Spaghetti Westerns Read online

  Similarly, it was assumed that other composers working on Italian Westerns were influenced by Morricone’s style. But more often than not they produced material that bore little resemblance to Morricone’s music and was original in its own right. Luis Bacalov’s dark, gloomy score to Django could never be mistaken for Morricone. The same goes for Riz Ortolani’s breezy, brassy title music to Day of Anger. Among the best of the other composers are Gianni Ferrio, Nico Fidenco and Bruno Nicolai. Roberto Pregadio holds the honour of having composed one of the most familiar pieces of Spaghetti Western music, though few people actually know what it’s called, where it comes from or who wrote it. This haunting whistled theme, which appears whenever a suitable Spaghetti-Western atmosphere is required (in anything from adverts to holiday programmes), is the theme from Gunmen of Ave Maria (1970), also rather aptly known as The Forgotten Pistolero. This piece is a formula composition, the classic example of a Morricone pastiche. Morricone’s style was later parodied by Marcello Giombini (with Sabata), Franco Micalizzi (They Call Me Trinity) and Guido and Maurizio De Angelis (who came into their own in the seventies with scores including Trinity is Still My Name and Keoma), when Spaghettis themselves moved into more light-hearted territory. Even Morricone eventually adapted his style at the end of the Spaghetti boom and ended up parodying himself.

  The key collaborator throughout the Western cycle was Alessandro Alessandroni, an immensely important figure who worked with most of the main composers on many of the finest Westerns. His distinctive whistling and guitar playing, and the diverse vocal talents of his choir, are instantly recognisable. Never more so than in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Morricone’s most famous score – where bizarre shrieks and whoops replace the whistled melodies of the previous two ‘Dollars’ films. Morricone was experimenting with using human voices to replicate animalistic sounds – the howl of a coyote, the screech of a bird – and this is most apparent on the raw vocals used in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and other films of the period like The Hills Run Red and Navajo Joe. The howls in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly were applied like signature tunes to each of the three main characters, and freezeframes and title cards introduced each of them (‘the ugly’, ‘the bad’ and ‘the good’ respectively) as the film progressed, though even this title-card device was borrowed from the American B-Western Rage At Dawn (1955), where it introduced the villainous Reno brothers. But The Good, the Bad and the Ugly also featured the soprano vocals of Edda Dell’Orso, a pure, ethereal voice that would become synonymous with Morricone’s best scores. In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, she performs Morricone’s pounding ‘Ecstasy of Gold’ theme, which accompanies Tuco’s search for the $200,000 grave at the film’s climax. Dell’Orso’s voice was used to even greater effect in ‘Jill’s Theme’ from Once Upon a Time in the West, one of Morricone’s most moving compositions. In fact, Leone and Morricone’s relationship was such that the themes for Once Upon a Time were written before Leone started shooting. The film also featured the track ‘Man with a Harmonica’, which epitomised Morricone’s showdown themes up to that point.

  For all the competition, Morricone was the foremost composer of the genre. His scores often made the films successful, while even some of the worst Westerns are bearable, if only to hear his accompaniments. His scoring was sometimes formulaic, and his pieces were often reused from film to film, but they were far away from the epic, brassy (and sometimes interminably slow) scores from American Westerns. He also quoted liberally from classical music, stealing phrases, passages and whole compositions (which he reorchestrated) from Mozart, Beethoven, Mussorgsky and Wagner.

  If Spaghetti-Western music conformed to a loose formula, it would read thus: Spaghetti title themes are usually up-tempo, catchy and anarchic, and are often accompanied by cartoonish, pop-art title sequences featuring action and stills from the film. Moments of tension tend to be scored with unsettling, atonal sound effects, mingled with the clever use of actual sounds (horses’ hooves, spurs, the wind, a creaking sign). Gunfights are preceded by extended scenes where the protagonists stare at each other, waiting to draw, while triumphal trumpets, church organs and guitars whip up a macabre bolero before the moment of death. Pathos is added to other scenes with elegiac, delicate melodies – themes that seem a million miles away from the violent world conveyed on screen. Navajo Joe wouldn’t be as effective without Morricone’s wailing, electrified take on Native American Indian music. The chase through the cane fields in The Big Gundown (1967) would be less than impressive with anything other than Morricone’s percussion-driven tour de force, and the mute gunslinger’s bloody death in The Big Silence wouldn’t pack such a punch without Morricone’s plaintive reprise of the ‘Love Theme’. Moreover, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West are almost totally reliant on music to make their visuals, plot twists, action sequences and humour successful.

