Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)
Monday, July 6, 2020 at 8:00PM by Nathaniel R
Confession, dear reader. Two decades of writing about movies later I still feel ill-equipped to write about one of the largest tools in the filmmaking arsenal: scoring. Ennio Morricone once described music as "energy, space, and time" which is a broad and huge and cosmic enough description to explain away how overwhelming a task it is to write about... especially to those of us who are more visually attuned. As you've undoubtedly heard, Morricone, by all accounts of the all time great composers, has passed away at the age of 91 after a fall which hospitalized him. In the course of his spectacular career, which stretches across six decades of cinema, he helped defined an entire genre (the spaghetti western), and composed the scores for over three hundred movies as well as an alarming number of TV shows on the side.
His six Oscar nominations (Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malena, The Hateful Eight) and two Oscars (one of them an Honorary) don't even begin to cover what he gave to the cinema. He was beloved by auteurs as is amply evident in his filmography. Some of his most famous films and scores outside of those Oscar-honored works include The Good The Bad and the Ugly, La Cage Aux Folles, Lady of the Camelias, Once Upon a Time in America, Inglorious Basterds, Wolf, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, For a Few Dollars More, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Cinema Paradiso. Do you have a favourite score from that illustrious body of work?
Morricone is survived by his wife of 63 years, Maria Travia, and their four children. He will be missed but his legacy has long since been immortalized.
Reader Comments (22)
I love the scores from The Untouchables and Cinema Paradiso -- two very different films, but both unforgettable.
Ennio Morricone wrote a score for that 1915 silent movie in 1992.
The Mission. Still can't believe he lost that Oscar. And how did he miss for Nuovo Cinema Paradiso?
Once Upon a Time in the West, hands down. Not only because itś one of the greatest movies ever, but because itś that great because of Morriconeś music. People tend to be condescendent about spaghetti westerns, like a nerd obsession, but this movie is flawlessly serious and epic and Morricone's music works not to make characters look cool, but to perfectly delineate drama.
I remember the first time I saw the movie. I started to cry from the very moment we listen to Jill's theme and Cardinale's character realize nobody's expecting her at the station, and she decides to look for her husband. The music becomes louder as the camera moves up in a crane to show the whole village. Like, I am crying now just by writing this.
Peggy -- thanks for the clarification. it makes sense now.
His score for The Mission helped pull me out of many mini-depressions in my life.
His score for The Mission is truly a work of art. How did he not win?
It's curious -and a bit confusing- because he scored another Camille in '81 starring Isabelle Huppert.
A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly, The Battle of Algiers, Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker!, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1900, Days of Heaven, La Cage Aux Folles, The Thing, Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso, Casualties of War,Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Wolf, The Legend of 1900, Malena, Mission to Mars, The Hateful Eight.
If you ever want to learn about the power of music in a film, just listen to the music of these films by the Maestro. As great as Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein, Terence Blachard, Alexandre Desplat, Rachel Portman, John Williams, Nino Rota, Hans Zimmer, and many other composers are in their craft. None of them has that air of beauty and grandeur that Ennio Morricone had. To me, he was the best of them all. Grazie Ennio. Ciao.
I... for Icarus. It's a little seen film, but it is really good, and Morricone's score for it is spectactular. Is it okay to plug the review I wrote for it yesterday in this comment? Well there, I just did it.
I am so sad, he was one of my all time favorite cinema composers! Of course regarding his age it was probable that he would die someday, but even thinking like that, very sad news! As a fan of the maestro, and with such a long career and many scores, it's so difficult to choose only one... of course the films with Sergio Leone (not only the spaghetti westerns, but also "Once Upon a Time in the West"! the wonderful and poignant "Once Upon a Time in America"), "The Mission", "Cinema Paradiso", and even less remembered films as the today undervalued "State of Grace"... But if I have to choose only one, my final decission would be a sentimental one: the soundtrack for the miniseries "Marco Polo", from 1982, the first time I fell in love with Morricone's music (I was only 7 or 8 years and didn't know anything about cinema or soundtracks, but what an evocative music!), and years later, the amazing "Novecento" by Bertolucci: the film was from 1976, but it was forbidden in my country (Chile) during the dictatorship, and finally arrived to chilean TV in the 90's, since then it is one of my favorite films... I know that maybe is not perfect or a masterpiece in the traditional sense of the word, but for me it's amazing, a bigger than life movie!!! And the beautiful and very sensitive music of Morricone it's a very fundamental part of my passion for that film!
