“And Just As Reckless As You”: Timbral Invention in Morricone’s Scores for the Leone Westerns
Morricone gained international fame scoring Sergio Leone’s Westerns, but his work in popular music got him the job with Leone in the first place.46 When Morricone was recommended to score Leone’s 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars, he had already scored two low-budget Westerns for Italian cinema, Duello nel Texas (1963) and Le pistole non discutono (1964). Leone hated not only these films but also Morricone’s scores for them. Morricone had copied the lush Hollywood Western scoring style of Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin, complete with “fully orchestrated main themes based on a four-chord structure,” Mickey-moused “hoofbeat drums,” and slick cowboy ballads.47 Leone loved, however, a standalone popular arrangement Morricone had done of Woody Guthrie’s song “Pastures of Plenty” for the American singer Peter Tevis. In this arrangement, Morricone had experimented with the strange, career-making sounds cited by Morricone’s New York Times obituary writer (“haunting whistles, cracking whips, gunshots”), and even added electric guitar and chanting male chorus. Leone wanted to make Westerns that defied the norms of the genre. He recognized that the creator of this subversive arrangement was the perfect musical accomplice for his subversive films.
Morricone and Leone were schoolmates in the 1930s but had not maintained a friendship. They were reacquainted in the early 1960s; Leinberger, Ennio Morricone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly : A Film Score Guide, 4. 46
Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London: Tauris, 2012), 147. 47
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