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The death of Ennio Morricone, the great Maestro of Italian film music, has been announced; he died from complications of a fall. He had been at school with Sergio Leone before becoming a composer, but it took their collaboration on A Fistful of Dollars, the film that sparked the Spaghetti Western craze and made Clint Eastwood a star, to begin to redefine what film music should sound like. Morricone would go on to score Leone's For a Few Dollars More and The Good The Bad and The Ugly, as well as later movies Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker! and Once Upon a Time in America, one of the greatest partnerships in all cinema.
But Morricone did not rest on his laurels, composing an incredible five hundred or more scores for film and television, including The Battle of Algiers, The Big Gundown, Bava's Danger: Diabolik, Teorema, The Great Silence, The Mercenary, Burn!, Violent City, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Two Mules for Sister Sarah, Lizard in a Woman's Skin, The Decameron/Arabian Nights/Canterbury Tales for Pasolini, 1900, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Days of Heaven, La Cage aux Folles, Butterfly, White Dog, Carpenter's The Thing, The Mission, De Palma's The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso, Bugsy, Eastwood's In the Line of Fire, Wolf, Disclosure, U Turn, Bulworth and his Oscar-winner for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. We are truly blessed for having such a prolific, influential genius to have made such an invaluable contribution to the movies. |
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