… E POI NON NE RIMASE NESSUNO (TEN LITTLE INDIANS)

As volume ten of the series "Bruno Nicolai in Giallo" Digitmovies proudly releases on CD for the very first time the complete OST by Bruno Nicolai for the movie "...e poi non ne rimase nessuno" (aka "Ten Little Indians" - "And Then There Were None") made in 1974 by British director Peter Collinson and with an international all-star-cast: Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Richard Attenborough, Gert Fröbe, Herbert Lom, Charles Aznavour, Maria Rohm, Adolfo Celi, Stéphane Audran, Alberto de Mendoza, ,Nasser Malekmotei and Orson Welles (the tape recorder's voice). The plot is based on the homonymous novel by Agatha Christie "Dieci piccoli indiani" on which a previous British movie from 1965 had already been based (this 1974 version has dialogues identical with the '65 version, apart from some modifications so that the story now takes place in a far place in Iran instead of a rocky British little island and also in the finale the two innocents do survive and do not die as in the novel where they really were not innocents.) The title of the movie is derived from a nursery rhyme where ten little Indians did die one ofter the other until "...and then there were none". A mysterious invitation from a stranger who signs as U.N. Owen leads ten people, all of them allured under strange pretexts, to stay in an isolated house in the Iran desert, where the closest inhabited place is two hundred miles away and the house does have neither telephones nor other communication devices with the outside world. Just after having arrived, the ten guests do not find the house owner, but they can only listen to his recorded voice which accuses them of various murders they did commit for which they went unpunished and for which they shall pay now with their lives. From this moment on, each guest will be killed, but two of the accused ones, Vera Clyde (Sommer) and Hugh Lombard (Reed), did not at all commit the crimes with which U.N.Owen charges them. They stay there by mistake and at the end will survive. In the internet and other sources Carlo Rustichelli has been mentioned as co-composer of the music score, but on the official Italian poster only the name of Bruno Nicolai appears. This CD (54:36) would not have been possible if Edipan had not preserved till today in its archives two mono master tapes (regrettably stereo mixes did not survive) in good conditions even if it was impossible to eliminate some magnetic damages. We could bring to light a remarkable score, almost lost in time, which contains all those noted and appreciated musical elements of M°Nicolai for the Giallo genre like dissonant strings, experimental effects and an evocative main theme of a classical kind, ambiguous and mysterious, accompanied by pop rhythms (the main and end titles, here Tr.1 and Tr.18).