Ennio Morricone

“Gli Intoccabili” (The untouchables) is a slightly unknown movie that belongs to a very crowded group of international productions made between the ’60s and the ’70s. Some became ‘instant classics’, while many others remained unknown for years, only to be rediscovered recently and pronounced a cult movie. Such as this film directed by Giuliano Montaldo in the US and screened for the first time on April 1969. The cast is stellar, with a young Peter ‘Lieutenant Columbo’ Falk, John Cassavetes (who had just worked on “Rosemary’s Baby”), Gena Rowlands, Britt Ekland and Florinda Bolkan as the main characters.

The music is written by the omnipresent Ennio Morricone, who fluently moves from the western genre (the various Sergio Leone’s films which made him famous in the sixties) to the police/thriller one, making this one of his most varied works. As in the western field, we find one main vocal track about the main character, “La ballata di Hank McCain”, while the rest of the soundtrack toggles between symphonic/epic moments and tense/dissonant ones, going through mellow and lounge atmospheres.