IN MEMORIAM: Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)
My official introduction to Ennio Morricone’s music was The Untouchables. At the time I wasn’t well versed in mob movies and I wasn’t as much of a film score junkie as I would become later in life, but even then it was clear that his composition for a movie about a group of lawmen taking on Al Capone was unique and grand in scale for a movie like that.
Movie scores are one of the most important aspects of filmmaking that exists, subjectively speaking. When you are talking about engaging the emotions of the audience and getting them to feel a specific way about events, characters and moments, sound is crucial to the narrative you are building. Without a composer’s score, movies fall flat and don’t carry nearly the amount of emotional weight and power with just images in front of you.
Morricone over the course of several decades exemplified that, and even though there are several of his scored movies I’ve never watched, I’ve heard his music many times, in large part due to Quentin Tarantino, who aside from being a master of “musical reappropriation” in his film, has a habit of using more than a few of Morricone’s tracks in his films.
My favorite at the moment is a track called “Minacciosamente lontano,” which is originally from the film “I Crudeli(The Cruel Ones),” a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Corbucci. I’ve never seen that film, but the track is expertly placed in Django Unchained for the scene when Django and Dr. King Schultz met up with Calvin Candie and his slave holding entourage to tour the grounds. It’s a tense, uncomfortable scene and the music, which has an old school jazz orchestra flavor with sharp brass and a lot of percussion, is perfect for it. If you weren’t familiar with I Crudeli(also called The Hellbenders) you’d have no idea it was borrowed from another film.
That might be one of the best things you can say about Morricone’s work, that it is so versatile and ubiquitous that it needn’t be tied to a particular film like many scores are designed to be. Even some of the most well known compositions by some of the best composers in history are uniquely tied to the films they were scored for with themes, motifs and arrangements, but Morricone just made great music in general for his films that could really be used anywhere, if not just listened to by itself without a need to connect it to its original film. Indeed, Tarantino used a few tracks from I Crudeli for Django Unchained, and they all sound and feel just as great in that movie as they surely do in its original film, and even by itself on the soundtrack.
That being said, it can also depend on the movie, because the score for The Untouchables is unmistakably tied to Brian DePalma’s film, and all the themes and motifs used there evoke the violence, tension and at certain times heroics of the characters and story in question. The theme Morricone made for Elliott Ness’ group is an orchestral delight, but you don’t get much better than the drama, tension and outright horror of the entire train station scene from start to finish. Everyone knows the slow motion framing, pacing and blocking, but it’s that haunting, terrifying score from one of the masters of the genre that makes it all work in the end and sends chills down your spine whenever you watch it.
Ennio Morricone was without question one of the titans of the film scoring world, and his immense legacy and body of work in Hollywood will stand the test of time for generations to come. Rest in peace good sir, and thank you for reminding us how important music is to movies, like all good composers do.