Finchè c'è guerra c'è speranza

Digitmovies is glad to remember the very great Alberto Sordi by releasing for the very first time on CD in full stereo the OST by Piero Piccioni for the movie “Finchè c’è guerra c’è speranza” (aka “Where there was war there’s hope”) directed by and starring Alberto Sordi with Silvia Monti, Alessandro Cutolo, Matilde Costa Giuffrida, Edoardo Faceta,Mauro Firmani, Eliana De Santis, Fernando Daviddi. Pietro Chiocca (Sordi) is a water pumps dealer who succeeds in improving his standard of living by devoting himself to a more lucrative business, the one of weapons, and so he spends his own life touring the countries of the third world, mangled by civil wars, while his family lives in luxury in a new villa to which the family has just moved away. All is going very well until one day a journalist of the Corriere della Sera, who gave him the contact to sell the weapons to a national liberation movement in Angola, in public denounces Chiocca’s actions with an article titled “ I have met a death merchant”. Wife and sons show all their contempt, but then presented with the alternative to dispense with the comforts and luxuries they are now accustomed to, they will prefer to keep on pretending to not knowing anything about the source of the family father’s money. Piero Piccioni has written one of his nicest OSTs with ethnic colours from Africa and from Latin America: it was indeed for this movie that the composer has written a theme which has become the one among many that identifies the comical, but also nostalgic figure of Alberto Sordi: “Rugido do leao”, a sparkling samba the actor-director wanted to be re-used as main title for the very popular TV program “Story of an Italian” conceived, realized and hosted by Sordi himself, containing selected scenes from his movies and broadcasted during four seasons between 1979 and 1986. For this CD we could use the first generation stereo master tape assembled for the original album issued in 1974 (General Music ZSLGE 1001) (33:24) which in fact contains all the music recorded for the movie and we were able to discover three unreleased versions of “Rugido do leao” which brings our CD to a total duration of 41:00.