Pinky Violence was the Japanese version of the sexploitation-gangster movie. The basic premise is beautiful women with well-developed bosoms and abnormally developed martial arts skills take on either a rival female gang, or band together to battle some group of badly behaved Yakuza. The soundtracks ranged from Lounge Jazz and Downtempo to a version of Funk that borrowed heavily from American Blaxploitation soundtracks, Soul-Jazz, Flamenco and surf guitar, bossa-nova inspired pieces--even Spaghetti Western influences.
Trash cinema? Absolutely, in the best way imaginable. The Girl Boss collection comes most highly recommended here. As far as the music is concerned, there's not an awful lot of it out there. My collection of Pinky/Japanese albums number around 100. That may seem like a lot to the uninitiated, but it's only a fraction of what's available in other cinematic genres.
For this post I've compiled some of my favorite Pinky Violence, or Pinky influenced songs from my collection. These 14 rollicking funk and soul tracks are taken from various soundtracks. My personal favorite soundtrack collection is the Miki Sugimoto vs. Reiko Ike album which is pictured below. The rival actresses were often pitted against one another in some of the best Pinky Violence movies and are probably its most well known and recognizable fixtures.
A sample of the kick-ass girl funk on this volume:
The Spaghetti Western is a criminally overlooked film genre. Many wrongly pass it off as silly, trash cinema, a cheap imitation of “real” American westerns. But for a few publications, namely director Alex Cox’s college dissertation which has recently been given a new name and a proper release, and several works by Christopher Frayling, the genre is given the shaft in “serious” film discussions.
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Franco Nero as the hero in "Django"
I’ll grant that a lot of Italian Westerns are glorious pieces of crap. I’ve seen enough of them to know. One thing they definitely are not is boring. The Italian Western takes the traditional American western to the extreme, particularly in its depiction of violence and characterization. The plots are rather simple tales of revenge, but whereas the American Western tends to define characters in a simple black and white, good and bad, the Italians are, without a doubt, character-driven pieces. The good, the hero, is almost never good in the traditional sense. He tends to be an outlaw with an unknown but presumably dark past. Someone either killed his brother of father, or massacred his whole family when he was a child. He has likely had to engage in theft and murder as the ends justify his means, which is ultimately to exact revenge. But he’s much more complex than his American counterpart. There are many more ethical questions, and questions of motive, that we have about him.
Villain Klaus Kinski in Sergio Corbucci's
"The Great Silence"
Spaghetti villains can be exceedingly immoral. They're often nihilists who rape and kill women and torture their victims out of pleasure. There's usually no real reason except that they are just evil incarnations. Hell on Earth brandishing a Colt. Though we’re not usually meant to sympathize with the villain, along the hero’s journey, we’ll be given plenty of reasons to question his morality or motive, and when we arrive at the point of reckoning, we may not be left with the question of which is the good guy and which is the bad, but rather which one is worse.
Spaghettis are highly stylized and the characters are given a savoir faire that traditional western leads never had. Yes, Shane was cool in a way, as was John Wayne, particularly in later films like Rio Bravo, but they were more iconic figures to an audience who still saw the cinema as something grand and fantastic, heroes as heroes of the old west to model our lives on. No one would cite the ethics of a Spaghetti hero. The Italians molded their heroes and villains as much on non-western genre cinema characters, like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, or Marlon Brando in The Wild One. The baddies weren’t just a bunch of rowdies who would steal your cattle and off a few people who stood as obstacles in their way of treasure or a land-grab like in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine or Red River. They were much more likely to be bloodthirsty sociopaths, schizoids who’d keep their dead mother in the basement like Hitchcock’s Norman Bates in Psycho. Perhaps part of the reason for this was that the Italian Western genre rose with the counter-culture. Its style and bold attitude is similar to what was happening in other burgeoning pop arts of the 1960s. A film like The Good, the Bad & the Ugly has as much in common in spirit and irreverence with Easy Rider or The Rolling Stones as it does with The Searchers.
Claudio Camoso plays Manuel, one of Spaghetti's best ever villain roles in "$10,000 Blood Money"
The brashness of the Spaghetti Western was in need of equally daring scores. Though Ennio Morricone is rightly the first name that comes to mind, there are a number of other prolific composers like Nora Orlandi, Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani, Riz Ortolani, Piero Umiliani and Nico Fidenco, who did a whole lot more than just score Italian Westerns. These composers, led by Morricone, referenced all kinds of musical genres. Obviously the American Western would have been the foundation on which all of this was built. The use of the Fender Stratocaster and the stretching and bending of traditional orchestral arrangements gave the soundtracks and hipper, rawer sound--Dick Dale-like surf guitar riffs, an arsenal of whips, clicks, whistles, gallops and bass drums are brought to the fore and are often featured parts that build scenes into incredible climaxes. The Mariachi element that existed in westerns previously is accented and occasionally given a clownish personality. And, naturally, the composers came wired with their Italian influences, the grandiosity of Italian opera, the hymns of Catholic masses.
Gian Maria Volonte and Lou Castel in the Damiano
Damiani masterpiece, "A Bullet for the General"
The influence of Spaghetti Western film scores, particularly Ennio Morricone’s work, run deep. Besides modern alternative bands like Calexico, who pay direct homage to the music, the number of musicians influenced by Morricone is incalculable, in songs from Muse to Metallica to Jay-Z and The Orb--a sufficient list is impossible to compile. Quentin Tarantino has done much to introduce Morricone to a new generation as he has a most visible obsession with the Italian Westerns. There are also a few fine cover bands like Death Valley from Melbourne, who give a healthy boost in sound and production to the older, often out of print and obscure scores.
