Ennio Morricone

Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and EMI General Music Publishing, presents a remastered reissue of the 1968 classic, propulsive and exciting Ennio Morricone cult score for the gangster movie Gli Intoccabili (aka Machine Gun McCain), a successful Italian-US coproduction, directed by Giuliano Montaldo and starring John Cassavetes, Britt Ekland, Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands and Gabrielle Ferzetti. The film is about a paroled gangster and his son who plan to rob a Las Vegas gambling house, unaware that the casino is bitterly contested by the West Coast and East Coast mobs.

Ennio Morricone’s score creates an elegant and distant—almost abstract—atmosphere. “Hank McCain’s Ballad,” performed by Jackie Lynton, anchors the musical narrative. It is a melancholic, nostalgic theme that deliberately contrasts with the character’s violence. The film’s musical discourse oscillates between two opposing universes: one of elegance and artifice, and the other syncopated, dissonant, urgent. Morricone resorts to atonal structures, employing radical sound resources: metallic clusters, industrial noises, abrupt staccatos of metal or struck piano. Traditional melody disappears; instead, tension is built from texture and unconventional instrumentation. The score also includes two different and beautiful love themes.

An album with a selection of 11 tracks was released in Italy and France in 1969, becoming one of Morricone’s most sought-after albums over the following decades. In early 1990, Alhambra released the first CD edition with the same program. Over the following years, Gli Intoccabili has been released several times on CD and LP (even on cassette!) with different programs, some more expanded than others. The most complete edition, 74 minutes long, appeared in 2010 on GDM, supervised by the composer and produced by Claudio Fuiano and Dániel Winkler. This CD quickly sold out. This is a reissue of the same program, revised and mastered by Chris Malone. The booklet includes liner notes by Miguel Ángel Ordóñez discussing the movie, the music and the composer.