Ennio Morricone was honored earlier this week with a Golden Globe Award for his music to Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent mystery-western “The Hateful Eight.” The nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were announced yesterday, and again Morricone is on the ballot.
Though he received an honorary award in 2007 “for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music,” Morricone has never won a competitive Oscar. That could change this year, as I have yet to hear anything that can stand up to Morricone’s persistently sinister, insistently memorable passacaglia of doom.
Hear it for yourself this week on “Picture Perfect,” as I salute Morricone with an hour of his western scores, including his immortal music for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966) and “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), both written for Sergio Leone, and his whacked out main title for Sergio Corbucci’s “Navajo Joe” (1966).
Tarantino is a magpie filmmaker who draws his inspiration from a variety of B-movie genres, tossing their elements into a blender and then slathering them all over his screenplays, in much the same manner as he pours on the blood and guts during his films’ gratuitous showdowns. He has made no secret of his love for the spaghetti western, and there are moments in “The Hateful Eight” when the ghost of Lee Van Cleef seems to hover over this gathering of bounty hunters, Civil War veterans and outlaws as their patron saint.
Morricone singlehandedly invented the spaghetti western sound over a half century ago, when budgetary constraints caused him to bypass the big orchestral flavor of Hollywood oaters in favor of a psychedelic palette of twangy surfer guitars, whistles, harmonicas, whips, gunshots, jew’s harps, preening trumpets, shrieks and barking male choruses.
Morricone wrote three dozen such scores during a career which encompasses over 500 film and television projects.
Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that John Williams received his 50th Academy Award nomination, for his music to “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” He is the most nominated artist alive, and the winner of five competitive Oscars. But at 87 years-old, the Force has been with Morricone for a long time.
I hope you’ll join me as we head out west with Ennio Morricone, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – tonight at 6 ET, with a repeat tomorrow morning at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
