1970 was prolific year for Ennio Morricone, similar to his output since the mid-1960s. Fifteen films featuring his music scores were released that year. When asked about his consistently vast output (in the next two following years he would compose 20 and 22 scores respectively), he modestly replied: “It is not much to compose 12 or 13 cantatas in one year because if you think about it Bach, for example, used to compose one cantata a week. He had to compose the music in time for it to be performed in church on Sunday so if you just consider Bach, you will see that I’m practically unemployed!”
1970 was significant for featuring Morricone’s first full score for an American film production. In 1966 he wrote a few cues that went uncredited for John Huston’s film The Bible, but now he had the opportunity to score a full-fledged western (what else?) featuring Clint Eastwood (who else?) and Shirley MacLaine, directed by Don Siegel. Two Mules for Sister Sara is set in post-Civil War and was shot on location in Mexico. It tells the story of a drifter named Hogan who saves a nun about to be raped by a gang in the desert. Turns out that both of them have an interest in joining Mexican revolutionaries who are trying to overthrow their French colonial overlords. Typical western adventures ensue and the nun proves to be a true professional of the oldest profession.
This was not Siegel’s first Western, nor his first film starring Client Eastwood, but with Morricone’s music it is not far stylistically from the famed spaghetti westerns released a few years earlier. The Dollars Trilogy, consisting of A Fistful of Dollars, Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all scored by Morricone, definitely comes to mind while watching this movie.
Siegel rose to fame after his 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and he first collaborated with Eastwood in 1968 on the film Coogan’s Bluff. The two would join forces again in 1971 on the blockbuster Dirty Harry. For Two Mules for Sister Sara they sent Morricone the script and flew to Rome to meet him. Siegel remembers: “His ideas were startling. The mule had special music, which sounded dramatic and amusing. A special litany was the theme for Sister Sara: the music had choral effects, which were enchanting. Hogan’s character was well described musically, to show action, strength and a great deal of humor.”
Siegel’s appreciation and trust in the composer was such that he left Morricone to do his thing without involvement from the director. While many composers would find this behavior liberating, Morricone thought it was somewhat isolating: “He was a brilliant director, but we didn’t communicate much. On the one hand, there was the language problem; on the other it seemed to me that Siegel wasn’t used to talking much even in his own language. He didn’t offer me the kind of feedback that I was looking for. He was a friendly man and an excellent filmmaker, but he acted like he was fine with anything, including the music. Maybe it was a form of respect toward me, but I began to feel a little uneasy because I no longer understand what the other person thinks about me and my way of working.”
The score for Two Mules for Sister Sara is best known for the humor demonstrated in the mule theme, where Morricone emulates the braying sound with a piccolo and a Hammond X-66 organ. The arrangement is rich with woodwind instruments including bassoon, oboe, flute and recorder. There is also the strumming of banjo and guitar, courtesy of long-time collaborator guitarist Alessandro Alessandroni. Siegel summarized the score well: “The music is among the most original and unusual ever written for a film. As far as I was concerned, Morricone was a genius.” A review in New York Times the year the film was released highlighted Morricone’s music for the film’s female star character: “Sara is most mysteriously spiritual when most openly physical (a paradox enforced by Ennio Morricone’s gracefully functional musical score).” Years later director Quentin Tarantino found this music compelling enough to use it for his film Django Unchained, incorporating two of the score’s pieces: “The Braying Mule” and “Sister Sara’s Theme”.
The rest of the movies released in 1970 and scored by Ennio Morricone were all directed by European film makers. The most significant of them won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This was Morricone’s second collaboration with director Elio Petri, after working together on A Quiet Place in the Country in 1968. Morricone would continue to work with Perti for the rest of the director’s career, but their 1970 film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is considered a masterpiece. It tells the story of a police inspector who murders his mistress and plants evidence pointing in his direction, to prove to himself that he is a citizen above suspicion and beyond the Law. It is a Kafkaesque tale that ends fittingly with a Kafka quote: “Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set beyond human judgment.”
Morricone talked at length about his work with Petri: “Our collaboration marked a series of fundamental milestones in my career; each and every one of his new works was very intense. Elio was able to transform his sharp and critical interpretation of reality into great cinema. He accomplished this in such an effective and proficient way, describing the complex relations between man and society. He was truly an extraordinary director, far ahead of his times. In each project we worked on together I sought to follow his critical vision and intensify it with the necessary musical means, drawing on experiments and themes pervaded by subversive elements.”
Special attention was given to the overall sonic effect and mood of the music and how it worked in the context of the movie. Morricone: “I began the main theme with the mandolin and the classical guitar, to which I added an off-tune piano and the bassoons, aiming to obtain intestinal, extremely vulgar timbres. Besides that, I added a synthesized ostinato with a very acid timbre, which we devised through long research in the studio. Then I thought about adding the marranzano (Jew’s harp), to suggest the Sicilian origin of the detective. I did not polish much of the overall performance as I wanted to achieve a ‘dirty,’ rather imprecise recording. Everything had to evoke the shadiness conveyed by the images.”
Morricone did not watch the film before he composed the music. Petri explained the plot and gave him the screenplay. Morricone realized that he had to write music of the grotesque that had a folkish feel to it, plain and simple. So he decided to write music for ‘peasant’ instruments: mandolin, Jew’s harp. He talked about writing the score: “I only wrote two pieces, one very different from the other. While the second theme has a ternary rhythm and underscores the sensual scenes between Gian Maria Volontè and Florinda Bolkan, I wanted the perverseness of the film to clearly emerge in the main theme, which is a folksy and grotesque tango, meant to incarnate the neurosis of the elusive, cocky, corrupted killer, the Sicilian police inspector. Melodically and harmonically, it was an ambiguous tango, yet at the same time it was easy to sing and remember.”
Petri had a dark sense of humor which did not only lend itself to the pervasive atmosphere of the film, but was also the source to one lasting memory for Morricone. After he finished composing and recording the music, he was invited to a mixing session to provide his feedback. He continues the story: “We went into the projection room, the lights went off, and the screening began. Something wasn’t right from the very first scene, up until Florinda Bolkan’s character’s murder. The music was different from the one I had composed for the film, and instead came from Comandamenti per un Gangster (Commandments for a Gangster, 1968), a rather cheap movie for which I had composed easy-listening music.”
Morricone was baffled and speechless. Petri kept exclaiming how this music worked so much better with the movie than what Morricone just composed. When the screening ended, Petri asked, “So, what do you think?” Morricone, still young and obedient, replied, “Well, if you’re happy with it, what can I say. . . .” Petri added, “It is perfect, isn’t it?” Morricone was devastated, swallowing his pride in agony. He continues: “I tried to find some energy to reply, but before I could utter a syllable, Elio patted me on the back, shook me with both hands, and in Roman dialect said, ‘A Morrico’. . . .You always take the bait! You wrote the best music ever for this film and you should punch me in the face for such a prank!’ Just like that. It was a prank, but I had no clue. He confessed he had been concocting it for a while.”
In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that “have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978.” John Zorn, a confessed fan of Ennio Morricone, who released an album interpreting the composer’s work, said of the score for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: “Morricone has written so many dynamic and brilliant scores in his huge career but few have had as original and striking an orchestration as this one. The Jew’s harp takes a major role here, adding, as so often is the case with Ennio’s scores, a feeling of irony and commentary on the sardonic vibe and black humor of the story.”
In 1966 Ennio Morricone joined the musical improvisation collective ‘Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza’, formed by Franco Evangelisti two years prior. The group performed and recorded experimental and avant-garde music, focusing on new sounds and methods of playing musical instruments. Morricone recalls: “We would use our instruments in unusual and decidedly progressive ways, we would reinvent them by avoiding classical timbres. The piano was ‘prepared’ in peculiar ways. At times we would put screws or fabric pieces in between the strings, which could be plucked from inside the sounding board with fingers (as a harp) or hit with a broomstick, but never with the hammers.”
