Finally.
The classy Italian cult music specialists Four Flies Records have issued the soundtrack to the deliciously sleazy, sexy and seductive 1975 Italian giallo film Nude per’lassassino, otherwise known as Strip Nude for Your Killer. Neither the original soundtrack nor its intoxicating main theme were ever previously issued in an official capacity. Long thought lost, the original 8-track tapes were found recently, apparently whiling – or rotting – away in a box in some dusty old basement.
This vinyl (only) issue marks Nude per l’assassino‘s first-ever release, and it’s a joy to behold.
Way back in 2010, I reported on the European and Italian film music scholar – and moderator of the Facebook group The Retro Euro Cult Film Score Society – John Bender’s “call-to-arms” at the Film Score Monthly board for some brave film music specialist to issue this delectable little score.
Little did we know at the time, that, like far too many worthy scores (I am still hoping Michael Small’s score to the 1975 film Night Moves turns up in somebody’s garage), it was thought to be lost or destroyed. The film’s main theme had only ever appeared on a bootleg CD compilation, likely recorded right off a DVD issue of the film – which is exactly how I often enjoyed it, over and over again.
Nude per l’assassino, literally “naked for the killer,” was directed by exploitation master Andrea Bianchi (1925-2013). The film was the first of three of the director’s Pisano-scored film extravaganzas: the notorious Malabimba (1979) and Burial Ground (1981) being the other two. Undoubtedly, it was the best of the collaborators’ film projects and the best of Pisano’s Bianchi scores.
Coming at the tail end of the great giallo cycle that reigned between Dario Argento’s 1970 film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and ended with Argento’s own 1975 classic Profondo rosso (aka Deep Red), Nude per l’assassino has the specific advantage of featuring not one but two of the genre’s undisputed scream queens, the extremely beautiful but genuinely talented Edwige Fenech and the always game and buxom Femi Benussi (both were noted at the time for their popularity in Italian sex comedies as well).
Nude per l’assassino comes at a time when many European genre films were becoming notably more sleazy, with amped-up sex scenes and increasingly nasty sexual violence. But while Nude is often derided as much as celebrated for its sleaziness – the men are real pigs and the women are slutty beyond belief – the film can’t hold a candle to another Pisano-scored giallo, Mario Landi’s dreadfully awful Giallo in Venice (1979).
The film is, however, guilty of wallowing in some of the genre’s worst excesses: the script’s embarrassing and very dated sexism and some crazy, hammy acting, especially by actor Nino Castelnuovo, who plays the detestable Carlo, particularly stand out.
But it also features some remarkably memorable set pieces, a black-leather bound killer (whose svelte figure certainly narrows down the potential suspects) and a surprisingly considerable human understanding of loneliness, women in the workplace, lesbianism and obesity.
Aside from the presence of the two female leads, chief among Nude per l’assassino‘s assets is the film’s terrifically exciting main theme. Obviously modeled after Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” it sounds more like a poliziottechi theme by Franco Micalizzi or Guido and Maurizio De Angelis than one of the canonical themes out of the Ennio Morricone playbook (Morricone scored many of the best and best-known giallo films).
Driven by an intoxicating funk bass line and enhanced with a pulsating jazz trumpet – beautifully played by Italian trumpeter Oscar Valdambrini (1924-96) – the main theme (titled “Nude per l’assassino” on the soundtrack) is not only a tasty slice of jazz funk but a remarkably adept action-movie theme…that is totally deflated by the film’s goofy first scene.
The theme gets its spectral vocal, of course, by the legendary Edda Del’Orso, in that suggestive way of vocalizing words that may or may not exist, leaving it to the listener’s imagination whatever she’s singing about. Pisano’s extremely effective disco string work enhances the song mightily, as does an uncredited trombonist, who adds terrific counterpoint.
I once surmised there were only one or two fully-fledged cues, apart from the main theme, that could fit out on a release of the soundtrack. But, boy was I wrong. Here, Four Flies presents a whopping 15 tracks, roughly 36 and a half minutes of music. It amounts to about six fully-fledged and worthy themes, with the main theme’s lone variation being titled, appropriately enough, “Strip Nude for Your Killer.”
The Four Flies release also reveals that the music for the film was recorded in Rome by Gianni Fornari over six sessions between April 23 and 29, 1975 (the film premiered in Italian cinemas on August 26, 1975).
Perhaps the biggest surprise of all, though, is that Berto Pisano supposedly composed the Nude per l’assassino soundtrack with the help of Elsio Mancuso. The latter – who wore some pretty diverse hats at the time in the Italian film industry as composer, producer, assistant director and actor – is not at all credited on the final film and, as a result, not listed as such on IMDb either.
But, according to Four Flies, the Italian music publisher PRO SIAE lists both Mancuso and Pisano as the composers of the score, which is likely correct, as the two are co-credited on quite a few scores together: The Big Blackout (1966), Decameron nº 2 (1972 – also available digitally from Four Flies), Gli altri racconti di Canterbury (1972), They Were Called Three Musketeers But They Were Four (1973), La Collegiale (1975), as well as the aforementioned Malabimba and Burial Ground.
But why Mancuso failed to receive final credit in the film remains a mystery.
As Four Flies so perfectly puts it, “Nude per l’assassino is a cornerstone of Italian genre cinema: lurid, brazen, and utterly iconic, with a sexy-panther Edwige Fenech sporting a haircut that could scar your adolescence, and the unforgettable image of a killer in full-face helmet and motorcycle suit. [Little wonder why the black-clad killer factors in so much of the artwork promoting the film.]
“This soundtrack is the very soul of that film, hidden for far too long, now gloriously brought into the light. A forbidden dream made real.” Available, as of this writing, at Four Flies Records and Dusty Groove.