Photo caption: Ennio Morricone in ENNIO. Courtesy of Music Box Films.
Ennio Morricone is one of the greatest composers of movie music and certainly the most original, and the thorough and well-sourced documentary Ennio traces his life and body of work. We hear from Morricone himself and plenty of talking heads – many film directors, composers and musicians, from Clint Eastwood to Bruce Springsteen.
Morricone is the first artist I’ve heard of who aspired to become a doctor, but was forced by his father to play trumpet. During WW II in Italy, the Morricone family business was a small town brass band that entertained occupying German, then American troops, which the young Ennio found humiliating. Nevertheless, he followed his talent into a music conservatory, and evolved into composing.
Circumstances brought him a gig writing movie music and led to his groundbreaking scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Beginning with the whistle in A Fistful of Dollars, this now iconic music is described in Ennio as “cultural shock” “operatic” and a “whole new language”. We learn how Morricone built his score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly around his interpretation of a coyote howl. Great stuff.
Ennio’s other highlights include:
His work with Joan Baez for Sacco & Vanzetti in 1971.
His 9/11 symphony.
How he was snubbed by the Oscars for The Mission and The Untouchables before wining for The Hateful Eight.
Ennio takes two hours and 36 minutes to comprehensively survey Morricone’s entire career, and I would have preferred a shorter film more focused on the highlights. There is an unnecessarily long exit ramp of accolades at the end.
BTW I recommend listening to Morricone himself conduct an orchestra’s performance of his music from The Mission; search YouTube for “morricone conducts the mission”
Ennio is now available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
Ennio Morricone, one of the greatest movie music composers (and perhaps the most iconic) has died. Among his 519 composing credits, he is most known for his groundbreaking scores in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Morricone’s work was ever aspirational, seemingly seeking to become iconic, and he sure didn’t believe in understatement.
Buck Henry (right) in THE GRADUATE
“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word…Plastics.” Screenwriter Buck Henry wrote some of the most iconic dialogue in the movies. “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me!” Henry was nominated for Oscars for adapting The Graduate screenplay and for directing Heaven Can Wait. Along with The Graduate, I also love his screenplay for What’s Up, Doc? He also played the hotel clerk in The Graduate and played himself in The Player, pitching The Graduate II. He appeared often on Saturday Night Live, once getting nipped by John Belushi’s samurai sword. HisNYT obit includes his birth name and other tidbits.
Terry Jones in LIFE OF BRIAN
Best known as member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Terry Jones was responsible for much of the troupe’s surreal and wicked humor; he embraced cross dressing as British matrons in Python skits. Jones thought up And Now for Something Completely Different, co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail and wrote the The Meaning of Life. Jones wrote and directed one of the wittiest films ever, The Life of Brian.
The novels of author John le Carré made for unforgettable cinema. Le Carré’s complicated and conflicted Cold Warriors battled though what he revealed to be corrupting bureaucratic game. His work was the most sublime literature, and it elevated the spy movie genre. The VERY best screen adaptations of le Carré’s work are the BBC miniseries Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982) with Alec Guinness.
Lynees Shelton in her SWORD OF TRUST
Director Lynne Shelton was the best of the mumblecore directors with Your Sister’s Sister, Touchy Feely, Laggies, Outside In and Sword of Trust. Between her uncompromisingly authentic and goofy indies, she was sought out to direct mainstream TV like Mad Men and GLOW. She got in front of her own camera in Sword of Trust and delivered one of last year’s best performances.
RAGING BULL: cinematography by Michael Chapman
Cinematographer Michael Chapman shot the most stunning boxing scenes ever in Raging Bull. Before that, Chapman had an amazing run of work in indelible films from 1973 through 1979: The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wanderers.
Alan Parker had a gift for directing modern musicals (Bugsy Malone, Fame, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Evita) but he was Oscar-nominated for two harrowing dramas, Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning. He also directed the deliciously trashy Angel Heart. My favorite Alan Parker film is the ever-delightfulThe Commitments.
Director Ivan Passer came out of the Czech New Wave (Intimate Lighting) to work in the US (fifteen features including award-winning Haunted Summer and Robert Duvall’s Stalin). My favorite Passer film is his 1981 Cutter’s Way, with its early Jeff Bridges and fine performances by John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn – and it’s still the best film set in Santa Barbara. I watched it again recently and it still holds up; you can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Director Joel Schumacher had been a department store window dresser when he broke into movies as a set designer. Then he wrote the screenplay for the wonderful guilty pleasure Car Wash, which led to directing the similar DC Cab. His career took off when he launched the Brat Pack with St Elmo’s Fire, and followed that with Batman and Robin. My favorite Schumacher film is the 2002 thriller Phone Booth, in which an Everyman – or is he? – (Colin Farrell) is trapped in a phone booth by a sniper villain (Kiefer Sutherland); Phone Booth can be streamed from all the usual sources.
