A Fistful Of Ennio

Aah-eee-aah-eee-aah. A coyote’s wail-like whistling, the twang of a guitar, a haunting chime from a bell, a chorus of yodelling, barking voices and trumpets crescendoing—these are the sounds of the catchy theme that a generation of Indian moviegoers in the seventies can still hear in their heads, even if they can’t name the movie they heard it in. It was the main theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, composed by the Italian maestro Ennio Morricone.

Back then, everybody assumed it and others of its ilk were Hollywood flicks, but, of course, they were Italian ‘spaghetti’ westerns, often shoddily voice-dubbed from Italian into English and released even in non-English speaking countries. Besides, like most ‘English’ (foreign) films that released in India, these were already several years old. I know that in Bangalore alone, there would be subsequent reruns of the worn-out prints of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) or For A Few Dollars More (1965), both directed by Sergio Leone, almost every year. They ran for a week each in regular theatres as well as in what we called ‘tent’ cinemas. Hollywood western Mackenna’s Gold (1969) was a ‘raja of reruns’ in India—there is even a hilariously dubbed Hindi version called Mastaan Ka Sona!

Sometimes, most of the audience wouldn’t even understand English, but they still thoroughly enjoyed these masala movies—especially the Italian westerns, which were meant to be popular money-earners. And everybody would come out of the theatres whistling Ennio Morricone’s tunes.

Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) heavily influenced Sholay (1975), the biggest Indian blockbuster from that era. And predictably, R.D. Burman’s seminal background score was also influenced by Morricone’s themes from the film. The strange, distorted and heavily processed sound effects one hears in the movie had never been used before in Indian cinema. From the cheerful main theme to the eerie Gabbar Singh theme with metallic clanging, echoing and wails, all are hugely Morricone-inspired.

Morricone is my favourite film composer from the West. I keep listening to my elaborate collection of his soundtrack CDs. I am sure even the best music composers in India—from Ilaiyaraaja to A.R. Rahman, Vishal Bhardwaj and Amit Trivedi—will acknowledge that he was a huge influence in their formative years.

The spaghetti western tunes were the most popular, but Morricone’s flamboyant music spanned many genres and moods. Roland Joffe’s masterpiece, The Mission, had melancholic, religious and choral music while the 1997 adaptation of Lolita with Jeremy Irons had a romantic, sad and dreamy score. Cinema Paradiso has many fans in India, but few remember or even know its soulful music was by Morricone.

From Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) to Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Oliver Stone’s U Turn (1997), Pedro Almodovar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) and Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015), he composed for about 500 European and American movies and TV shows. I remember him telling an interviewer that he took on as many films as he could—he saved many undeserving movies too.

One could say that the Italian maestro’s fusion of modern, classical and pop, choice of unconventional instruments, choral flourishes and enthusiasm for risky sound experiments—while never sacrificing the melody—changed the way film music was composed everywhere. Typical Hollywood background scores of that era were conservative and stuck to the faux-classical, formal orchestral compositions or pop songs. There were a few exceptions, like Bernard Herrmann, who would compose unconventional music, especially for Alfred Hitchcock. In this milieu, Morricone’s oeuvre stood out. It was not just a ‘background’ score, it was sometimes a ‘foreground’ score—very much a part of the narrative and cinematic to its core.

It was especially so with his legendary collaborator, Sergio Leone, who worked with Morricone in six of the seven films he made. Take the climactic duel in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. The scene cuts to a series of shots of the three actors (Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach) and then their extreme close-ups repeatedly for a shocking five minutes or so. There are no dialogues or action as the music builds up—just a grimacing close-up after a scowling close-up after a tense close-up. The Charles Bronson character in Once Upon A Time In The West is only identified as ‘the man with a harmonica’. Their collaboration is unique. I cannot think of another example of a film director so reliant on his composer that if you removed the music, the film would almost collapse.

It is well-known that Morricone often recorded the main themes first and then Leone would play these soundtracks while shooting the sequences to pace the actors and the way the camera moves. This was a reversal of the norm. In Once Upon A Time In The West, for instance, there is a theme building up when the actress (Claudia Cardinale) enters the railway office. The camera cranes past her, observes her from outside a window and then rises above the roof to reveal the entire town and the changing times. The piece Morricone had composed for the scene decided the cues and the duration of the shot. I don’t think there can be a greater compliment to a composer in a movie. It was like Morricone’s music was an invisible co-writer, actor, director and editor.

(As told to Ajay Sukumaran)