Hell on Frisco Bay (2005-2008 archive)

The Roxie and the Castro have both printed up calendars of their schedules up through late April, available at the respective theatres and elsewhere. Highlights at the Roxie look to include Robinson Devor's Police Beat (which has only been available in Frisco via broadcasts on the Sundance Channel, and then only in a reportedly cut version) April 6-12, Claude Chabrol's Comedy of Power April 20-26, and a number of free screenings, such as a Saturday morning series of film and video entitled Cine Del Barrio. Regular readers here could have pieced together from my previous posts practically the entire Castro program, including the restored print of the Rules of the Game March 9-14, the SF International Asian American Film Festival March 15-18, the Antonioni retrospective (also at the PFA in Berkeley) on various dates in March and April, and Two Or Three Things I Know About Her March 30-April 5. What I haven't mentioned yet are the slew of musicals in April (including Pennies From Heaven April 16th), a Friday the 13th MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS-presented prom movie triple-feature with Carrie as the blood-red centerpiece (also mark May 25th on your calendar for Gremlins, Howard the Duck and Troll 2), and best of all, the outstanding lineup of films chosen for the April 20-25 tribute to Ennio Morricone, probably the greatest living legend of film music (his main competition for that position being John Barry, who'll soon get his own tribute in the form of a James Bond series when the next Castro calendar is published).

Morricone's music seems ubiquitous to me; it exists well beyond the films he wrote it for, which in my book is one of the marks of a great film composer. The first Morricone-scored film I saw was probably the Untouchables, but I'm certain I knew some of his themes, particularly the famous ocarina call from the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, well before that, even though I wasn't lucky enough to grow up in a household with spaghetti Western music in the record rack. As I've watched more films scored by Morricone over the years, I still hear a great deal of his music long before glimpsing the images he composed it for, sometimes in the most unlikely of places. The classic example is when I first saw Once Upon a Time in the West and immediately recalled the iconic harmonica smear as the third critical sample in the trifecta of musical collage that forms one of my favorite pieces of danceclub strangeness, "Little Fluffy Clouds" by the Orb (the other two being Rickie Lee Jones' reminiscences of skies in Arizona and Pat Methany's recording of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint). Years ago I was in a band which occasionally performed a cover of "Magic and Ecstasy" (quite different from this version) from Exorcist II: the Heretic, a film I've still never seen. And the only film featured in the Morricone montage put together for the Oscar ceremony last week that I hadn't seen before, Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, was accompanied by a theme I'm sure I've heard elsewhere. Perhaps in the background to a This American Life segment or two?

What minor epiphanies of recognition might the Castro's Morricone week bring me this time? Several of the films in the series would be near the very top of my to-see list even if I didn't know Morricone wrote their scores. Knowing it, they're at the top of my to-hear list too: Sam Fuller's long-shelved White Dog (playing with U-Turn April 20), Dario Argento's giallo horror Four Flies on Grey Velvet (with Once Upon a Time in the West April 21), Sergio Leone's Mexican revolution picture Duck, You Sucker! (with another unseen Western Italiano the Big Gundown, April 22). and Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion (with Petri's a Quiet Place in the Country, also unseen, April 24). Perhaps one or more of these will unlock the memory of a melody hidden in some unlabeled drawer of my brain. Or, like the first time I watched and heard the terrific percussion-heavy score of the Battle of Algiers (playing April 23 with the Mission, the only film of those I've seen in the series that I don't like), the music will be completely new to me and feel like another sort of revelation. All of these double-bills have great appeal, but the program I feel I can most heartily endorse is the April 25 pairing of Malick's Days of Heaven and Pasolini's Arabian Nights, both of which I've seen in gorgeous new prints in the last few years.

I remember the reports from watchers of the Golden Globe ceremony a little more than seven years ago that, when Jennifer Love-Hewitt was called upon to announce the winner of the award for Best Original Score, she not only balked at pronouncing the name of the composer behind the Legend of 1900, she assumed that "Ennio Morricone" was a band. When Morricone failed to be nominated for an Academy Award for that score, I realized he probably never would earn a competitive Oscar. He immediately became in my mind the classiest choice the Academy could pick to give an honorary Oscar to, following in the footsteps of Alex North, another composer who also never had an Oscar until receiving an honorary one in 1986. At the time I was rooting for it to happen soon; these days my investment of interest in Oscar decisions is a lot lower, but it was no less classy a pick. And if it helped put the wheels of this touring retrospective in motion, I'm particularly happy for it.

That said, let me be the millionth voice in the blogosphere to ask what devil's bargain is it that if Mr. Morricone gets an award, Celine Dion has to be involved? And was it my imagination or was the look on the honoree's face as her performance was announced something along the lines of "what have I gotten myself into?" If there's one shortcoming of the Castro tribute, it's that a screening of Once Upon a Time in America wasn't arranged so we could all cleanse our memory of whatever "I Knew I Loved You" was supposed to be.

And as much as the presence of a live orchestra must thrill the Kodak Theatre audience, I have to admit I was a little disappointed in how the orchestra tended to bland Morricone's scores out; so much of the innovation of his approach, especially in the early part of his career, rested in his unusual orchestrations and even recording practices. Russell Lack, in his superb history of film music, Twenty Four Frames Under, writes on Morricone:

One could perhaps isolate his tendency to avoid traditional symphonic development, concentrating instead on creating overlays which get at the thematic heart of the film rather than the incidentals demanded by a particular action sequence.

The Academy orchestra may have played the notes perfectly right, but it rarely came very close to sounding like a Morricone orchestra. It's really just another example of Oscar's tendency to treat the honors it bestows as some kind of branding tie-in, making whatever originality, personality and energy in a film or a filmmaker seem secondary to the glow of Oscar-worthiness they get by their association with the Academy Awards. I guess that's inevitable with something like the Oscars. When Alex Patterson of the Orb incorporates a piece of Morricone into his art it feels like a natural, but when a four-hour-long celebration of American-style middlebrow filmmaking does, not quite. Still, his tribute was a highlight of watching the Oscar ceremony at the Roxie Theatre, something I tried for the first time this year.

Anyway, of the hundreds of scores Ennio Morricone wrote, very few were for films that ever came close to winning or being nominated for Oscars. Most of the ones playing at the Castro April 20-25 weren't; only three (Days of Heaven, the Mission, and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) were deemed Academy-friendly enough to even make it into the montage of clips played as part of the tribute. (I assume that the exclusion from the montage of the Battle of Algiers, which earned Gillo Pontecorvo two Oscar nominations in 1968, was somehow connected to the "don't mention the war" theme of this year's ceremony.) I hope to be there for some of these, but I suspect it's the more "disreputable" films I'm more certain to attend.

See you there!