There's a bit of confusion over Hold-Up, instantánea di una rapina, as it's appeared under many different names (including Hold Up, instantanea di una corrupcion), and has been assigned release dates of 1972, 1974, and 1977. The most common date among online databases is 1974, and that's also the year the CD label, Fin de Siecle Media, assigns to the recording date of Franco Micalizzi's excellent urban-orchestral score for this largely forgotten crime film with a clever hook: a cop tracks down the loot of recent bank robbery, and no sooner does he find a safe hiding place than he gets into an accident, losing all memory of the day. Total bummer.

What's intriguing about Micalizzi's approach is the rock-jazz-orchestral sound he's adopted for the film, paying some generous tribute to the warm, slickly orchestrated scores written for U.S. crime and detective films of the early seventies. With the exception of two cues, everything else on this 53 min. CD was previously unreleased, and the label has edited Micalizzi's short cutes into longer tracks, although few of the tracks contain proper cue names.

Track 4, a suite of five unreleased cues, recalls the soul styles both Quincy Jones and Isaac Hayes, with Micalizzi establishing funky beat using a fat electric bass and piano, and light percussion from bongos as screeching, breathy improv on flute (a Jones trademark) occasionally joins a sharp brass rendition of Micalizzi's swaggering secondary theme. It's perfect pursuit underscore for a cop tracking crooks through city streets, and offers some thematic variation among some very repetitive cues.

Track 5 replays the bass groove in a more strained light, with side accompaniment from synth organ, and a rippling low bass, congas, and sharp theme restatements from separate groups of trumpets, trombones, and flute. Among crime & caper film scores, Hold-Up basically illustrates the adeptness of Italian composers in writing their own brand of urban funk.

The Italian film industry's approach to snagging onto popular genres and exhausting the, through myriad imitations and variations isn't wholly different from the U.S., where urban-styled crime films, for example, were split between A-level, TV, and drive-in productions; often the budgets of the lesser American entries had producers grabbing a popular music composer, sometimes getting good results – The Education of Sonny Carlson, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's largely mono-thematic, is still a highpoint – but the sheer volume of crime films in Italy, including co-productions with French and Spanish firms, was significant, and many of the Italian composers scored an exhausting amount of genre entries during their careers.

In meeting the demands of producers wanting a specific sound and mood for their star-studded productions, the music had to be good, so fans of the urban orchestral sound have every reason to be giddy when a rare genre score makes it to CD. The sound is fresh, the performances by the musicians first-rate, the orchestrations quite beautiful, and the local spin on an American sound very refreshing.

Most of the tracks on the Hold-Up CD feature a fair amount of theme repetition, and Micalizzi's biggest weakness here is simply replaying segments with minor peripheral changes; a sadder flute, a violin in place of flute, and the reintroduction of an ethereal female vocalist. What the score has going for it is an engaging tragic main theme which nicely encapsulates a wounded soul blunted by a physical trauma that's rendered him somewhat dysfunctional, and increasingly desperate in trying to reconcile his present state with his prior complete life. That's a pretty specific evocation one gets from Micalizzi's music, and it demonstrates the composer's strengths in rendering musical comments on a character most listeners of this score have likely never seen.

After a few listens, the album kind of grown on you, and genre fans will find Hold-Up possess a similar allure to Jerry Goldsmith's 2-theme score for The Russia House: the theme restatements become oddly hypnotic, and the album develops its own weirdly engrossing flow.

Also available from Fin de Siecle Media is Micalizzi's Adolescenza perversa / Adolescence pervertie (1974).

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan