. Must have been a trend at the time, as with the piece heard playing during the ritual scene. The track is actually in two main disjointed parts that go back and forth over the course of 6 minutes.
The “first” bit is, well, this pop-meets-choir thing with numerous variations on it through out the track. It tries to sound a bit exotic with the addition of some clanky, out-of-tune sitar, which almost sounds like the musician is furiously strumming a loose, metallic length of wire. The choir over top sounds almost Gregorian at times, or from a classic spaghetti western film. There’s a few times that part almost starts to sound like some Christmas carol, complete with singers in the snow in the streets — “Joy To The World”?
And then it switches to this “second” bit, which is a bit unsuspected — with the guitar becoming more prominent and switching over to a diabolic, chromatic hard rock/surf riff, that almost could sound more like fuzzed-out heavy metal if the guitar had been going through some more brutal distortion — or maybe “Lucifer Sam” by Pink Floyd (and later covered by Love And Rockets). The sitar-like instrument starts to go into overdrive and sound more like something Einstürzende Neubauten would deploy on a recording. Further into the recording this riff has wails and screams from the actors from the film overlaid, making for a demented yet groovy satanic atmosphere.
Overall these two parts are mainly glued together by the drumming that goes under the music for the whole duration of the track, in a style that brings to mind Jaki Liebezeit from Can. The song eventually concludes on a variation of the “first” bit, with the additional excitement of this drummer now doing some Keith Moon-style (or Animal from The Muppets) continuous drum fill over all the repetitions of the verse at this point.
Probably my most favourite example of this “style” is a piece called “Valmont’s Go-Go Pad” from the 1968 film Danger: Diabolik, starring John Phillip Law (who was the tall, lanky wing-ed dude from the 1968 film Barbarella), and composed by Morricone. It’s an earlier Mario Bava film from 1965, that wouldn’t be recognised from his usual horror-leaning output but rather almost a spoof on spy films at the time, yet sort of feels a bit flat and too kitsch. It again uses that pop-meets-choir formula although this one more falls in line with a jumpy Motown-style number rather than a laid-back pop-jazz feel. It almost gives me the feeling of the original version of “Tainted Love” by Gloria Jones (later immortalised by Soft Cell), if it were slowed down a bit and with the entire mix passed through a deep, spring reverb tank — especially the snare drum which sounds like it was recorded at the complete other side of a massive, underground cave. It almost sounds a bit like it’s tainted through some gothic doom chamber, complete with the choir blowing it out over top of this one.
I put a trailer for All The Colors Of The Dark below, opting to choose the “modern” trailer as it seems more sinister and captures the weirder, darker vibes from the film more.