Italian Soundtracks

One of the unexpected pleasures of the CD age was that European reissue labels began dredging up soundtracks from both familiar and obscure Italian films from the early 1950s through the late '70s. These boom years of Italian cinema, when Rome's studios churned out everything from art-house classics to the schlockiest softcore, caused a similarly enormous glut of soundtracks, nearly all of them featuring lush orchestral arrangements, elegant melodies and jazz-inspired cool. Many were far more interesting and pleasurable than the movies themselves. At the time, Nino Rota (whose brilliant work on Federico Fellini's classic 1950s and '60s films, including 8 1/2 and Juliet of the Spirits, led Francis Ford Coppola to hire him for The Godfather) and Ennio Morricone (whose twang-guitar-and-whistling themes for Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns became what most Americans think of when they think of Italian soundtrack music) were the only names known to the average American filmgoer. But in the late 1980s, as reissue imprints led by Italy's prolific CAM label opened the CD floodgates, lesser-known worthies like Piero Umiliani (known to generations of American youth as the guy whose ultimate earworm "Mah Nà Mah Nà" was repurposed for a much-beloved sketch on The Muppet Show) and Edda del'Orso (whose wordless soprano vocalizations are a key element of seemingly hundreds of Italian soundtracks) became familiar names. Several introductory CD anthologies exist, most devoted to specific eras or film genres, offering the newcomer affordable ways to dip into this potentially forbidding wave of reissues.