  By the late sixties, Morricone was becoming a major force in the Italian film industry. Apart from working on dozens of Westerns (35 in all), he worked on both award-winning art cinema projects and genre trash, ignoring snobbishness and creating effective, apt scores for both camps. On the arty side, he provided music for critically acclaimed movies like Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket (1965), Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Burn! (1969), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows (1966) and Theorem (1968), Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) and Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970). At the other end of the spectrum, Morricone worked on most of the popular Cinecittà genres of the sixties and early seventies: black-and-white Gothic horrors (Night of the Doomed [1965]), spy movies (Operation Kid Brother and Matchless [both 1967]), sci-fi (Danger: Diabolik [1968]), war movies (The Dirty Heroes [1967]), thrillers (Wake Up and Kill [1966], Grand Slam [1967] and The Sicilian Clan [1969]), adventures (The Rover [1967] and The Red Tent [1969]) and giallo horrors (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage [1970]). His prolific output and obvious talent resulted in his transition to Hollywood movies in the seventies, though the results (on movies like Exorcist II and Orca – Killer Whale [both 1977]) were often indifferent. One of his most famous pieces of the eighties was ‘Chi Mai’ (initially written for Maddalena [1971] a decade earlier), which was used by the BBC TV series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (1981) and became a hit. But it was his involvement in Leone’s last film Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986) that revitalised his career and finally announced to the world that Morricone was one of the most important film composers of the twentieth century. Initially, Morricone refused to work on The Mission, but not because of money. Having seen a rough cut, he felt the film was so powerful that he couldn’t do the images justice, though he was eventually persuaded otherwise.

  Morricone has been nominated for an Oscar four times (Days Of Heaven [1978], The Mission, The Untouchables [1987] and Bugsy [1991]) and in 2007 Eastwood presented him with an Honorary Oscar. The most enduring aspect of his scores, be they Westerns or otherwise, is their ‘listenability’. Morricone is one of the most collected soundtrack composers in the world, with each successive generation of film fans entranced by his genius with a melody. He has even taken to conducting his scores live, as in the celebrated concert at Santa Cecilia in 1998. Even years later, their power is undiminished, as The Mission and Cinema Paradiso (1988) sit beside The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Burn!. This is especially noticeable in the exquisite choral arrangements and solo vocalists. It is also strange how stars like Eastwood have become synonymous with Morricone’s music. Though the actor has only appeared in a few films scored by Morricone since his Spaghetti jaunt (The Witches [1966], Two Mules for Sister Sara [1970] and In the Line of Fire [1993]), most Eastwood documentaries make liberal use of Morricone on the soundtrack, even in the sections of his life not dealing with his Italian work. And when the American Film Institute honoured Eastwood for services to the industry, he arrived at the gala to the stirring strains of ‘Ecstasy of Gol
d’ from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, reiterating how important Leone’s films were to his career. Ironically, though Morricone now composes for Hollywood blockbusters, writes cantatas and has received great critical acclaim, the mere mention of his name still conjures up his Westerns, and images of dusty landscapes and ruthless gunslingers.