Four years later, echoes of these experiments found their way to another Morricone score, this time for Dario Argento’s directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The genre of giallo films began in the 1960s, murder mysteries with fondness of gore and horror, but Argento took it to the next level. His first three films, forming the ‘Animal Trilogy’, all featured Morricone’s music. The composer remembers his approach for these films: “There was a moment in my life, starting with the first three film scores I made for Dario Argento—The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)—when I decided to adopt a completely different writing style from the one I normally used in cinema. I wanted to experiment in a more contemporary and dissonant language, embracing techniques that reached beyond Webern’s influence. I started to gather ideas, melodic and harmonic fragments based on twelve-tone techniques, utilizing principles derived from Schoenberg’s dodecaphony.”
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a psychological murder mystery involving a serial killer, knives and lots of blood, receives perfect musical accompaniment of two distinct types. In the first, Morricone says that he, “Used a lot of components of different influences that contributed greatly to contemporary music. That of the total serialization of not only the sound but of the pitch, the values, the timbres, etc.” Realizing that the audience will be in a constant state of tension with this style of music, he decided to balance the atonality and weirdness with extremely simple, childlike themes that work as anchors for listeners and concurrently sound chilling in context. Expanding on his thought process at the time, Morricone said, “Up to that point I had always reasoned in terms of coherence (tonal language for certain sequences, more advanced idioms for others). But for the first time I combined the two. This double aesthetic seemed a feasible way to intermingle communication and experimentation—I thought I had created something new, at least as far as cinema was concerned.”
Argento later said of his work with Morricone: “I made my first three films with Ennio Morricone. He is a great musician. Working with him was wonderful. But then the rock and roll part of me insisted I should work with other musicians.” The director went on to work with artists such as Goblin, hitting a peak of film and music art with Suspiria in 1977.
One more Morricone score for this article, and we are still leaving out more than ten scores, such was Morricone’s prolific output in 1970. That year he collaborated for the fourth time with director Mauro Bolognini. The two made a total of fourteen films together, making it one of Morricone’s most enduring relationships with a director. Metello is based on a book by Italian author Vasco Pratolini and features Italian pop singer Massimo Ranieri in his acting debut. This time Morricone opted for a dramatic and lush orchestral theme to accompany the late 19th century tale of a man rising from poverty to assume an important role in an emerging workers movement.
The composer had much appreciation for the director’s ability to tell a dramatic story: “In terms of purely visual aesthetic skill, Bolognini was second to no one but Visconti, as far as I’m concerned. I think he received less recognition than he deserved, because he somehow found himself in Visconti’s shadow. He allowed me the freedom to be spontaneous. He used to come by to my house and listen to my thematic ideas, which I played for him on the piano. Once he had chosen them, he had complete faith in my consequential decisions, from the instrumentation to any other subsequent stages.”
But this time around, they had a conflict over the use of the music in the film. Morricone recalls: “I wrote about fifteen cues for Metello, but eventually Mauro multiplied them into thirty or forty by replicating them and putting them in positions on which we had not agreed. I only discovered it later when we watched the first screening with the whole cast. The presence of the music had become overwhelming. At the end of the projection, we walked down along opposite sides of the theatre’s double staircase, and as we crossed glances from a distance I motioned to him as if to say, ‘What did you do!’ He shrugged his shoulders, as if to reply, ‘What’s done is done. . . .’ Regardless, I could also tell from that glance that he too realized he had gone too far—it was definitely excessive.”
Not reviewed but should be mentioned are these films featuring Ennio Morricone’s scores, all released in 1970:
When Women Had Tails (Quando le donne avevano la coda), directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile
Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It (Uccidete il vitello grasso e arrostitelo), directed by Salvatore Samperi
Companeros (Vamos a matar, compañeros), directed by Sergio Corbucci
Violent City (Città violenta), directed by Sergio Sollima
The Voyeur (Giuochi particolari), directed by Franco Indovina
The Year of the Cannibals (I cannibali), directed by Liliana Cavani
Hornets’ Nest, Directed by Phil Karlson and Franco Cirino
La califfa (Lady Calyph), directed by Alberto Bevilacqua
The Most Beautiful Wife (La moglie più bella), directed by Damiano Damiani
Forbidden Photos of a Lady above Suspicion (Le foto proibite di una signora per bene), directed by Luciano Ercoli
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