2xLP Transparent Magenta 180gr + CD | Limited Numbered Edition of 500 copies. April 1969. On screens across Europe, a film opens that looks like an American crime picture but feels like something else entirely. Giuliano Montaldo, the Italian director who would later give us Sacco e Vanzetti and Giordano Bruno, has crossed the Atlantic to shoot a heist thriller in San Francisco and Las Vegas. The cast reads like an inventory of New Hollywood royalty: John Cassavetes, fresh from Rosemary's Baby, as a convict sprung after twelve years behind bars. Peter Falk before the raincoat. Gena Rowlands before the legend. Britt Ekland. Florinda Bolkan. And at the center, a million-dollar casino job that will go wrong in ways no one sees coming.

The score comes from Ennio Morricone. By 1969 the Maestro was juggling a dozen films a year, moving between genres like a card shark shuffling decks. Gli Intoccabili was his second collaboration with Montaldo, after Ad Ogni Costo in 1967. Ten more would follow. Something clicked between them.

What Morricone delivers here is a master class in versatility. The score opens with La Ballata di Hank McCain, sung by Jackie Lynton over a rolling, melancholic groove that would find its way onto a hundred compilations. It's a theme that sounds like the end of something before the beginning has even started. From there, Morricone spirals outward: sad waltzes for Las Vegas showrooms, lounge fox-trots for cocktail hours that hide murder, striptease music dripping with noir irony, dramatic cues that ratchet the tension like a garrote tightening around a throat.

The score shifts between tension and groove, between lyrical passages and pure menace, with an ease that only Morricone could muster. Party music curdles into dread. An epic waltz becomes a funeral march. The crime genre bends under the weight of the Maestro's invention, becoming something richer, stranger, more emotionally complex than any heist picture has a right to be.