When composer Ennio Morricone, well into his 80s, lets loose on the “coyote howl” theme he wrote for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and sings the howling part — in a fully committed a capella attack you wouldn’t think possible coming from any human — well, those eight or nine seconds alone make the documentary “Ennio” well worth your time. It opens March 28 for a week-long run at the Music Box Theatre; Music Box Films is the film’s U.S. theatrical distributor.
Beyond those eight or nine seconds, there’s everything else. He gave us a bounty, from “A Fistful of Dollars” to “1900” to “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” and scores less familiar but no less wonderful (“Bugsy,” for example). A trumpet prodigy when he was a boy, following dutifully in his musician father’s footsteps, Morricone is best known for his 500 or so film scores between 1961 (first credited assignment in the Italian film industry: “Il Federale,” aka “The Fascist”) and 2016 (“The Hateful Eight,” for which Morricone won, at long last, his only competitive Academy Award). Once his film career took off, he managed as many as eight or 10 scores in a single year. In 1969, Morricone hatched a staggering 21.
Did he borrow from himself now and then, or more than now and then? Sure; the question comes up in “Ennio,” because it’s valid. Did his conservatory compositional training, wedded to his equally fervent devotion to the avant-garde, commercial pop and the expansive parameters of film music, lead to a remarkable percentage of not just solid, but good and great results? “Ennio,” directed by his friend and frequent collaborator Giuseppe Tornatore, answers that question in the affirmative, as do millions more. (Count me in.)
Morricone died in 2020 at age 91, pre-writing his own three-sentence obituary, the first sentence of which was: “I, Ennio Morricone, am dead.” Most of the composer interview footage Tornatore uses here comes from 2015 and 2016. We meet the musical lion in winter in his wonderfully chaotic study at home, in Rome, surrounded by mountains, of paper and books and sheet music. He never relocated from the city he knew all his life, 70 years of that life in the company of his wife, Maria Travia, with whom he had four children.
We first see Morricone in “Ennio” stretching out, literally, doing his daily calisthenics. Later — in a self-conscious but effective first-person camera composition — director Tornatore shoots his subject conducting his own recorded music so that the composer’s hands momentarily become ours.
Most of “Ennio” flies by, in breathless yet somehow easy-breathing ways Tornatore’s fiction features rarely do for me. Co-editors Massimo Quaglia and Annalisa Schillaci work wonders in blending archival footage with choice excerpts from the Westerns, gangster movies, love stories and whatnots graced by Morricone’s scores.
We learn of his early years, his stern trumpeter-father, the fear of “humiliation” that young Morricone felt so readily. Recalling his insecure years as a working-class student in a hidebound musical conservatory, or as a young teenager, subbing for his ailing father as a late-night dance band trumpeter during World War II, that word comes up, with a wince, several times.
For decades Morricone wrestled with the patronizing attitude of his mentors regarding the budding arranger and composer’s commercial work, considered not just un-serious but musical trash. It wasn’t until the 1980s, and his score for Sergio Leone’s gangster saga “Once Upon a Time in America,” that many of Morricone’s longtime skeptics acknowledged the craft, sly counterpoint and soulful ambition they might’ve heard decades earlier had they truly been listening.
Much of the material in “Ennio” will be a revelation to the garden-variety American fan of film music (i.e. me). The borderline-crazy soundscapes Morricone created for Italian popular singers, risking gimmickry every bar but rarely settling for it, intrigue and delight to this day. His inspirations ranged from Igor Stravinsky to John Cage to his own loving mother, who exhorted him to “write a nice melody. That’s how you will become famous.”
Other interview subjects in “Ennio” include Quentin Tarantino, who revered Morricone though he didn’t quite understand the score he ended up with for “The Hateful Eight.” The fanboy director preferred something with whistling, or howling, or harmonica, like the Leone Westerns which made Morricone’s name in the 1960s. Instead, the composer handed Tarantino a set of brooding, carefully unsettling themes that made Tarantino’s hollow snowbound mystery more interesting than it actually was.
Toward the end of “Ennio,” which premiered at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival a year after the composer’s death, director Tornatore lays on the memorializing and the summary myth-making hosannas pretty thickly. It’s not a short film, at roughly two and a half hours. It’s also so rich in its detail, and sheer musical variety, you’re grateful for the excess. Morricone referred to his primary, theoretically opposing realms as “absolute music,” purely personal compositions for the concert hall, versus his “film music,” complementing images created by a director (though often Morricone composed prior to filming, working from the screenplay).
Yet listening to what he wrote for Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” or countless other reasons to be glad for Morricone’s existence, you hear something else. You hear the inspired midpoint between those two polarities: absolute film music.
“Ennio” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating
Running time: 2:36
How to watch: Through April 4 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; musicboxtheatre.com
Phillips is a Tribune critic.