This week on “Picture Perfect,” for Father’s Day, it’s a fistful of spaghetti for Dad.
We’ll be sampling an hour’s worth of distinctive scores from spaghetti westerns – ultra-cool, hyper-stylized entertainments, made by Italians but often shot in Spain, with their multinational casts heavily dubbed in post-production.
Spaghetti westerns frequently turned the conventions of American westerns on their heads. At any rate, the morality of the traditional western was made much murkier, with antiheroes cast as protagonists, usually motivated by greed and revenge. Especially greed.
As with the American film industry, only more so, when the Italians found something that worked, they went into overdrive, churning out literally dozens of knock-offs and imitations a year, until a given genre had run its financially lucrative course.
To this end, over 600 European westerns were produced between 1960 and 1980. The most influential of these were those directed by Sergio Leone, especially those of the so-called “Dollars” Trilogy – “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
These, of course, featured then-rising star Clint Eastwood. His co-star in the second and third films was Lee Van Cleef, who in American westerns such as “High Noon” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” had bit parts as one of the villain’s henchmen, but became an international superstar as the spaghetti western’s most reliable – and bankable – heavy.
We’ll sample from music for the “Dollars” Trilogy, composed by Ennio Morricone, and the “Sabata” Trilogy (which also starred Van Cleef), composed by Marcello Giombini.
Tell Dad it’s all-you-can-eat. We’ll be piling the plates high with music from spaghetti westerns, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
What did I learn from watching “Ennio” (2021), director Giuseppe Tornatore’s epic love letter to his regular musical collaborator, the late Ennio Morricone? A lot, actually. At some points, perhaps even too much.
I always knew the composer was a little exasperated by his continued association in many people’s minds with “spaghetti westerns.” Of course, he’d written music for dozens of them, but they were a mere fraction of his overall output of some 500 film and television scores. What I didn’t know is that, according to him, both he and Sergio Leone disliked the music for his revolutionary score to “A Fistful of Dollars.” You know, the one that changed movie music forever, certainly that for westerns and especially Italian westerns. The artists seemed to like it well enough in the moment, but by the time they got around to working on the sequels, they were over it. Good thing Ennio pushed through to compose the music for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” which is quite simply one of the most recognizable film scores ever written. Right up there with “Psycho” and “Jaws” in terms of instant identification by your average person on the street.
Morricone and Tornatore’s working relationship began with “Cinema Paradiso,” which the composer agreed to score at a time when he was one of the most famous in the world (with 350 of his scores already written) and the director was only just starting out. Decades later, when Morricone talked retirement, he specifically cited Tornatore’s films as being among the few projects that could ever entice him back. Sort of like John Williams with Steven Spielberg. But to my knowledge, Williams never was so divided about his occupation or so vocal about his reservations.
If you’re a filmmaker and you hire Ennio Morricone, in the names of all saints in Heaven, do not tell him what to do! Unquestionably, he has his own ideas. Send him a script and let him watch the movie, and then get out of the way. Otherwise, like Oliver Stone, you’ll get a taste of his testiness and understand in no uncertain terms that you are an idiot.
Not that Morricone is at any point discourteous to anyone. He just has strong convictions about what a specific film requires. He has his vision, and he is unwavering in the drive to realize his musical ideas.
We also learn how sensitive he is. He talks with palpable ambivalence, describing his longtime struggle to come to terms with his chosen profession. He so desperately craved the approval and acceptance of his father, his teacher, and his colleagues in the world of classical music. Even all these years later, his emotional and psychological struggles are evident.
According to Roland Joffé, when he first showed him “The Mission,” Morricone dissolved into tears, he found it to be so moving. He asked Joffé what he could possibly want from him. The movie required no music, he said; it was perfect as it was. Then he went home, and later the motif for “Gabriel’s Oboe” popped into his head. The score went on to become one of Morricone’s most recognized and revered. He was robbed of the Academy Award for Best Original Score that year when the Oscar went to “Round Midnight,” the soundtrack of which consisted mostly of preexisting classics by established jazz artists. It could be argued that it didn’t even belong in the same category. But Herbie Hancock, who provided what little original music there was in the film, accepted the award, and he was and remains an outspoken Morricone admirer.
Morricone would be nominated for – and lose – the Oscar five times before the Academy finally gave him an honorary award in 2007. Then he went on to win a competitive Oscar in 2016, at the age of 88, for his music for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” That he would remain so long underappreciated by the Academy is unfathomable. But he did live through an era when the competition was much stronger than it is now (“Round Midnight” aside).
The most revelatory parts of the documentary come in the first half hour, when we learn about Morricone’s early years, following in his father’s footsteps as a working musician, as opposed to an artist, earning the family bread using the cheapest secondhand trumpet his dad could find, playing gigs in orchestras and dance bands. Then his pursuit of excellence as a classical musician, and a composer, studying with Goffredo Petrassi. And after that, wandering further into avant-garde experimentation, first in Darmstadt, the epicenter of plinks, planks, and plunks, and then with the group he himself formed, Il Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (G.I.N.C.) .
The documentary does a great job of showing how these influences carried over into his music as an arranger for pop singers, and it’s hilarious, once it’s pointed out, to grasp just how crazy – and inspired – his choices were, in terms of including extramusical effects in these hit songs. So the spaghetti western sound of whip cracks, whistles, and nonsense choruses did not develop in a vacuum. At a point, Morricone brings some pretty hardcore avant-garde experimentation to bear on his film scores, with the G.I.N.C. improvising in some 40 films, until the suits finally pull him aside and say, Hey, Ennio, enough already!
There’s lots of great, rarely-seen footage of young Morricone in his nerd glasses, looking, as someone describes, all the world like a Peanuts character. But there’s so much, it seems like an awfully long time passes before we finally get to the spaghetti westerns that made him so famous. At that point, of course, even the most casual Morricone fan will sit up and take notice.
Then there will likely be a dip in interest, except perhaps for diehards and fans of international cinema, as there are discussions of films many Americans will be unfamiliar with, save perhaps something like “The Battle of Algiers,” which was regarded as significant enough that it made it to U.S. theaters. But many of the directors Morricone worked with were major players in world cinema, and a number of these are included among the talking heads.
One of the weaknesses of the documentary is its assumption that its audience really knows its stuff, to the extent that many of those who offer their onscreen commentary are not really identified beyond their names. So you have to fill in the blanks a little bit, in terms of who was a director or a work associate or a fan from another genre of music you might not be so familiar with. Again, if you’re really into Morricone and world cinema in general, you will likely recognize just about everyone, but I was relieved when there was finally some footage that explained who Alessandro Alessandroni (Morricone’s whistler and guitarist) and Edda dell’Orso (who provided the haunting vocalises for classic scores like “Once Upon a Time in the West”) are.
Also, are there any subtitles in this movie? For a documentary about a figure of international appeal, with so many of the onscreen participants speaking different languages, you would assume that there would be English subtitles. That well may be the case, but if so, for some reason they were not showing up on my print (I streamed it on Prime), so I wound up having to resort to closed captioning.
What comes across loud and clear, in whatever language, is that Tornatore loves Morricone. And why wouldn’t he? He enjoyed the privilege of being favored by one of the greatest geniuses of his art form. However, it is possible he loves him just a little too much. He is so close to his subject, he can’t seem to look away. While unquestionably a feast for Morricone admirers, the film, I’m sure, could be tightened by a good half hour. The running time is 150 minutes, nearly as long as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” itself (which I rewatched the next night). There’s a lot of repetition in the commentary of the talking heads, and I wonder if some of them even had to be there at all.
Perhaps partly it was a question of securing funding, or at any rate audience identification. If you can get Bruce Springsteen to come on and say he loves Morricone, great, but he really offers nothing substantial, certainly no insights. And then once you’ve got him to participate, you’ve got to have him in there enough to make it worthwhile. There are several such witnesses included. I found it much more interesting when the guy from Metallica shows up to offer a few remarks and we see him play “The Ecstasy of Gold” in concert. That was awesome. Really, between that and Morricone’s own concert footage, anyone will walk away understanding that the composer himself enjoyed the status of a rock star. At the end of his life, he toured everywhere, selling out arena after arena all over the world.
Tornatore began filming the documentary while Morricone was still alive, so we’re very lucky to have so many clips of the composer recollecting everything, including his work on so many of his major scores. For a guy who worked so much (there were years when he composed more than 20 scores), he seems to remember every musical phrase. Most shocking admission by the composer: that he hates melody! But I think we can take that with a grain of salt. These segments are gold.
And by the time we get to “Days of Heaven,” anyone who lived through the era realizes what a golden age it was. In the late ‘70s and 1980s, Morricone quietly revivified even American movies.
The verdict: “Ennio” is definitely worth seeing, most of all for Morricone fans; then for those that love the movies in general; and then for anyone who is curious about the fascinating path an artist’s career can take, and how expertly Morricone navigated the then-divergent fields of classical, avant-garde, popular, and film music. He really was forward-looking in his embrace and mastery of different forms, anticipating the now common practice of hurdling barriers that used to stand impenetrable between genres.
The trailer is superb. Whoever edited it should have put together the movie.
“Ennio,” a solid three out of four stars. Indispensable for lovers of Morricone and, more broadly, film music, and an interesting watch, if a long one, for everyone else.
It often frustrated Ennio Morricone that he was so identified with the spaghetti western. After all, he composed music for some 500 film and television productions, of which only a few dozen were set in a highly stylized American west – more often than not recreated in Spain. It’s the price to pay for having brilliantly revitalized an exhausted genre.
Primarily for budgetary reasons (the Italians didn’t have the luxury of Hollywood’s overflowing coffers), but also, in part, as a reaction to the ballad scores of Dimitri Tiomkin and the neo-Coplandisms of Elmer Bernstein, Morricone brought his own quirky sensibility to bear on the classic western iconography. His music is offbeat, ear-catching, and almost absurdly cool.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll celebrate Morricone’s birthday (he was born on this date in 1928) with a heaping helping of spaghetti and selections from his scores for “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), “Navajo Joe” (1966), and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966).
His striking music for Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy, especially that for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” became some of the most iconic of all time, frequently parodied, and as much a part of our collective cultural consciousness as that for “Jaws” and “Psycho.”
Morricone died in 2020 at the age of 91. His only competitive Oscar was for the Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” (allegedly a spaghetti western homage) in 2016. Previously, he was nominated for “Days of Heaven” (1978), “The Mission” (1986), “The Untouchables” (1987), “Bugsy” (1991), and “Malena” (2000). He received an honorary award from the Academy in 2007.
Get ready for a serenade of clangy surfer guitars, whistles, harmonicas, whips, gunshots, jaw harps, preening trumpets, coyote howls, shrieks, wails, and barking male choruses.
Happy birthday, Ennio Morricone. Grazie, Maestro, for all the Colts and carbs. We’ll be ladling out the spicy marinara on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EST)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EST)
Okay, Halloween is past. It’s All Saints’ Day. Not only that, but it also happens to be the start of Spagvemberfest!
What’s that, you say? Why, it’s a month-long challenge to view a spaghetti western a day.
What exactly is a “spaghetti western?” It’s a term bestowed by American film critics on Italian-produced oaters. Characteristically, they are filmed by Italians, often in Spain, sometimes in the American southwest. They likely feature an international cast, with a recognizable rising or fading star as their lead or leads. All the voices are dubbed in post-production, often to humorous effect. The characters are motivated by revenge or a lust for gold. In terms of morality, only a few degrees tend to separate the hero and the villain. Often there is an adherence to the conventions of the American western, however with the intent of deflating the western myth. There is certainly a preponderance of stylized violence. And if it’s worth watching, it probably features Somerville, New Jersey’s own Lee Van Cleef (pictured).
Admittedly, the genre is an acquired taste. I don’t know about you, but I’m really going to need this, as we begin the inexorable slide toward the holidays.
Wholly by coincidence, I’ll be doing my part by presenting a heaping helping of spaghetti western scores for the birthday of composer Ennio Morricone on my radio show, “Picture Perfect,” on Friday, November 10, at 8 p.m. EDT.
There is something just so innately Italian about the music of Ennio Morricone. So often in his works the smiles and tears commingle. He really caught the bittersweet essence of what it is to be alive. If he had lived a hundred years earlier, he might have been one of the great opera composers. When he’s not in badass spaghetti western mode, that is.
Happy birthday, Ennio Morricone, wherever you are.
“Cinema Paradiso”
“The Mission”
“Once Upon a Time in the West”
And, just so I don’t take the gas pipe, “The Ecstasy of Gold” from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”
Which I would request to be played at my funeral, if not for “Navajo Joe”
