Ennio Morricone’s scores, celebrated in overlapping retros at Film Forum and MoMA this month (and with an honorary Oscar in the next) are exultant trash. Shameless portentousness and then endless climax, guitar power chords and eclectic instruments appropriated ravenously — it’s pure pulp. But when pulp is exploded to larger-than-life it becomes iconic.
For that reason, it’s impossible to start a discussion of Morricone’s scores anywhere but with his collaborations with Sergio Leone — just as it’s impossible to conceive of Leone’s films without Morricone’s scores. From Leone’s first major film, the Yojimbo/Red Harvest riff Fistful of Dollars, his panoramic vistas and even more panoramic close-ups express, basically and emphatically, the central Western myth, the Man in Landscape. Leone purifies and enlarges the tropes of American history as related by American movies; the outsized movie-fed iconography of the primally titled Once Upon a Time in the West and its even more sprawling gangster movie counterpart Once Upon a Time in America are epic summations of how American pop culture creates American archetypes. Leone’s frequent tactic of attributing Morricone’s matinee-stirring score to a character within the film is both ludicrous — as if Charles Bronson’s harmonica could make such a big noise — and essential, as if the characters are so large they carry their own soundtrack with them. (Along those lines, the obvious and oft-mocked dubbing of spaghetti Westerns and other Italian genre fair of the period is a synecdoche for the films in general. The films were recorded without synchronized sound so that dialogue could be added later in any language, and the myth easily exported: they’re literally so universal it’s funny.)
But, as the upcoming surveys indicate, you can’t have a transcendent pulp composer like Morricone without straight-up pulp movies. Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, with Morricone’s swingin’ 60s score, is a catsuit-sporting supercriminal spoof that outdoes its competition both contemporaneous (Batman, the Flint movies) and contemporary (C.Q., the Austin Powers movies) for pseudo-acidhead mod spectacle. And in Navajo Joe (which can’t possibly star Burt Reynolds as its avenging title character and yet, somehow, does), director Sergio Corbucci plunging with his camera into the midst of his own reckless action choreography, dodging the stuntmen leaping from toppling horse to runaway train. (Morricone’s wailing score is credited to occasional pseudonym “Leo Nichols.”)
Sometimes, though, the cheapies are just cheap: John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Gena Rowlands slum their way through Giuliano Montaldo’s heistploitation Machine Gun McCain: the tawdry location exteriors and Cassavetes’s bantamweight Lawrence Tierney impersonation are hopeful, and Britt Ekland is certainly convincing as the single most compliant piece of excess-baggage eye candy in the history of cinema, but late-show movie arbitrariness wins out. Maximillian Schell’s End of the Game has a 70s airport-bookstore source novel and a mixed-nuts cast to match (Martin Ritt, Jon Voight, Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bissett, Donald Sutherland), but the blocky plotting steps all over the decades-old cat-and-mouse murder hook, and Schell fails to set a mood to match Morricone’s autumnal score. Then again, it’s a tribute to the composer that whenever the music kicks in, you can almost picture the movie it should be accompanying.
For that reason, it’s impossible to start a discussion of Morricone’s scores anywhere but with his collaborations with Sergio Leone — just as it’s impossible to conceive of Leone’s films without Morricone’s scores. From Leone’s first major film, the Yojimbo/Red Harvest riff Fistful of Dollars, his panoramic vistas and even more panoramic close-ups express, basically and emphatically, the central Western myth, the Man in Landscape. Leone purifies and enlarges the tropes of American history as related by American movies; the outsized movie-fed iconography of the primally titled Once Upon a Time in the West and its even more sprawling gangster movie counterpart Once Upon a Time in America are epic summations of how American pop culture creates American archetypes. Leone’s frequent tactic of attributing Morricone’s matinee-stirring score to a character within the film is both ludicrous — as if Charles Bronson’s harmonica could make such a big noise — and essential, as if the characters are so large they carry their own soundtrack with them. (Along those lines, the obvious and oft-mocked dubbing of spaghetti Westerns and other Italian genre fair of the period is a synecdoche for the films in general. The films were recorded without synchronized sound so that dialogue could be added later in any language, and the myth easily exported: they’re literally so universal it’s funny.)
But, as the upcoming surveys indicate, you can’t have a transcendent pulp composer like Morricone without straight-up pulp movies. Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, with Morricone’s swingin’ 60s score, is a catsuit-sporting supercriminal spoof that outdoes its competition both contemporaneous (Batman, the Flint movies) and contemporary (C.Q., the Austin Powers movies) for pseudo-acidhead mod spectacle. And in Navajo Joe (which can’t possibly star Burt Reynolds as its avenging title character and yet, somehow, does), director Sergio Corbucci plunging with his camera into the midst of his own reckless action choreography, dodging the stuntmen leaping from toppling horse to runaway train. (Morricone’s wailing score is credited to occasional pseudonym “Leo Nichols.”)
Sometimes, though, the cheapies are just cheap: John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Gena Rowlands slum their way through Giuliano Montaldo’s heistploitation Machine Gun McCain: the tawdry location exteriors and Cassavetes’s bantamweight Lawrence Tierney impersonation are hopeful, and Britt Ekland is certainly convincing as the single most compliant piece of excess-baggage eye candy in the history of cinema, but late-show movie arbitrariness wins out. Maximillian Schell’s End of the Game has a 70s airport-bookstore source novel and a mixed-nuts cast to match (Martin Ritt, Jon Voight, Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bissett, Donald Sutherland), but the blocky plotting steps all over the decades-old cat-and-mouse murder hook, and Schell fails to set a mood to match Morricone’s autumnal score. Then again, it’s a tribute to the composer that whenever the music kicks in, you can almost picture the movie it should be accompanying.
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