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The Big Score: Ennio Morricone
spaghettiwesterns.com
Friday, March 23, 2007
The Big Score: Ennio Morricone
By Nathan Kosub
I like that Ennio Morricone never spotted Clint Eastwood a score of his own. Eastwood might be the only one; the composer?s achievements include plenty of adaptations from the Bible, a Pedro Almod?var movie (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) and Orca, the next best summer Saturday for anyone who hasn?t seen it. If you missed the Oscars but read Dave Kehr, his ?Critic?s Choice? column in last week?s New York Times says most of what you need to know. To his endorsement of Lucio Fulci?s A Lizard in a Woman?s Skin, Kehr adds, ?The score, it almost goes without saying, is by Ennio Morricone.?
That statement is either a testament to Morricone?s genre credentials or Kehr playing darts on the board of Morricone?s career (close to five hundred film and television scores to his name). Almost 80, Morricone is still working on soundtracks and concert pieces ? video games, too. He doesn?t differentiate between them, but I?ve only heard his film scores. They work well in the context of movies ? a nice argument for the team effort.
Of course, the lonesome whistle and stringent guitars that trace every Sergio Leone movie Morricone scored from A Fistful of Dollars to Once Upon A Time in the West are maybe the last reminder of the Western as anything not post-modern in cinema. Everybody recognizes the music, everyone enjoys it; it?s Clint Eastwood, of course, the short cigar and wanton slaughter, but more and more, it?s John Wayne in Stagecoach, too ? less the escalation of the Western hero?s creed (?Ride away, ride away?) and more the stardust iconography of The Hero As Exactly Who He Appears To Be. The surprise is that it?s no surprise when NPR?s Marketplace plays the same soundtracks to indicate a particularly bad day at the stock exchange. As film scores, they?re templates. As pop culture, they?re ubiquitous. Not even John Williams? Jaws jam feels quite as commonplace anymore.
So no overwhelming tribute here; with Oscar comes all requisite hagiography. Instead I?ll mention one of the hundreds of movies Film Forum left out of their recent Morricone retrospective: John Carpenter?s The Thing. The thing to know is that Carpenter didn?t like to outsource his soundtracks. Long past the point of repetition, they felt like his break from the hazards of filmmaking ? his retreat. Sometimes Carpenter collaborated, but he rarely surrendered whole hog. Except, most notably, on The Thing.
As a composer, Carpenter loved synthesizers. He used them as emphasis in startling scenes, and cradled the repetitious bass line or thimbleful of notes that built with the slow inevitability of a zombie invasion. Carpenter claims to have always wanted most to make a Western, but in spite of a lot of Western tropes in every genre from horror to science fiction, he never really has. The same with Morricone; very few of his hundreds of scores are for Westerns, but the West is what he?s known for. Maybe, this once, Carpenter even asked for him.
The Thing begins with a credit sequence, but not the title. Names appear as the low, rhythmic, and familiar sounds of a synthesizer build. Then silence, as ?Directed by John Carpenter? fronts the background?s dissolve from pitch black into stars. A space ship dwarfs the shot and ignites in the distant atmosphere of earth. It disappears. ?John Carpenter?s The Thing? burns through the film stock; the screen goes dark and the synthesizers begin again. They continue that way, as a big husky lopes across an open field of year-round snow and a man in a helicopter tries to shoot it down.
Except for the credits, you?d guess it was Carpenter. It looks like a Carpenter movie (that Dean Cundey burnish is unmistakable) and sounds like a Carpenter score. Was that really Morricone, you ask, as you think of Days of Heaven. But it is. It might be the perfect copy if it wasn?t also so efficient ? a kind of cabin fever that shadows the plot and reinforces each monstrous death through unchanging repetition; when only two characters remain, however tenaciously, from an Arctic outpost of a dozen, the credits begin with the same clean refrain.
But there is another score at work in The Thing: a symphonic, string-filled affair, like Hitchcock, to be uncreative about it. Yet those strings are something Bernard Herrmann might have done ? they have the effect of a ghost story, as in Vertigo when Kim Novak is watching the grave, which, in some ways, MacReady (Kurt Russell) and his expedition team sort of are. The arrangements feel new in a Carpenter movie ? and again, they are ? but mimic the lush life of an alien life-force characterized by the warm organic mess its attacks and modifications inevitably involve. Morricone?s strings are the birth pangs of a hot-house flower on the rampage; there is romance in the score quite apart from the throes of an Arctic winter.
The trick, as far as the audience is concerned, is how often the music isn?t even there. In the moments of highest tension (testing the crew for alien blood, say), only silence registers in the background. Or else a little soundtrack pipes in, like in an early, ominous tracking shot that follows the alien dog as it wanders screenwriter Bill Lancaster?s ?cramped and never-ending maze of hallways? to the increasingly distant, muffled-by-rooms spark of Stevie Wonder?s ?Superstitious.? Silence, stereos, and, finally, the wind. More than just white noise or narrative irony, the sound of wind ? of storms, of socked-in angry gales ? is omnipresent in The Thing, just like the breath at the tip of everyone?s tongue. It howls and rages and convinces us all that at least death by fire is quick by comparison.
Three variations on the theme of isolation, on the anti-hero all-American (Russell?s MacReady), on dire straits and pessimism. Like the whistle at Clint Eastwood?s back, Morricone?s score is lots of fun. In a documentary about The Thing, John Carpenter talks up the original novella by John W. Campbell (Who Goes There?), special-effects long-hairs spasm down memory lane, and Kurt Russell is just glad to be on location in such a pretty wilderness. Dean Cundey, the cinematographer, is nervous about the mining crews on the nearby mountain. Morricone isn?t anywhere; he wrote eleven scores in 1982, and The Thing was just one of them. Which is, I hope, less an argument for the mundane truth that all of Ennio Morricone?s scores are worthwhile, and more a suggestion that craft is the best way to explain his numbers; it?s the craft, and not the talent, that makes him rare.