In the 1960s, the movie-loving world became obsessed with the American West. Hollywood couldn’t stop exploring themes around gunslingers and lawmen. Much in the way that superhero movies consistently top the box office and the Star Wars tv shows are the most talked about today, Westerns dominated entertainment during the 1960s and the creators of these Westerns were propelled to stardom. Three men in particular would have their lives forever altered by their portrayal of the American West.
The first is Sergio Leone. Leone was an Italian director who popularized what is now known as the Spaghetti Western. The term was publicized by a Spanish journalist to define the rise of Westerns, directed and produced by Italians, whose actors generally had no common language; the movie instead being dubbed over in a uniform language during production. This new genre encompassed some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of all time: Django, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and A Fistful of Dollars. The last of these movies would surge the second man whose career was to change forever into stardom: Ennio Morricone.
Towards the end of his life, Ennio Morricone would outright refuse to talk about his career ties to Sergio Leone. Not out of a resentment of the man who he made five legendary Westerns with, but instead that his career seemed to never escape “The Sergio Question,” the persistent attention put on the old days and not whatever Ennio was working on at that moment. Ennio was obsessed with his present work and was frustrated by interviewers who were obsessed with the past.
Morricone was relatively unknown when he was approached by Sergio Leone to create a film score for the director’s new movie A Fist Full of Dollars. In addition to Ennio as a composer, a young actor named Clint Eastwood would join the cast as the lead. When the movie was released in 1967, each of the three men’s lives changed forever. Leone’s budget for his movie was $200,000. Each of his following movies would have budgets that were large multiples of this amount, but in his obscurity it was the most that could be afforded. $200,000 needed to be allocated across actors, production crew, set creation, promotion, and, of course, score composition. It was in this last line item that Leone decided that serious budget cuts would be adopted.
The specific proportion of funding that Morricone was allotted to create an entirely original soundtrack is not known, but it was such a small amount that he could not afford to hire a full orchestra for his recording. He was hired to define the sound of a new world in the Dollars Trilogy, but wasn’t given the tools to do it. Instead of simply writing the music that would underscore Leone’s creation, he would have to improvise sounds which would be inserted in lieu of the instruments that Ennio was accustomed to working with.
To compensate for the missing musicians, Ennio utilized instruments and sounds that weren’t all intrinsically musical: gunshots, yelling, the crack of whips, and, famously, a Fender electric guitar. These sounds punctuated the soundtrack of A Fistful of Dollars where one at that time would expect to here cymbals, kettledrums, and a strings section. The title track from A Fistful of Dollars opens with a low acoustic guitar and then proceeds to mix in some of the most inexpensive sounds one can make: someone is whistling the melody, triangles ring, a bell tolls, and someone chants. From our vantage the song is the quintessential Western song, but at the time these kinds of amalgamated, wild seeming noises had no association with gunfights and deserts. It was a musical innovation being heard for the first time, defining a legendary trilogy and laying the groundwork for nearly all Spaghetti Westerns that would follow.
A Fistful of Dollars was a massive success at the box office earning $18,875,000 world-wide. Sergio Leone was immediately slated to direct a sequel and Ennio Morricone’s involvement in the score creation was without question. Leone and his crew of increasing fame had now proven they deserved far more funding to create their anticipated sequel. The sequel, For A Few Dollars More, received a much larger budget than the title would suggest. The budget tripled to $600,000 for the new film.
One would expect that with this new budget, Morricone would finally splurge on a full blown orchestra and create the kinds of sounds that he was trained to compose. That didn’t happen. For A Few Dollars More and each of the succeeding Westerns that Leone and Morricone made together followed the musical blueprint created on a restrictive budget during their first film together. Thanks to, not in spite of, the lack of funding for an orchestra early in his career Morricone proved his worth as a musical innovator and created a genre that was truly original and beautiful.