Better known to English language audiences as one of the few film appearances by Camille Keaton (later to achieve a kind of immortality/notoriety in Meir Zarchy's Day of the Woman / I Spit on Your Grave), What Have They Done to Solange? also ranks as one of Ennio Morricone's best giallo scores because it's such a perfect amalgam of the composer's fascination for bending the rules and scoring a titillating shocker with concepts that never insult the audience, and give resonance to a film with an inherent sleaze factor.

Multi-thematic, and following Morricone's then-penchant for crafting a gentle lullaby to offset the brutal dissonance in his giallo scores, DigitMovies' sublime album also interpolates many unreleased alternates that often differ significantly from the film versions, giving the already engaging album more reasons for a second spin in the CD player.

Solange was written in 1972, during Morricone's monster period where he scored upwards of 15-20 movies in one year, so there's significant parallels between other giallo soundtracks, including Dario Argento's Cat O' Nine Tails , Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and Enzo Castellari's Cold Eyes of Fear / Gli Occhi freddi della paura (1971).

Like his score for Cold Eyes, it's the funky jazz deconstruction that dominates cues such as “Cadenze” and “Aleatorio” with shrilling strings abrasively trying to disrupt the bass fingering and drum hits. And similar to Cat O' Nine Tails, there's grinding strings and muted trumpet in “Aleatorio,” while “Aleatorio Secondo” offers Morricone's familiar use of rising, falling, intertwining tones; here, however, the emphasis is near-disunion, via painfully harsh strings and a restriction to each instrument's ceiling of high notes.

“Ostinazioneal Limone” is a grooving, sly cue with dueling acoustic guitars on the stereo spectrum, and an electric bass grounding the unstoppable ostinato. A jazzy drum beat kicks in the background, and Morricone uses an organ for some eerie colour.

Electronics also figure in “Altre cadenze,” with the regular use of an electronic shrill that fades up and down on the right track, while muted brass bellow from a distant, bottomless pit, and the organ plays an unforgivable funeral dirge.

One of the biggest surprises in the score is the hurdy-gurdy tune “Fragile organetto,” which is a slight variation of the carnival music heard in Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet , and was left off the original soundtrack album*******.

Like Cat O Nine Tails, Solange has its own tender main theme, and Morricone's use of Edda dell'Orso's ethereal voice, coupled with piano and acoustic guitar, convey images of innocence and deep affection. The warm sections of the semi-tragic theme are bracketed by sharp string plucks that provide a suitable allusion to the disruption of these tender qualities by the killer.

A slightly longer version, used to close the film, contains a fuller use of orchestra, and Morricone tones reduces the more disruptive qualities of the strings, yet has dell'Orso performing her final part with visible exhaustion, not only ending the cue on a calm level, but alluding to the brutality that will forever scar the characters who survived the killer's ordeals.

Just as memorable is the short “Anche un quartetto per lei,” which largely consists of tight bundled woodwinds and strings playing a short melodic phrase. There's virtually no ornamentation, and the cue delivers a sharp moment of tenderness through Morricone's radically simple construction.

A mandatory addition to anyone's collection of Morricone scores, and giallo soundtracks.

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan