In one of the most memorable moments of the 2007 Academy Awards, the Man with No Name called out the name of a man to whom the moviegoing public owed a debt. Clint Eastwood was tasked with presenting an honorary Oscar to Ennio Morricone, whose dazzling career as an international film composer included creating the wistful yet fearsome music that accompanied Eastwood’s Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of spaghetti Westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
On the stage of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Eastwood provided translation for the speech of the Italian-born Morricone, who self-effacingly thanked the directors who sought his services, the film professionals who had never received such an honor, and, of course, his wife, Maria.
Morricone, who died last week at the age of 91, casts an outsize shadow in film history. A trumpeter’s son from Rome, where he was born and where he died, Morricone initially adopted his father’s instrument, studying at the National Academy of Saint Cecilia. A stint in radio preceded his entrance into the Italian film industry, in which he worked consistently for six decades. The composer collaborated with the major talents of his home country, including Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as several generations worth of American wunderkinds, among them Brian De Palma, Mike Nichols, and Quentin Tarantino. His consistently lively, sophisticated, and witty scores helped enhance the standing of what were once considered to be disreputable genres, including Westerns, horror movies, and thrillers. Yet, if Leone’s rangy, deceptively simple “wah wah wah” theme for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly could be regarded as art, then maybe the movie itself could be, too.
His music always added texture and depth to unlikely projects. Consider the unexpectedly plaintive theme he composed to Dario Argento’s violent serial-killer film, The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971): The central melody is played on assorted instruments — a flute, a guitar, a violin — but is supported by the haunting yet subtle humming of a female vocalist. Not that there was anything stodgy or restrained about Morricone’s music. On receiving the assignment to work on John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), the composer produced a score that was as grandiloquently off-kilter as the movie itself: Morricone’s brilliant “Pazuzu” theme is a frenzied cacophony of chanting voices and ecstatic drumming.
By the time he was hired to score that much-maligned film, Morricone had already made inroads in the U.S. film industry, although he was never tempted to pull up stakes and leave his home country. Nonetheless, Hollywood was wise to the value Morricone could add to a project. For John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Morricone wrote a notably downbeat, glumly expectant theme, a piece of music that suggests the tension of a rubber band ready to spring; for Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988), he deployed slow strings and a touch of ’80s-era synth to evoke the story of a man in despair over his missing wife.
Until Eastwood handed Morricone his honorary Oscar, the composer was woefully underrecognized by the academy, having been nominated but never winning for some of his lushest, loveliest but most conventional music, including Days of Heaven (1978) and, perhaps most famously, The Mission (1986). Finally, four years ago, Morricone won a competitive Oscar for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015). He remained committed to the ethic of his job, even when he felt estranged from inspiration. “Even when I’m not able to come up with anything extraordinary, I must force myself because there’s a signed contract and a deadline, and I must be ready to record music that is good, dignified, and respectful of another author’s creative work,” he said in Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words.
At his best, Morricone was much more than that. His luxuriant music always aided in the believability of what we see on the screen: His stately score for Red Sonja (1985) mitigates the preposterousness of a long-haired Arnold Schwarzenegger on horseback through the Italian countryside, and his glorious, Oscar-nominated score for De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) is rousing enough to persuade even the most jaded of modern audiences to root for Prohibition-era G-men on liquor raids. Morricone contributed art to pop, and our moviegoing experience is richer for it.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