  ROME ON THE RANGE: 1964–65

  A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

  Directed by: Sergio Leone

  Music by: Ennio Morricone

  Cast: Clint Eastwood (The Stranger), Gian Maria Volonte (Ramon Rojo), Marianne Koch (Marisol)

  97 minutes

  Story

  Into the small Mexican town of San Miguel rides a poncho-clad gunslinger. The town is run by two rival gangs – the Baxters, a group of American gunrunners, and the Rojos, a bunch of Mexican liquor smugglers, led by Ramon. The stranger becomes a hired gun for the Rojos, thus escalating the conflict, but he later sees the Mexicans steal a shipment of army gold from the Federales. He cleverly plays one side off against the other, and is paid for his services, whilst saving the lives of a Mexican woman named Marisol and her family. But his ruse is discovered by the Rojos, who capture him and beat him up. He escapes and the Mexicans presume he has sheltered with the Baxters. In a ruthless attack, the Rojos burn down the Baxters’ house and massacre the entire clan, but the stranger has already left town. He recovers in hiding and returns to town to face the Rojos. In the showdown, he defeats the gang (using a square piece of iron hidden beneath his poncho as a breastplate), kills Ramon in a duel and rides out of town with a fistful of dollars.

  Background

  Leone’s first Western is the foundation stone of the entire Spaghetti Western concept. Moreover, with The Magnificent Seven (1960), it is the most important Western of the sixties. It is ironic that such a defining film was made the same year that the greatest Western director of all time, John Ford, made his last Western, Cheyenne Autumn, which to some extent apologised for the mistreatment of Native Americans by filmmakers down the years. A Fistful of Dollars was a million miles away from Ford’s vision of the West, created an international megastar in Clint Eastwood and kick-started an entire genre under the most extraordinary of circumstances.

  Looking to remake Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movie Yojimbo (1961), Leone (using the pseudonym Bob Robertson) and his writers (including an uncredited Duccio Tessari) reworked the Japanese sword-flick as a Western – just as The Magnificent Seven had its roots in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Leone even called his version ‘The Magnificent Stranger’. But both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars owe a debt to crime writer Dashiell Hammett, who penned similar town-feud scenarios in Red Harvest and the clever Western whodunit Corkscrew.

  For the role of the hero originally played by Toshiro Mifune, Leone approached two of the ‘Seven’, Charles Bronson and James Coburn, and also Henry Fonda. After failing to lure any of them across the Atlantic, Leone eventually hired American TV actor Clint Eastwood, who was playing Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. As the production began shooting, first in Cinecittà Studios in Rome and later on location near Madrid and in the deserts and mountains of Almeria, Southern Spain, Leone completely overhauled Eastwood’s clean-cut image.

  Dressed in a Mexican poncho, with a couple of days’ stubble and a cigar held tightly between his teeth, Eastwood ushered in a new style of anti-hero. Steve McQueen and James Coburn had already experimented with the ‘strong, silent type’ in Westerns, but, under Leone’s direction, Eastwood’s vocal performance was pared to a minimum. The original script was very longwinded and Eastwood cut dialogue at every opportunity. Nevertheless, he found the first of the many quirky catchphrases of his career when he utters in the final duel: ‘When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said the man with the pistol’s a dead man. Let’s see if that’s true.’ It’s not, incidentally.

  When the film was released in America, the adverts dubbed Eastwood ‘The Man With No Name’, though it was really only a marketing ploy by United Artists. It is important that both Leone and Eastwood claimed to have created this new Western anti-hero. In actual fact, neither could have done it without the other’s participation. Leone’s vision plus Eastwood’s image resulted in an astoundingly fresh approach to the old myths.

  But everything about A Fistful of Dollars (as Leone’s film would be rechristened) was refreshing and different, from the harsh desert landscape to the brutal censor-defying violence, the imaginative music and the exotic, suntanned cast. The international co-production employed performers from Italy and Germany in the other main roles with the rest made up of Spaniards (both professional actors and assorted locals and wranglers who lived in Spain). The music was a major contributing factor to the film and nothing like it had been heard before. Working in collaboration with Leone, Ennio Morricone and his whistling, guitar-playing associate Alessandro Alessandroni breathed new life into Western scoring, producing something akin to a Western pop song, which absorbed elements from classical music, folk music, beat music and opera.

