My friend Daniela Catelli has written to me announcing the death, last evening, of Maestro Carlo Rustichelli at the age of 89.
He wrote the scores for more than 200 movies, including most of Pietro Germi's films (most famously, DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE), as well as such outstanding genre works as THE DAY THE SKY EXPLODED (the first Italian sci-fi movie), Edgar G. Ulmer's HANNIBAL and JOURNEY BENEATH THE DESERT, Riccardo Freda's THE GIANTS OF THESSALY (Freda once called Rustichelli "the only true composer of Italian film music"), THE MINOTAUR, THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD with Steve Reeves (one of his best), MY SON THE HERO, RoGoPaG, Antonio Margheriti's THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH, Ernesto Gastaldi's LIBIDO, numerous Totň comedies and Spaghetti Westerns, and of course, Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, KILL BABY... KILL! and the deliriously romantic THE WHIP AND THE BODY. He was also a widely travelled conductor of his own classical compositions, and the father of actress Alida Chelli (pronounced "Kelly").
In May 1999, I obtained Rustichelli's address and asked Daniela if she might interview him, on my behalf, for my Mario Bava book. She set the appointment and went to his penthouse apartment, where she met an impeccably dressed Old World gentleman, very friendly and courteous -- who was also blind. Rustichelli didn't remember much about his scores for BLOOD AND BLACK LACE and KILL, BABY... KILL!, and couldn't read them, but he remembered by heart his music for THE WHIP AND THE BODY and treated Daniela to a spontaneous piano recital of the piece -- almost certainly its final live performance, for an audience of one. The Maestro gave her, for me, a copy of the first pages of the SEI DONNE score, which he inscribed (in Italian) "To my friend Tim Lucas, who mistook this for good music."
The success of that contact encouraged me to put the producers of two different Bava documentaries in touch with him, which resulted in him receiving more public exposure in his last years than he might otherwise have received. I feel good about this. He was also independently interviewed on camera by the producers of the German DVD of BLOOD AND BLACK LACE.
The Italian media is reporting that Rustichelli had been suffering from a long illness, and that he died peacefully, surrounded by his wife, sons and grandson (the son of Alida Chelli and Walter Chiari). A funeral and memorial service for Maestro Rustichelli will be held on Monday at the Artists' Church in Piazza del Popolo.
I'm saddened to hear of the death's of any Eurocult personnel, but I find it particularly sad to hear of the passing of a quality composer like Carlo Rustichelli. Composers such as Rustichelli (and Piero Piccioni) never received as much attention in the West as some others, but their music is a vital part of many films that continue to move me. Rest in Peace Carlo.
There aren't many of his generation of Italian screen composers left, possibly any of his magnitude. Keep in mind that he was a score of years older than Morricone, closer in birthdate and musical outlook to Nino Rota (1911-1979), with whom he's more usefully compared, I think. Swing bands and bop music and Bossa Nova and wah wah weren't really colors on his musical palette as for the next crop of guys. He's more lyric opera, George Gershwin, Miklós Rózsa, silent movie theater pit orchestras, the Mighty Wurlitzer. He seemed a little anachronistic and adrift in Spaghetti Westerns, sudsy or sunshiney rather than plangent and savage. A much better setting for his best to flourish was provided by Bava (Horror might be new fangled as a genre, but the Gothic of it was melodramatically suited to him), and -especially- his musical-marriage with Germi. That director's sentimental streak and innocent humor wreathed in the grouchy thorniness and abject, disconsolate cynical melancholy of the terminally middleaged...set up the perfect parameters for Rustichelli to do his wonderful act, and elicited an ironic bite that's foreign to most of his work for others. Their work together is all great, but the one I'm relistening to in my head is FERROVIERE/THE RAILWAY MAN, a bracing, heartbreaking piece of neo-silent scoring, a breakneck piano (with lovely happy, sentimental flourishes, manic and hysterical in context) rattling down the track with Germi's brakeman heading towards destruction of himself, his career and all he loves. Screen music gets no (artfully) simpler or more cinematically-emotionally effective than this.
A follow-up on the last score mentioned. I'm watching the film now. Funny how one's memory can get the overall impression just right, but the particulars so wrong!
It is as I said neo-silent scoring, but it's not piano driven at all, Rather it's richly orchestrated and formally varied melodrama in the fullest sense. The train music is the dominant theme, and I remembered correctly its propulsion towards doom effect, but it's a string driven machine, and it's far from the only theme in a film that I realize now is music-music-music for all its running time but wed so completely to the story as to hide in plain hearing. The diegetic component is part of it: Germi -star as well as director here- is often seen in mellow moments strumming a guitar. The rest is related. I mentioned melodrama above. That's musical drama, and in this case the Italian variety as glimpsed in a moment of GODFATHER II when young Vito watches a performance with a prodigal son run off to America (Statue of Liberty silhouette on the backdrop), hearing the news that Mamma has died, cue the orchestra for the sentimental shame of it. That's the popular-drama effect Germi and Rustichelli aim for here. A few years later they'll turn the trick to very tart, ironic folkloric effect in DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE and SEDUCED AND ABANDONED, but on this occasion they choose to play it essentially straight. The result is a fine, neorealist tearjerker that's knowing but not patronizing about the ways we all live our lives to interior pop-music soundtracks scoring our sudsy or heroic dramas. The one Rustichelli composes for this one is -like the film itself- exquisitely sentimental and stirring without once taking a false step into bathos. I'll stop talking about it and simply urge you to seek it out and listen to it (better still hear it with the film if you can find a copy)