Che vuole questa musica stasera

Armando Trovajoli wrote this for Dino Risi's Profumo di donna, the 1974 Italian film about a blind, embittered army captain and the young conscript assigned to guide him. Hollywood remade it eighteen years later as Scent of a Woman.

The arrangement is deceptively light — a lounge shuffle, strings, an unhurried vocal — and that lightness is the trick. It plays over a story about a man who has decided how his life ends, so the prettiness works against the film rather than with it.

Trovajoli scored well over a hundred Italian films and is one of those composers whose music escaped the movies entirely. This piece gets used constantly by people who have never seen the film it belongs to.