An Ennio Morricone film education

I didn’t know a thing about the Italian composer called “Maestro” by his admirers, and there wasn’t an easy, in-house way to educate oneself on his discography. But as my cinephilia took hold, and I grew more adventurous with my rentals from the local video store, I started to notice his name popping up on films that, if nothing else (and very often there was nothing else), were bolstered by powerfully evocative scores. I didn’t much care for the flatly directed rainforest porn of Roland Joffé’s “The Mission”, but, ye gods, that oboe cue was the most heavenly melody I’d heard this side of Meredith Wilson’s “Till There Was You.” I desperately wanted to shut off Gregory Nava’s cloddish WWII melodrama “A Time of Destiny,” but I couldn’t risk missing another achingly gorgeous composition that belonged in some as-yet-unmade masterpiece. No one was writing better film scores than Morricone in the late 1980s, and I couldn’t understand why this guy wasn’t routinely snagging the A-list studio assignments that seemed to be the exclusive turf of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner and John Barry?

I’d discovered Morricone at a very strange time in his career. This wasn’t his emergence. This was his comeback. He’d been to the scoring mountaintop. Those spaghetti western themes Joe Dante referenced in “Innerspace” and “The ‘Burbs,” the ones I’d heard a thousand times at ballparks and in commercials, were callbacks to a time when Morricone was the counterculture king of film scores. The whistles and harmonicas and Fender electric guitars that defibrillated rebellious new life into a wheezing genre: I knew those movies and their pioneering sound, but I had no idea I was falling in love with the domesticated version of the man who’d concocted the latter.

The epiphany occurred one morning while I was splayed sick across a couch in my family’s living room. Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” is one of the quintessential widescreen classics, a movie you “haven’t truly seen” until you partake of its 35mm, 2.35:1 splendor in a movie theater. I watched it for the first time on a 28-inch Zenith, formatted for 4x3 broadcast, all while nursing a 102-degree fever. I might not have “truly seen” Leone’s masterpiece that day, but I heard it. I felt it. And when I saw the Maestro’s name in the credits, I immediately did the math: This film was over 20 years old. I had decades of Morricone to catch up with.

“Decades of Morricone” translates to hundreds of movies — most of which were not accessible to a movie-mad kid in a small northwest Ohio town in the late 1980s. The Leone films were there. But the gialli, poliziotteschi and non-spaghetti westerns that comprised the majority of his 1970s output were largely out of reach. They were mostly ignored by the many dependable home movie guides of the day (e.g. “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide” and Mick Martin and Marsha Porter’s “Video Movie Guide”). And if they did merit a mention in these books, they were typically shrugged off as sleazy, poorly dubbed knockoffs of successful Hollywood films. If you lived outside of a major media center, you had to work hard to find these movies. And if you had a Morricone jones, you did the work.

And you discovered more than Leone and Argento. You found Gillo Pontecorvo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Corbucci, Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, Lucio Fulci and Massimo Dallamano, their films full of violence and sensuality and radical politics. And you learned that even though he could churn out over 20 full scores within a year, Morricone never stopped inventing new sounds and motifs. They weren’t all knife-to-the-forehead stunners like “The Big Gundown,” but even the least inspired soundtracks had one keeper of a cue nestled within them — and you’d sit through all of “When Women Had Tails” to find it.

I came to these films without prejudice. They didn’t have to be masterpieces. They didn’t have to be passable. All that mattered was that they contained Morricone music I hadn’t heard before. Resolved to stick with them to the end credits, it didn’t take long for me to realize the conventional critical wisdom on a lot these movies was rubbish. Yes, they were riddled with dodgy dubbing and oftentimes pitched at piercing emotional decibels. They were lurid, shocking and a little insane. They were made for a madman like Morricone — and in many cases, Morricone’s music made these movies. But they were not, as I'd been led to believe by the vast majority of critics, without value. Growing accustomed to these off-kilter sensibilities in my formative years opened me up to a whole new avenue of cinema at which I might've turned up my nose had I arrived to it later.

Morricone flirted with Hollywood respectability in the late 1970s, scoring such bizarro commercial productions as “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” “Orca” and “The Island.” Somewhere amid this undistinguished string of assignments, he earned his first Academy Award nomination in 1979 for Terrence Malick’s pastoral pièce de réistance, “Days of Heaven.” But the 1980s were unkind to him until he stopped wasting his talents on true dreck like “Butterfly,” “Sahara” and “Treasure of the Four Crowns” and answered the prestige calling of “The Mission,” “Cinema Paradiso” and “The Untouchables.” In each of these latter-day scores, and in the scores to come (e.g. “Casualties of War,” “Bugsy,” “Love Affair” and “Lolita”), you can hear the Maestro working variations on the themes he composed for those tawdry spaghetti westerns and gialli. And you can trace a direct, decades-long line from what was once disreputable to what is now respectable. You can hear a half-century of film history in one man’s work. 

Happy 90th, Maestro. Thank you for the education.