Ennio
                         
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Year: 2021
Rating: 8.0
"I want to be a doctor when I grow up". "You will learn to play the trumpet so that you can support your family like I have." Ennio Morricone and his father. Morricone's father played the trumpet for decades in small bands that performed in cabarets and theaters. He wanted Ennio to follow in his footsteps and so forced his son to learn to play the trumpet. And so begins this wonderful documentary about the life but especially about the music of Ennio Morricone. Only a few minutes of the 156-minute film is dedicated to his life, the rest is to his music. Ennio went to music school, studied composition for years with one of Italy's most famous teachers. And at night played in the bands like his father - substituting for him if he was sick. He first started getting work as an arranger for TV and then in 1961 he was hired to compose the music for his first film, The Fascist. Then a few Spaghetti Westerns in which he used a fake name because he was embarrassed to be composing music for such a film. He didn't want his teacher to know. There were two very different schools of music - what they called pure music - classical music as we know it - and music for films and TV. The purists very much looked down on that world. Ennio bridged both.

 

Sergio Leone wanted to make a Spaghetti Western and heard the music on those other Morricone films and asked him to compose music for Fistful of Dollars. Morricone was reluctant but when they met, they realized they had been classmates as youths. And the legend began as did their partnership. Over his career, Morricone composed the music for somewhere north of 400 films. Many obscure now, many classics. As the genres came and went in Italy, he adjusted his music to them - the Westerns to the crime films to the giallos. The documentary is a compilation of loads of film clips along with his music - which made me want to watch them all - comments from various directors, composers, singers - even Bruce Springsteen and Clint Eastwood get a say as does Wong Kar-wai - all laudatory as you might expect.

 

But the main thing is that Morricone talks about his life, his reluctance to do film music, his desire to begin writing "pure" music (which he also did) - and talks about his music, where it came from, the process, collaborating with the director, what he was attempting to do. I wish I understood music better to follow all of it but he had so much innate ability that he could read the script and start writing the music. Listening to all the music in this documentary, I got a much better appreciation of the width of his music from those early Spaghetti Westerns to the later symphonic style music in The Mission and Once Upon a Time in America, The Untouchables, The Legend of 1900 and 1900. It is a great journey of music and movies. He passed away in 2020, his last well-known work was for Tarantino in The Hateful 8 in 2015 for which he won his first Oscar.