Ennio Morricone
After making a name for himself scoring spaghetti westerns, Ennio Morricone went on to work with some of the most renowned European and Hollywood moviemakers of all time in a career that has spanned five decades. The maestro was born in Rome and educated in trumpet and choral music at Italy’s National Academy of Santa Cecilia, one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, during World War II. Early in his career, he wrote background music for radio dramas, composed classical pieces, and performed in jazz bands, but it was his sixties movie scores for Sergio Leone—specifically his now ubiquitous woodwindy wah-wah for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—that put him on the international map. Thanks to the iconic themes from these films, Morricone would be commissioned to write music for more than forty other westerns, but he would also work with such filmmakers as Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket), Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò), and, when he began scoring American films, Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven), Samuel Fuller (White Dog), Brian De Palma (The Untouchables), and John Carpenter (The Thing). Moving easily between B movies and prestige films, adventure and romance, Morricone has remained one of cinema’s most adventurous, active, and versatile composers.
One of the most influential political films in history, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (La bataille d’Alger) vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot in the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. The Criterion Collection is proud to present Gillo Pontecorvo’s tour de force—a film with astonishing relevance today.
One-of-a-kind filmmaker-philosopher Terrence Malick has created some of the most visually arresting films of the twentieth century, and his glorious period tragedy Days of Heaven, featuring Oscar-winning cinematography by Nestor Almendros, stands out among them. In 1910, a Chicago steelworker (Richard Gere) accidentally kills his supervisor, and he, his girlfriend (Brooke Adams), and his little sister (Linda Manz) flee to the Texas panhandle, where they find work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer (Sam Shepard). A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire—Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating a timeless American idyll that is also a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor.
Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio. Charged by a coolly assured style, shocking perversity, and savage gallows humor, Fists in the Pocket was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality, a truly unique work that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . it’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to 1944 Fascist Italy remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in.
Samuel Fuller’s throat-grabbing exposé on American racism was misunderstood and withheld from release when it was made in the early eighties; today, the notorious film is lauded for its daring metaphor and gripping pulp filmmaking. Kristy McNichol stars as a young actress who adopts a lost German shepherd, only to discover through a series of horrifying incidents that the dog has been trained to attack black people, and Paul Winfield plays the animal trainer who tries to cure him. A snarling, uncompromising vision, White Dog is a tragic portrait of the evil done by that most corruptible of animals: the human being.