My roommate stared me down when I asked her if she’d heard of Ennio Morricone. “Are you kidding me?” she quipped, confirming the iconic Italian film composer—who’s loved equally by cinema buffs, avant-gardists and rock snobs—was in fact quite familiar to her. Her father is a first generation Italian, making “Morricone” a natural part of her cultural lexicon.
But lately his name has been just as ubiquitous in the American press, especially here in New York, where alongside an ensemble of some 200 musicians and vocalists the 78-year-old maestro conducted his first-ever American concert Feb. 3 at Radio City Music Hall. In fact, this February might as well be called “Ennio Morricone Month.” On Feb. 20, Sony’s classical imprint releases a Morricone tribute album featuring the likes of Roger Waters, Bruce Springsteen and Metallica—which is sure to bolster the hype he garnered in the rock world last year thanks to his string contributions on Morrissey’s latest album.
Five days later, Morricone will receive an honorary Oscar at the 79th Academy Awards—he racked up, but failed to take home five original score nominations between 1978 and 2000—a monumental achievement for a man who’s been called one of the most distinctive and influential composers of our time.
Central to the current wave of Morricone madness is a three-week, 26-film retrospective presented by Film Forum, an event that trumps the equally relevant, though far less substantial six-film tribute that MOMA screened Feb. 1-7. Ironically, the timeliness of Film Forum’s programming was sheer coincidence:
“The impetus really was when we heard about the Radio City concert,” explains Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s director of repertory programming. “But we had no idea he would be receiving the Oscar this year. We published the film fest schedule in our calendar and news of the Oscar was announced the next day. It was purely coincidental.”
Basing a film retrospective around a composer can be tricky, but Morricone’s body of work is so vast—he’s composed music for some 500 films—it was easy for Goldstein to select 26 films celebrated both for their direction and Morricone’s inimitable scores; compositions that fuse his workings in the pop world with his background in contemporary experimental music. And while Morricone is most famous for his contributions to Sergio Leone’s classic 1960s Spaghetti Westerns, Film Forum’s program draws from a wide sampling of genres and directors. After all,
Morricone himself, Goldstein points out, hates that he’s associated primarily with Westerns.
The result is a diverse arrangement of masterworks, period films and obscurities that reflect the breadth of Morricone’s talent as a composer. The festival kicked off last week with Elio Petri’s 1970 police thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, followed by Once Upon a Time in the West (a staple from the Leone/Morricone canon), Italian neo-realist Pier Pasolini’s 1974 desert saga Arabian Nights and Danger! Diabolik, a 1967 Mod spy flick directed by Mario Bava. The remaining Leone films include the “Man With No Name” trilogy—A Fistful of Dollars (Feb. 7), For a Few More Dollars (Feb. 15) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Feb. 16-17)—in which Clint Eastwood stars and some of Morricone’s most recognizable scores are featured, like that unmistakable “Waah, Huwaah, Waaah.” Other highlights are screenings by Academy Award winner Bernardo Bertolucci, horror auteur Dario Argento and Gillo Pontecorvo, whose famous 1965 political thriller The Battle of Algiers will be shown Feb. 9-10. The most recent selection of the lineup, also one of the few films to afford Morricone an Oscar nomination, is Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), scheduled for Feb. 18-19.
For some Morricone enthusiasts, the prolific and illusive composer’s recent acclaim, however well deserved, seems to have come out of the blue. London-based BBC documentarian David Thompson, who made a film about Morricone in 1995, says it feels odd talking about Morricone at the present time considering the world hasn’t heard much about him, or from him, in the past 20 years. He also says aside from Morricone’s late ’60s work with Leone and other Italian directors, it’s difficult for him to isolate any one period as the pinnacle of Morricone’s career. But if there’s one thing of which he and other film connoisseurs are certain, it’s the fact that his praise is warranted:
“It’s a sign of the recognition that we don’t have composers of this caliber anymore, or at least the music we hear in films today generally isn’t of that level of distinctiveness where you can’t separate the score from the film. He certainly deserves the Oscar.”
