L'Assassino... E Al Telefono

Digitmovies presents on CD for the first absolute time complete and in full stereo the OST by Stelvio Cipriani from the movie L'assassino…è al telefono (aka The Killer is on the Phone) directed in 1972 by Alberto De Martino (Horror, L'anticristo, Holocaust 2000).

The movie makes use of, besides the splendid location of the city of Bruges, of the performance of actors with the caliber of Telly Savalas in the role of a killer, Anne Heywood and Rossella Falk. Heywood plays a young woman, stage actress who suffers amnesia, does not remember the last five years of her life since she witnessed the killing of her boyfriend. The woman is constantly shadowed and tormented by the shape of a man (Savalas). Her friends and colleagues try to help the woman remembering: including the man she married after the murder of her boyfriend; he persuades her to come back on the crime scene. She recovers memory, she "see again" the boyfriend's killing by a mysterious killer, but the killer murders her husband and tries to kill the woman who will discover very soon a disturbing truth.

L'assassino... é al telefono is a refined Italian thriller directed with steady hand by De Martino. The plot, really is a little bit confused, comes to an end mentioning one of the thriller masterpieces by Alfred Hitchcock ("Paura in palcoscenico" – "Stage Fright").

L'assassino... é al telefono is one of the very few giallo movies of the early '70s to not follow the situations typical of the Argento movies, carving out, with its originality, a little niche in the too much often abused Italian Giallo genre. At that time C.A.M. issued a 45 rpm single (AMP 102) containing the two tracks "Tema di Anna" and "Ricordi nel bosco".

For our CD (TT 63:43) we could use the stereo master tapes of the original session that gave us the chance to release every recorded note. Stelvio Cipriani has written a beautiful orchestral score where the recurrent "Tema di Anna," a romantic motif with modern arrangement, emerges, introduced in Titoli di testa (Tr.1) that is reprised with variations in the score and alternated to suspence and psychedelic flavoured motifs. The CD is enriched as bonus tracks with the two original single tracks where "Tema di Anna" of Main titles was intentionally edited.