Production designer Ron Cobb imagined and brought to life the spacecraft in Alien, the DeLorean in Back to the Future and, in Star Wars, a dive bar for mercenaries in Space.
Ennio Morricone, one of the greatest movie music composers (and perhaps the most iconic) has died. Among his 519 composing credits, he is most known for his groundbreaking scores in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
He won an Oscar for The Hateful 8 in 2015. Although his score was excellent, it referred to his earlier, entirely original work, and this was probably a well-deserved “career achievement” award.
Morricone’s work was ever aspirational, seemingly seeking to become iconic. It takes fearlessness to incorporate whistling, gunshots, chanting men’s choirs, the Jew’s Harp, and what the New York Times calls the “bizarre, wailing “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah,” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called an ocarina“. Morricone didn’t believe in understatement.
Leone earned his first credit in 1960 and wrote the startlingly original Fistful in 1964 at age 36. His music defined the genre of Spaghetti Western as much as did Sergio Leone’s grotesques and closeups. Along with Leone’s great The Man with No Name trilogy, Leona composed for Once Upon a Time in the West and 2 Mules for Sister Sara. His trademark music elevated well over ten Spaghetti Westerns, including the lesser Seven Guns for theMacGregors, Navajo Joe, The Great Silence, My Name Is Nobody, and Duck You Sucker (and I’ve seem ’em all).
Besides the spaghetti westerns, Morricone composed the scores of The Battle of Algiers, 1900 Once Upon a Time in America, La Cage aux Folles and Cinema Paradiso. He was still working in 2020 at age 91.
I particularly admire his score for the 1986 historical drama The Mission. In the video below, Morricone himself conducts a symphony orchestra playing the theme from The Mission. In the story, an 18th Century Jesuit (Robert DeNiro) tries to Christianize an indigenous tribe in Paraguay (and it doesn’t end well). At 3:15, a flute reflects the indigenous culture and, at 5:30, a massive choir brings in the gravitas.
A scene from LET THE CORPSES TAN, courtesy of Kino Lorber
Neo-noir and Spaghetti Westerns converge in the hyper-violent and stylized Belgian thriller Let the Corpses Tan.
Written and directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, this is a contemporary thriller that pays loving homage to the Sergio Leone canon. Tight closeups on characters’ eyes aren’t just for the big showdowns in this flick. They even use two Ennio Morricone musical cues from 1969 and 1971. A pivotal character even smokes cigarillos like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the Leone movies.
Let the Corpses Tan is set in a compound of ruins atop a Mediterranean cliff, occupied by an oversexed artist who hosts visitors. Besides a writer, she’s hosting three mysterious out-towners. They turn out to be criminals who, with their shady lawyer, have pulled off an armored car heist and are flush in gold bars. Just as they are ready to sneak away, the writer is surprised by his estranged wife, her kid and her nanny. Then two cops happen upon the residents, and a gun battle explodes.
There’s only one road out of the compound and two groups of criminals and two groups of the non-criminals occupy various shelters in the ruins. It’s a standoff because no one can escape – or escape with the gold. They are forced to hunt each other in a lethal and claustrophobic game of cat-and-mouse, including even the guy caught without any clothes. Under life-and-death pressure, allegiances become malleable and the double crosses and side-switching begin.
So do the casualties. Sam Peckinpah would wince at some of the gore and splatter, and Let the Corpses Tan lives up to its deliciously brutal title.
As exhaustion mounts from the siege, various characters have vivid fantasies. Let the Corpses Tan gets very, very trippy. One breast milk crucifixion fantasy is like nothing I have seen or could have imagined. Eventually, there’s a Death character in female form, at one point a urinating Death.
There’s one interesting character. The artist/hostess is basically a goddess of carnality. She is played by Elina Löwensohn (from 1994’s Amateur with Isabelle Huppert), and Löwensohn’s eyes are voracious.
Let the Corpses Tan is essentially a soulless exercise in style, more interesting than gripping. It’s a visual stunner, though, and the Leone references are fun.
On the single blissful evening of November 9, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the three great Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All star Clint Eastwood and feature wonderfully idiosyncratic scores by Ennio Morricone.
Eastwood’s character in the trilogy is referred to in film literature as “the man with no name”. But actually, the character is named Joe, Monco and Blondie in the three movies, respectively.
Here’s Morricone’s theme for A Fistful of Dollars.
