While music has always been integral to the power of cinema, few composers have made a more dramatic impact than Ennio Morricone (1928-2020). The son of a trumpet player who grew up in a working class neighbourhood in Rome, Morricone was an avant-garde composer who found he had an affinity for movies. His scores for Sergio Leone’s 1960s spaghetti westerns revolutionized the form: incorporating electric and Spanish guitar, Jew’s harp, bells, whistles, cracking whips and gunshots, and the human voice, Morricone’s music was galvanizing, ironic, raw… In Leone’s films, it’s never subservient to the images, but triangulated with the actors and the camera (in fact the later films were choreographed to the score).
In this series we pull out half a dozen of Morricone’s most memorable scores from a filmography of more than 400 titles, and we showcase Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore’s loving profile of his friend and collaborator, Ennio.
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Ennio
Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore proves the perfect filmmaker to craft this loving tribute to one of the all-time greats: composer Ennio Morricone (1928-2020).
Image: Courtesy of Music Box Films
A Fistful of Dollars
Morricone's clamorous score -- with its chanting, flamenco guitar, bells and whistling -- encapsulated everything that was exciting and new about Sergio Leone's revolutionary spaghetti western, its brazen cheek and style.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The third and the best of the so-called 'Dollars' trilogy amplifies Leone's baroque style: crane shots, shock cuts and Morricone music all vying for attention as three rogues hunt buried gold in a series of triangular variations.
Once Upon a Time in the West
A magnum opus from Sergio Leone, the most operatic of Westerns, with a magnificent, soaring score to match its scale and set the tempo by Ennio Morricone, music that speaks of yearning, loss, and perseverance.
The Mission
Written by Robert Bolt (Lawrence of Arabia; A Man for All Seasons), The Mission is the story of an C18th Catholic outpost on the lands of the Guarani people, near the Iguazi Falls. Music is a transcendent force here, and Morricone's score is inspired.
Days of Heaven
As in Badlands, Malick tells a sensational story – here a love triangle – through the oblique perspective of a child, collateral damage in this tale. In place of melodrama, he gives us cinematic poetry.
The Untouchables
With a screenplay by David Mamet and a magnificenct cast (De Niro, Costner and Connery!) De Palma enjoyed one of his biggest hits with this big scale, mythic rendering of the Al Capone story, bolstered by one of Morricone's most stirring scores.
The Great Silence
A mute gunfighter, Silenzio (Jean Louis Trintignant) circles the vicious bounty hunter Loco (Klaus Kinski) in the snowy mountains of Utah, in this, one of the greatest westerns ever made. Morricone's music caps an under-seen but unforgettable classic.