A week or so ago, I was perusing some website of "The Sexiest Movies Ever Made" and, while I had most of them (that I wanted), there was one I'd never heard of that sounded intriguing.
In 1972 Roman Polanski made an improvisational absurdist comedy called "What?" ("Che?" in Italian) which was immediately rated X and banned in most countries, and has remained mostly unknown since. It stars a 21-year old American actress Sydne Rome at her peak of delectability, running around half- or fully-nude for most of the film, and co-stars Marcello Mastroianni and Polanski himself (in an uncredited performance). The script was largely improvised on the set, and the set was the film producer's house, Carlo Ponti, on the Amalfi coast of Italy. It's an absolutely stunning and huge villa overlooking the water, filled with famous art (originals, owned by Ponti, who, uh... did okay in the movie business).
The movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It doesn't have to, with that scenery.
I found a copy at Amazon for inexpensive, which turned out to be Region 2 (unmarked) but that's okay, I just had to hook up my region-free player again. One of the extras on the disc is an interview with the movie's composer, Claudio Gizzi, who adapted a lot of Mozart and Schubert for the film. It's interesting hearing how he reduced symphonies to piano pieces, and turned piano pieces into string quartets. It lent the film a real air of class (otherwise somewhat lacking I suppose) and Gizzi seems like a real talented guy.
Gizzi mentions, during the interview, that in the mid-'70s Polanski left Italy, Ponti left Italy, Bertolucci left Italy (for whom he'd also worked) and suddenly he found his film gigs drying up. He scouted around for other work, and ended up making an electronic music album with Romano Musumarra called "Automat" (1978). Now, I consider myself something of a collector of electronic music, and I'd never heard of this release, so I had to track it down. Turns out it was a demonstration project of Mario Maggi, who had invented one of the first analog synthesizers with computer memory, the MCS70 (Music Computer Synthesizer 1970). He wanted an album to demonstrate the synthesizer's capabilities, because although it was only a monophonic (one-note-at-a-time) analog synth, it was still pretty powerful and could store patches for live performance. His friend composer Musumarra started the album, but they brought in Gizzi as an "established composer" to polish it up and give it some flair.
Unfortunately for them, about this time the first polyphonic (many-notes-at-a-time) synthesizers came out, like the Prophet-5. This immediately obsoleted the MCS70, and only the one prototype was ever built. The album sank like a rock, never to be heard again. It was also released at almost exactly the same time as Jean-Michel Jarre's monster hit, "Oxygene," which took all of the oxygen out of the market for any other synth solo albums for a couple years. (In fact, Jarre swapped a test pressing of "Oxygene" for a tape of "Automat.") It's only ever been released once (briefly) on CD in a Russian bootleg... but that was enough for me to find the files.
The prototype synthesizer was afterward sold to the Italian rock band Area, who used it on their 1980 album "Tic & Tac" (their first after the death of their founder & singer, Demetrio Stratos). I've never been much of a fan of Stratos's histrionic singing, but I tracked down "Tic & Tac" and it's pretty good. The synthesizer really sounds quite impressive!
Anyway, that's how a little T&A led me to have to rearrange my 'A' shelf of CDs.
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