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They shot, He scored
“He could make an average movie into a must-see, a good movie into art, and a great movie into legend.”
- Director Edgar Wright on Ennio Morricone
Growing up in a small town in South India, I can’t pretend that I have always known the legendary film composer Ennio Morricone, who passed away earlier today in Italy. But if I have to pick one composer whose work made such an infuence on my movie waching experience without I even so much consciously realizing, it was certainly Ennio Morricone, without a doubt, whose name I didn’t learn of till the 1990s. My earliest memories of watching films in theaters was in a movie theater in Tirunelveli, which had a scrolling curtain (Gosh! I even remember the frilled maroon color with a festoon of golden threaded bottom) that would scroll up to the theme of For A Few Dollars More with colorful lights around the screens awkwardly choreographed to dance to the beats of galloping horses that the theme so brilliantly evoked.
I neither knew For A Few Dollars More nor the composer then but the sheer joy and excitement that the music brought to every member of audience in the theater is indescribable. For one, THAT music meant, that the screening of the film we all had so expectedly come to watch was going to commence in the next 15 minutes or so (after a few commercials and a short…
