Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone had a unique film-making partnership

By J.B. | VENICE

A LASTING COLLABORATION between a composer and a film director is a precious thing. The work of Steven Spielberg would be greatly diminished without John Williams’s scores. The famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” is remembered in large part because of Bernard Herrmann’s screeching strings. Of all such partnerships, none seems quite so complete as that between Sergio Leone (pictured right) and Ennio Morricone (pictured left). Together the two Italians revitalised an American genre and created some of the most powerful and recognisable moments in post-war cinema.

The two men grew up in close proximity in Trastevere, a working-class district of Rome—so close, in fact, that they posed for their primary-school photograph together. They met again in 1963 when Leone contacted Mr Morricone, who was working as a composer for radio, television and pop stars, to write the score for a new low-budget Western called “The Magnificent Stranger”. Without the large orchestra that would typically burnish the soundtrack of a John Ford Western, Mr Morricone got creative. An array of different instruments were used to create an exciting new soundscape: electric and acoustic guitars, rare harps, whips, durango trumpets, bells, gunshots and, perhaps most importantly, whistling, provided by another childhood friend, Alessandro Alessandroni.