Oliver Reed stars in Sergio Sollima’s 1973 thriller Revolver as a prison officer whose wife is kidnapped, and who has to organise the breakout of a violent criminal in order to get her back. It’s got a bit of a cult following, but doesn’t seem to be that well-known today.
It was the fifth and final film directed by Sollima to receive a score by the great Ennio Morricone (their first collaboration, The Big Gundown, is one of the great Italian westerns and features one of the composer’s finest scores of that genre). This genre – the thriller – is another in which Morricone thrived (well, I suppose he thrived in most genres) though his music for it is perhaps a little more of an acquired taste than his westerns or romances, which are of course beloved by so many. On occasion he wrote extraordinarily challenging music for the genre, dissonant and as he would say “absolute”, which could be remarkably impressive and effective but make for a hard time for the album listener.
Revolver is not one of those – it is a melodic, always-listenable (and almost always melodic) score which retains a hard-hitting edge – in some ways a sequel to another score he wrote for this director, Città Violenta, but with the key difference being that this one features one of Morricone’s loveliest themes (and that, my friends, is saying something).
“Un Amico” is just so pretty: a beautiful theme with a pop flavour that certainly sticks in the memory. Its first appearance on the album is instrumental, and amongst the later versions is one sung (in French) by Daniel Berretta. For my money it’s one of the finest songs the composer ever wrote – such an ear-worm of a tune. Quentin Tarantino used the theme to great effect in Inglorious Basterds almost forty years later (much to the composer’s annoyance!)
The album’s centrepiece is actually what follows that happy, tuneful opener: a 13-minute action piece that dazzles with its brilliance. Angular, jagged horn phrases sit atop a bed of piano, electric guitar, keyboards and drums for incredibly taut, incredibly tense dramatic action music of the highest calibre. Morricone’s written similar stuff in other scores, but not quite on this scale, I don’t think. The use of the ever-building repeated figure across such an extended piece is minimalism of the highest order. While it’s truly impactful as a piece of suspense scoring, it remains firmly melodic throughout and is evidence of a master at work.
Things don’t stop there, either – another sweet love theme, “Anna” (with more than a hint of Beethoven) is a treat – it’s so elegant and refined, pairing beautifully with “Un Amico” to offer such a contrast to all the taut suspense. And there’s a hard-as-nails dark mirror of it later on the album in “Pericolo Per Anna”, now the Mozart appearing not as a sweet interpolation in a love theme but heard on the lowest registers of a piano underneath tense, agitated string phrases.
The Vivaldi-with-a-drumkit “Quasi Un Vivaldi” is nothing short of breath-taking – the audacity to even attempt it, let alone pull it off, blows my mind. There’s also a pair of gloriously dynamic pieces of source music, the wonderfully-titled “In Un Bar” and “In Un Altro Bar”.
It’s quite a claim given however many hundreds of them there were, but I think Revolver may just be Morricone’s finest thriller score. There are no sweeping themes, no quirky effects – just simple ideas, executed to perfection – and I never tire of listening to it. He could (and did) do anything at all; he was a genius.
Leave a Reply