Nat, Morricone didn't write "Inglorious Basterds", Tarantino used some of Morricone previously written themes from other soundtracks not only in that film, but also in "Django Unchained", "Death Proof", both volumens of "Kill Bill" and even last year in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood". The only time the maestro wrote music specifically for a Tarantino film, it was the Oscar winner "The Hateful Eight". If there are still doubts on how influential the Morricone's legacy can be, you just need to check how many soundtracks have used his music from previous films during all these decades, it's amazing!
"And how did he miss for Nuovo Cinema Paradiso?"
I looked this up. One of the things that puzzled me is how "Cinema Paradiso" only got Foreign Language Film...and nothing else. Considering how popular it was, you'd think it would've been one of those foreign films that would've gotten Director, Screenplay and a couple of tech awards, including Score. Apparently, it wasn't released in U.S. theaters until February 1990, thereby it wasn't eligible for any other categories of that year and since it was nominated for (and won) Foreign Language Film, it was also no longer eligible to compete the following year.
I also think it's friggin' mental none of his Spaghetti Western scores got a nomination.
He scored my fave film of all time, an awesome collaboration with John Carpenter that ultimately made him win his Oscar in competition, decades later, using unused bits along the new score... "The Thing", which admittedly is an anomaly in his career, completely minimalistic and not as showy as, say, The Mission, which is a way more flamboyant score.
In an irony of destiny, Morricone (along John Williams!) is the 2020 winner of the Princess of Asturias Award in Arts (Spanish Nobel Price) and was scheduled to receive it later this year.
Like many, I am saddened by this maestro's demise. I thought he will be one of those people who will live forever. Like Agnès Varda, Leonard Cohen, Hortense Calisher, Michel Legrand.
I love the film scores he did especially when coupled with the incomparable voice of Edda Dell'Orso from Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) to Love Affair (1994). Favorites include scores for The Mission, Metti Una Sera a Cena, Maddalena and La Califfa.
One of my favorite Ennio Morricone stories. Morricone's score for The Mission was a triumph. Here is a portion of his interview with The Guardian on his Oscar loss to Hancock.
"I definitely felt that I should have won for The Mission," he declares, holding court in the classical splendour of his spacious Rome apartment. "Especially when you consider that the Oscar-winner that year was Round Midnight, which was not an original score. It had a very good arrangement by Herbie Hancock, but it used existing pieces. So there could be no comparison with The Mission. There was a theft! But, of course, if it was up to me, every two years I would win an Oscar."
Malena
The guy won 6 Baftas back when they didn't care about the race.
The Mission is simply the best soundtrack album of all time (how is that for superlatives?!). It so far exceeds the movie that it's not even close. I play it all the time and in fact it was my "go to" for dinner parties for over a year after the movie came out.
Cinema Paradiso is always terrific, but isn't as, well, satisfying as a soundtrack album.
If you listen to a "greatest hits" kind of compilation for Morricone, you will be overwhelmed with emotion and nostalgia.
Morricone was not only prolific but his range is amazing- from epics to comedies to thrillers
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso has the best score of all time. Period.
RIP Ennio Morricone
His range was incredible, but what also amazes me is that even as he spanned genres and moods, he still had such a distinctive *style* you could recognize. Nathaniel, I feel you on writing about music - I can't do it either, and I can't say what it was that made a score "Morricone." It was a "know it when you hear it" kind of thing.
Cinema Paradiso is my sentimental favorite, but I also have to give a shout out to one of his more obscure works by the same director (Tornatore), THE LEGEND OF 1900 starring Tim Roth. It doesn't quite work as a movie, but it has some lovely moments, and, of course some really lovely music. The "love theme" is one I keep returning to, even more than his greatest hits:
Playing Love
I've said on another thread that Once Upon a Time in the West is my favorite score of all time, and I agree with everything Cal Roth says. Close runners-up: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Days of Heaven.
Not as popular as the 2nd remake, but the lush orchestration of "Love Affair", the vanity project with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, is absolutely gorgeious.
Rest in Peace.