Obituary | From A Fistful of Dollars to The Untouchables: how Ennio Morricone made music a movie star and defined a genre
- Morricone thought the score for A Fistful of Dollars was the worst he wrote, but it defined spaghetti Westerns
- We look back at the prolific life of the composer of more than 400 film scores
By Justin Chang
It’s hard for me to recall the most vivid moments in Mission to Mars, Brian De Palma’s outer-space drama from 2000, without hearing the great music of Ennio Morricone.
That probably isn’t how you expected this to begin, but then, Morricone had a thing for unusual overtures, so bear with me. At one point in Mission to Mars, the astronaut characters manoeuvre their way through the vast emptiness of space – a moment of visual awe to which Morricone supplies a lyrical counterpoint that is at once weirdly playful and hauntingly spare. He helps transfigure the scene from a purely technical endeavour into a kind of weightless dance, a zero-gravity ballet.
And when the adventure reaches its climax, Morricone rises to his own peak of spiritual and emotional extravagance – a mighty convergence of strings, celestial voices and insistently brassy melody. It’s the music you might expect to hear as your life flashes before your eyes.
