Sergio Leone said it readily: he certainly would not have met with such success without his collaboration with the illustrious Ennio Morricone. Back on the common adventure of "For a handful of dollars" of two legends of cinema in the making.
CINQUINI / BESTIMAGE
The world mourns maestro Morricone. The one who rocked entire generations of moviegoers and music lovers is no longer dead at the age of 91. A figure so important to film music and short music, to whom we owe a number of absolute masterpieces of soundtrack, that we could almost have believed the immortal composer, from the top of his few 500 film scores written during his fabulous long-term career.
Among the decisive meetings of this one obviously figures prominently the one he had with Sergio Leone. Without doubt, the director's work would have had such an impact on the spectators' cinephilic memory without the fabulous work of Morricone.
"It's more than a couple, it's like a kind of involuntary marriage" confided Sergio Leone to the historian, scriptwriter and director Noël Simsolo, while Leone was invited on February 24, 1989 to the radio program Euphonia, two months before his disappearance. "We've known each other for a long time. I don't like repeating myself and explaining things several times, and with Ennio, it's very easy, at a glance, we understand each other right away. There is the success that we had together, the esteem that we have for each other... He is able to rewrite a piece of music four or five times if I don't like him at all. [...] He's more than a composer for me. I don't like words in movies at all, I always hope to make a silent film, and music replaces words, so you could say that Morricone is one of my best screenwriters. "
A friendship that was already fifty years long, going back to the school benches, long before the composition of the maestro for the film For a handful of dollars. "We were at school together in 4th elementary, I was 9 years old and he was 10" drops the filmmaker on the radio show. During their first artistic collaboration, the composer still signed his scores under the pseudonym "Don Savio".
After having signed the successes of the Colossus of Rhodes peplum in 1961, then directing the second team of the film by Robert Aldrich, Sodom and Gomorrah, Sergio Leone sets his sights on the western, even as the genre entered a progressive decline besides -Atlantic. It will be a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Bodyguard movie, For a handful of dollars (1964), which he produced under the pseudonym Bob Robertson. Leone then established herself as the cantor of a new style, that of the western "spaghetti", by striving to explode the codes of the traditional western, parodying typical situations, favoring slowness and stretching the scenes to excess, using close-ups (colts, faces, looks) as if he were filming landscapes in a picaresque tale of savagery and cruelty.
"Your music on Duel in Texas is awful!"
If Leone knew precisely what he wanted for his soundtrack, it was not at first glance at Ennio Morricone that he thought, but at the composer Franco Lavagnino, who was already working on two previous productions, The Last Days from Pompeii in 1959 and The Colossus of Rhodes. But the producers of Leone do not understand it well and do not want him, especially since the budget of his western is tight, not to say downright narrow. Morricone costs less. And they know something about it. Papi and Colombo, the producers of Leone, had already hired the composer for Duel in Texas (1963) and for Le pistole non discutono (Mon colt fait la loi). A western by Mario Caiano, filmed in the same sets as Il Magnifico Straniero, who will become For a handful of dollars. In fact, the producers forced Leone to make his film using the same locations, almost the same technical team, the same costumes and a few actors from My Colt makes the law.
Leone and Morricone were therefore on the school benches together, but "It was not enough for me to hire him. And I say frankly:" Your music for Duel in Texas is very bad. Very bad Dimitri Tiomkin. To my amazement, he agrees: "I totally agree with you. But I was asked to do bad Dimitri Tiomkin. I did it. You have to live well." I gave him another chance " said Leone in the book Conversations with Sergio Simsolo (published by Stock Cinéma in 1987).
Without showing the script for his film to Morricone, the filmmaker tells him the story, describing all the plans for his future film. And there is no question of making Hollywood music, far too symphonic and firefighting for his taste. Morricone offers him to go on a Woody Guthrie song, Pastures of Plentry, composed in 1941 and evoking the difficult daily labor of migrant workers in North America. If the version proposed by Morricone is rearranged for singer Peter Tevis, Leone does not like the voice of the latter. But the air seduces him enormously, between the cracking of whips, the sound of bells, the choirs, and even a piece of electric guitar.
Here is the song rearranged by Morricone for the singer, as it was listened to by Leone.
Leone lets go by way of conclusion: "You are making the film. Go to the beach because your work is done. Just get me a good whistler." The foundations for exceptional collaboration were laid; one of the most illustrious creative osmosis of the 7th art, with that which had nevertheless long dreamed of as a professional chess player. So long the artist ...