This mix is heavy on Morricone, as it should be. Sit back and imagine the deserts of Spanish Almeria or the Sardinian village of San Salvatore di Cabras…
The translations of the Italian film titles into English is half the fun of Spaghetti Westerns. For the unintiated, curious, or argumentative, here are my personal Top 20 Italian Westerns:
It is often said that the soundtracks to Italian Westerns surpass the films themselves. This is true on many occasions. But the working relationship between Italians Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone was one where the talents of each pushed the other the the pinnacle of their respective arts.
The duels in The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West and For a Few Dollars More, all collaborations between the composer Morricone and the director Leone, I would humbly argue are of the highest achievements in the coordination of music and film.
The greatest cinematic duel for my money goes to that near the end of For a Few Dollars More. A total of 12 words are spoken in the entire scene, all by Clint Eastwood's character. The build up to the duel and its conclusion lasts just over 4 minutes, but Leone is capable of packing a bucket load of ideas into a single shot, while Morricone stretches the sound and music to its boundaries, so it seems much longer.
The three players are the western genre greats Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and the Italian, Gian Maria Volonte. All three are on form. The cool swagger of Eastwood; the confident, stern, unmovable Van Cleef; and Volonte, who here plays the psychotic, misanthropic, drug-addicted and murderous villain.
The duel begins with Volonte extending a musical pocket watch.The music we hear is the same as that heard by the protagonists. Volonte is here to kill Van Cleef in cold blood for crossing him and stealing his loot. Now started, we understand that when the jingle stops, guns will come out blazing. But Van Cleef is unarmed, having been separated from his rifle.
Morricone blends the off-screen soundtrack into the music heard by the characters, taking the simple sound of the pocket watch and building it into a lush canvas of sounds. At 20 seconds, we get Morricone's strings. They coincide with Volonte's moment of enlightenment. He looks into the watch which reveals a picture. It's the sister of Van Cleef's character. The watch he took from the dead body of the young girl he raped and murdered years ago is unwittingly revealed to Van Cleef. Morricone's slow and ominous strings punctuate the moment, and the build up is taken to a whole new level. Van Cleef is aligned in the background. No words are needed.
Volonte is the star here. It is his face that Leone loves. Watch the slow movements, the head tilts from Volonte, the way Leone frames his movements. There are many subtle treasures of brilliant acting in these few seconds. We see the black, psychotic eyes of a murderer, but also a character who appears much more unsettled than earlier in the film. Van Cleef on the other hand is stoic. There's no movement except an ever-so-slight curl of the lip. He knows he'll either kill or be killed. He's accepted all possible outcomes.
Then comes a heartbreakingly beautiful montage of 12 shots, starting with an image of Van Cleef's rifle, his face, then a close up of Volonte's hand, the hand that is about to reach for the gun that will execute Van Cleef. The scene is jolted as Morricone cues a second, identicle jingle and we're led to another hand elegantly outstretched, holding a second watch. And more hands. This time its Van Cleef's reaching into his vest to find his watch gone, now held by Eastwood. The dual jingles represent the dueling sides, the fate that has brought them face to face. Their destinies have finally, rightfully synched in time in a fight to the death.
Eastwood is given a splendid entrance as the camera pans from the watch in his hand to reveal its holder. It's one of the archetypical images of Eastwood's western period. If you were to freeze that frame, it'd be instantly recognizable for most people. They may not know who it is, or from which movie, but it is an indelible image in the public imagination. The signature cigar shift is classic Eastwood. Some cineasts have interpreted this Man With No Name character as a guardian angel. Indeed, he saves Van Cleef from certain death at the last minute.
Morriconne brings up the strings and a guitar shatters the scene at 1:23. To me, this rather than the duel's outcome, is the real climax of the scene. It is a cinematic orgasm. A perfect union of sound and picture. Volonte gives an elegant spin of the head, then a piercing, cold stare, flashing that million dollar face. The music builds to bursting point and seems to be the force that whips Volonte's face in the direction of Van Cleef. It's a stunning portrait. He now realizes Eastwood and Van Cleef have been in cahoots. The look of rage and betrayal in Volonte's face. All the players are clued in on the game. Their eyes meet and they'll stay that way for the remainder of the scene. All the while Morricone is frantically plucking the guitar in that Spaghetti fashion.
An open door flutters in the background
Eastwood holds off Volonte at gunpoint and approaches Van Cleef. He hands him a holstered gun and announces, "Now we start." Morricone cues the mariachi-style trumpets and the players take their positions. Eastwood sits cool-ly in the middle, not quite a mediator as there can be doubt whose side he's on. Now that he's made it a fair fight, he's only a spectator. He sits not unlike Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's Yojimbo, undoubtedly a great influence on Leone.
At 3:31 Morricone's soundtrack is given a death of its own in the form of a haunting hollowed bass drum. We can almost imagine the music has been a kind of a vicious sandstorm that whipped through and turned the duel on its head. It righted the wrongs, squared the bets...then passed, leaving the music again to the stripped down sound of the pocket watch, and we return to the original standoff under totally different circumstances. Though Morricone's off-screen music had been winding up, in another contending duality, the drowned out watches had been slowly winding down.
