Kill is a 1971 film starring Jean Seberg (Joan of Arc) and James Mason, internationally filmed in exotic locales like Yemen and Afghanistan, it details the intrigue and corruption inherent in the international drug trade, and upon release pretty much sank without a trace. There is however a back-story to Seberg’s involvement that has been detailed in a recent Wax Poetics piece by Omni head honcho Dave Thrussell, who while researching this reissue began to piece together a real life tale of FBI harassment, surveillance and overreaching by intelligence agencies.
The score however is some else. Melding punchy energetic jazz with intermittent brass explosions, it’s the quintessential Italian job. It’s a highly caffeinated over the top Touch of Evil Henry Mancini with emotional problems, there’s a groove here, but a shrill paranoid darkness too.
It’s the work of Italian composer Berto Pisano, who began as a jazz player though is best known for his film scores and periodic excursions into pop. His most popular piece A Blue Shadow is a smooth orchestral melodramatic piece of melancholia. He is joined by Jacques Chaumont, for whom there is scant information, leading Thrussell et al to suggest it may be a pseudonym for Berto’s brother Franco, also a film composer who boasted such scores as Erotic Exploits of a Sexy Seducer and Goldface, The Fantastic Superman.
It’s a remarkably diverse work, there are frenzies of go-go music, shrill noiresque staccato strings, lush smooth and slightly melancholic orchestral pieces alongside these gentle moments of avant garde almost de composed sound design. In this sense these quieter moments feel even more macabre, with wailing voices and insistent, vaguely religious drones. There’s even a spot of western doing eastern, which is always a lot of fun. The compositions are wild and often unexpected, at times suites of sound just come in and out, with only a vague relationship between them, and then the following piece will be much more locked down self-contained pop.
Of note is the previously unreleased Hiasmina, which is ostensibly an earlier piece Il Deserto with the addition of Seberg moaning and whimpering over the top. It’s quite strange. The other unreleased piece Inchiesta begins like an outtake from Ben Hur with timpani’s and bombastic brass that inexplicably transforms midway into a 70’s cop show theme. Groovy. And just a little bit confusing. Not unlike this incredible lost soundtrack as a whole.
