Red Light Disco curator Eli Roth speaks to Edwige Fenech, the face of 1970s and 1980s Italian softcore and giallo cinema, on the hunt for lost soundtracks.

Born in Bône, French Algeria, in 1948, from a Maltese father and a mother of Sicilian origins, Edwige Fenech has long been identified as the ultimate erotic dream of 1970s and 1980s Italians. But her career and persona tell a whole lot more. After making her cinematic debut in France, in 1967 she landed in Rome. Over the following two decades, she would take part in many more and legendary films, which established the actress as the muse and poster girl of giallo first, and Italian sexy comedy then. 

Her enigmatic beauty matched by her flawless looks and distinctive hairdos went hand in hand with great acting versatility that would equally suit the thrilling cinema of Mario Bava and Sergio Martino, the cheeky comedy of the likes of Mariano Laurenti and Michele Massimo Tarantini, but also the intellectual stance of Pasquale Festa Campanile. 

This made Edwige Fenech one of the muses of Eli Roth when curating Red Light Disco, the new CAM Sugar collection exploring the sound of forbidden Italian cinema, 1969–1984.

The actress was pivotal in the selection of the tracks, inspired by some of her cult roles. One of these was Taxi Girl, the 1977 sex comedy directed by Tarantini. Conceived and released between Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and the Red Brigades kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the film belongs to that fortunate trend in which the Italian film industry reimagined Hollywood blockbusters with a farcical genius and extraordinary art of improvisation. Here, it’s Fenech who sits (and undresses) behind the wheel of the taxi. De Niro’s U.S. Army M-65 jacket is replaced by a black PVC outfit, and the actor’s iconic mohawk by Fenech’s brown hair, which at times gives way to a wig of platinum curls. In the end, Taxi Girl is a sexy, hyperbolic pulp movie, one to be rediscovered.

Taxi Girl (like many other Fenech-starring films) sits high in the olympus of Italian comedy, but music – one could argue – is its true unexplored potential. The score, rich in wah wah-driven funky and jazzy instrumentals, was composed and executed by Pulsar Music Ltd., the elusive studio group behind which hid the identities of Silvano Chimenti and Enrico Pieranunzi, the Italian jazz greats and long-time collaborators of Ennio Morricone. Chimenti’s trademark guitar appeared on Metti una sera a cena, Dario Argento’s Quattro mosche di velluto grigio, Sacco e Vanzetti and Il mio nome è nessuno, whereas Pieranunzi’s piano enriched one of the Maestro’s rare forays into jazz: The Blue-Eyed Bandit, starring Franco Nero.

The soundtracks are at the core of the rediscovery of the genre, and no doubt the element which, together with their costumes and set design, best stood the test of time. Part of their appeal also lies in their rarity, which still makes them elusive to the digital music fruition standards we’re now acquainted with. 

As Eli Roth pointed out when selecting the cuts for the collection, “Spanish horror movie Pieces from 1982 is one of my favourite slasher movies of all time, and so is the score. But for years you couldn’t know who the music was from. It just said ‘Music from CAM’ in the end titles. There was no record of what it was, it’s not on Shazam. Nobody could identify the songs from the aerobics scene.”

That song, which goes by the title of “Running Around”, is an all-Italian take on Lipps Inc. “Funkytown” and was composed by Stelvio Cipriani for the soundtrack of Un’ombra nell’ombra (A Ring of Darkness). It now sits, for the first ever on vinyl, fully remastered from CAM Sugar archive’s master tapes, next to the music from Taxi Girl on the Roth-curated Red Light Disco. 

Yet, going back to the films, re-watching them 40 and odd years after their release, they seem to reveal more cultural layers than one would expect. Despite the male gaze of the movies, self-determined, strong female characters emerged and they became national heroes. Fenech was one of these.

“I have to say I have rediscovered many of my films only years after their release. Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh), Perchè quelle gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer (The Case of the Bloody Iris) and, beyond gialli, Il ladrone by Pasquale Festa Campanile, who was above all a great writer.

When you’re young and living the moment perhaps you don’t fully realize what you’ve done. When rewatching them after so many years you realize they haven’t aged: the storylines are as solid today as they were back then, and you even marvel at the job done. Now I don’t see myself anymore on screen, but an actress making films…”

Even the iconography of comedies, which promoted over-sexualised bodies, Fenech reveals was a grotesque game of proportions, exaggerated on purpose. “When it came to comic roles I would sometimes wear wigs or even prosthetics. For example in Giovannona Coscialunga disonorata con onore (Giovannona Long-Thigh) the bottom part was me, but the top it was all prosthetics. The body had to look comic, hyperbolic and also a bit grotesque.”

She now takes these films with the wit and self-irony of someone who is conscious that her life and career has been much more than the sex comedy roles she may be often remembered for. Following the great season of genre cinema, in the 1990s Edwige became a prominent producer, a career that saw her reuniting with Sergio Martino, for the Fenech-produced series Delitti privati (Private murders). 

Now, she confesses, her dream is to “play a murderer, because I am interested in the psychology of the character, what drives a person to commit such an extreme act. I think that when actors love their job, they always ask to go further.”

It shouldn’t surprise, after all, finding out that the private Edwige has never been a femme fatale one would expect from all those cult movies.

“Of course I loved disco music, but I never loved discos.  I’d rather stay in the company of friends talking about everything and nothing, but most importantly to be able to understand each other and exchange ideas. I have never been a crazy girl!”

Read the full interview in the magazine included in the deluxe double vinyl and standard double vinyl edition of Red Light Disco.

Opening image: Taxi Girl, original movie poster. CAM Sugar archive, all rights reserved.