  A Fistful of Dollars is a fast-paced, beautifully photographed action movie. The San Miguel town set near Madrid has been used many times, before and since, but never to such excellent effect. And the atmosphere Leone creates is unique from the off – the stranger’s meeting with four toughs at the beginning of the movie has passed into history. They scare his mule with gunshots and he strides to face them, pausing to order three coffins from the local undertaker. He provokes the gunmen with almost parodic dialogue – ‘My mule don’t like people laughing. Gets the crazy idea you’re laughing at him’ – before flicking back his poncho and gunning them down in double-quick time. As he nonchalantly walks back down the street, he adds to the undertaker, ‘My mistake. Four coffins.’ Never had violence in a Western been so fast, seemed so appealing and looked so cool.

  Critics loathed lumbering, emotionless Eastwood and his swarthy adversaries, but audiences knew better. One snooty critic complained that the dubbed voices all employed the same brand of ‘Mexican mummerset’, that the Technicolor process gave the film a ‘pulmonary flush’ and that the action sequences looked ‘as though tomato sauce had been sloshed over a rather wretched meal’. Audiences didn’t care – they probably thought a pulmonary flush was a type of toilet. Ninety-seven action-packed minutes turned Eastwood into the Western anti-hero of the sixties. As the posters claimed: ‘He’s going to trigger a whole new style of adventure.’ And he did – the world over.

  The Verdict

  Reinvention doesn’t really cover what Leone and Eastwood did in 1964, but the film’s huge and enduring success is a testament to their achievement on a very low budget – even more so when you realise neither could speak the other’s language. When a director with imagination meets an actor with star potential, the man taking the money’s going to clean up.

  One Silver Dollar (1964)

  Directed by: Giorgio Ferroni

  Music by: Gianni Ferrio

  Cast: Giuliano Gemma (Gary O’Hara), Ida Galli (Judy O’Hara), Pierre Cressoy (McCory)

  88 minutes

  Story

  At the end of the Civil War, two Confederate brothers, Gary and Phil O’Hara, separate; Gary goes home to his wife, while Phil heads west. Bored by life in peacetime Richmond, Gary soon follows Phil. Gary is hired by a wealthy banker, McCory, to kill a local outlaw, Blacky, but the outlaw is actually Phil and the two brothers are ambushed. Phil dies, but Gary survives and sets about defeating the banker, who is in league with a bunch of renegades masquerading as Confederate raiders. Eventually it transpires that Phil was innocent, that McCory is the real villain (foreclosing on the local farmers’ debts) and that the local sheriff is also involved, so Gary sets the record straight.

  Background

  This was the first of a trilogy of Westerns Gemma made with Ferroni between 1964 and 1967. The only consistent features are the presence of Gemma (in each film playing a character named Gary), director Ferroni (billed as ‘Calvin Jackson Padget’) and some of the support
ing cast and crew (including composer Gianni Ferrio). Like the ‘Ringo’ films (also starring Gemma), this trilogy, and in particular One Silver Dollar, harks back to American series Westerns of the fifties, with an added dose of violence. One Silver Dollar was followed by the best of the trio, Fort Yuma Gold (1966), an entertaining Civil War-set Spaghetti that has a similar atmosphere (roving bands of guerrillas, ruined towns) to Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, though obviously on a lower budget. Here, Gary Hammond (Gemma) must deliver a warning despatch to the gold reserve at Union Fort Yuma before a gang of renegade Confederates infiltrate the stockade. It was followed by Wanted (1967), a more pedestrian tale of Sheriff Gary Ryan (Gemma) trying to expose a counterfeit branding ring. All three feature a strong central relationship between Gemma and a woman. Female characterisation was never a great strength of Spaghettis, but these films (especially the first two) make a commendable effort. Many Spaghettis didn’t bother with women and those that did made a pretty poor job of depicting them with anything more than cardboard conviction – epitomised by Gemma’s love interest in Fort Yuma Gold, a dance-hall girl named Connie Breastfull.