When I heard that Ennio Morricone had died, at 91, my first thought was that the cinema had lost one of the most romantic screen composers. Morricone, who worked with filmmakers from all over the world but rarely left his native Rome (insisted not to speak in any language other than Italian), wrote sheet music for films full of romance, with majestic waves of longing and anguish and ecstasy and melancholy. lyric. His most famous scores were those he composed for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and that music, so beautiful and whiny, with a kind of incandescence from Old World Grindhouse, was what elevated the great, raw, stylized and almost speechless from Leone. operas in a landscape of pulp dreams, a place where the explosions of violence were triggered by the lonely and trembling sound of an ocarina, which seemed to be suspending time itself.
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However, when you remember those movies, or the others that Morricone became best known for, it’s hard to find even a conventional love story. “The untouchables” and “Cinema Paradiso”. “The Mission” and “The Hateful Eight”. “The Battle of Algiers” and “1900”. “La Cage aux Folles” and “In the Line of Fire”. “Days of Heaven” and “Bugsy”. The list goes on and on, from Morricone, beginning in 1961 with “The Fascist” (for which he wrote a lighthearted score that captured the mentality of military fascism and mocked at the same time), composed the soundtracks for more than 400 films, which was a kind of album. No other film composer has matched it.
It’s surprising, in hindsight, that that list it did not include an image such as “A man and a woman” or “Love story” or “Romeo and Juliet”. However, the passion that ran through Morricone’s soundtracks told a different kind of love story. A romantic drama, in the truest and greatest sense, does not have to be about two people falling in love. It may be the quest that pushes someone to go into extreme blackouts, like the sacred (and spectacularly wrong) Jesuit pilgrimage to the jungles of South America in “The Mission.” Or the crime-fighting nobility that powers Eliot Ness in “The Untouchables.” Or the dream of the cinema itself in “Cinema Paradiso”. Ennio Morricone’s music told the story of the ecstasy of each character, and so it seemed to illuminate those films from within.
He also told the story of how the past can be covered by the present: sad, melancholic, transcendent. That’s part of the magic he brought to Leone’s western spaghetti trilogy with Clint Eastwood. When Eastwood first slipped into the vast spaces of “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), he was not just the nameless man. He was the man who barely had existence, the western renegade who had come out of nowhere. Morricone’s music, with its ghostly whistles and eager bursts of Mexican trumpet, seemed to be doing nothing less than fill the character’s soul.
It would be difficult to think of another case in the history of cinema in which a soundtrack literally created the third dimension of a film. It was the music that gave Eastwood’s presence a mystery note, allowing Leone to extend the western tropes to hypnotic action sequences that seemed to go on forever. The last of the three films, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), features what is arguably Leone’s highest score, with its coyote howl motif and rampant chorus. In the late 1960s, that music gave the western its last stroke of classical grandeur and, at the same time, seemed to bid farewell to the genre with one last tip of the flat-brimmed hat.
When there were CD stores, I was in the soundtrack section of Tower Records looking for a Morricone score, and I was shocked when I saw all the albums in their section. Dozens upon dozens of imported Italian soundtracks, all for films that had never come this far, and that surely contained riches that he had never heard; I still haven’t heard most of them. Few Americans have. But Morricone produced them with a work ethic that clearly kept him happy. He looked like a teacher and considered himself a classical musician, orchestrating each note from his own scores. And one aspect of his extraordinary production is that he didn’t necessarily distinguish between the soundtracks that many of us were obsessed with and those that weren’t that famous. He thought of all of them as children.
Everyone has their favorite Morricone score. There are many who love “The Mission”, which for its lush and orchestral beauty is really found in the stratosphere. The pan-flute Proustian fantasy that he composed for “Once Upon a Time in America” is a case, at least for me, of a score that exceeds the film for which it was written and I wish the film was up to the task. (Many think so.) The tense, irregular, and excitingly jarring opening music of “The Untouchables” is indelible: a crime movie score that touches our collective memory of the underworld genre. And “Days of Heaven”, which it is A love story (although one of the main characters is God), it has a score that starts as bright and crisp as the images from the movie’s magic hour, only to melt you with its haunting mix of faith and loss.
That said, if I had to pick my favorite Morricone score, aside from the spaghetti westerns (which I think are his best), it would be the magnificent opening music he composed for “Burn!”, A 1969 colonial drama directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. , starring Marlon Brando as a British secret agent who fosters and manipulates a slave uprising in the Caribbean. The music that opens the film begins as a single-note organ melody that turns into a majestic song that turns into a slow-paced island hymn that turns into a towering choral version of “Louie Louie” that turns in the most ecstatic revolutionary hymn this side of “Raise every voice and sing.” It could be said that it is not characteristic of Morricone, except for one thing: the way it burns, forever, in his heart.
