Monday, July 6, 2020

Ennio Morricone, 1928-2020


I woke up early this morning to see that Twitter was blowing up with news of the death of Italian film score composer Ennio Morricone at the age of 91. Morricone was incredibly prolific, having started in the late 1950s and becoming really famous with the scores to the three films in Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy.

Morricone scored both Hollywood and Italian movies, earning six Oscar nominations but only finally winning a competitive Oscer a few years back for The Hateful Eight. I happen to have Once Upon a Time in America on the DVR and at some point I'll get around to watching it and doing a post on it, but it runs something like 73 hours so it's going to be a time commitment.

I was looking for some examples of his work on Youtube, and wouldn't you know I was able to find three good examples right off the bat in which he's conducting his own music:



The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly



The Mission, which is one of his Oscar-nominated scores



Cinema Paradiso, which Ennio composed along with his son Andrea

I haven't read anything yet on when TCM is going to run a programming tribute to Morricone.

1 comment:

thevoid99 said...

This is really tough as he is my all-time favorite film composer in all of cinema as the scores he did for Sergio Leone are just iconic while he did so much more as the theme to The Battle of Algiers, some of the music he did for films by Brian de Palma and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the scores for 1900, Days of Heaven, The Mission. A true legend. Ciao Maestro.