Somehow, I assumed Ennio Morricone would live forever. But on 6 July 2020, the Maestro died following complications from a fall. Before he left, Morricone wrote his own obituary of profound humility. Many composers do not seem to live very long (Elliott Carter, Nicolas Slonimsky and Irving Berlin are among too few centenarians). Though he died at the age of 91, Morricone demonstrated he had the energy to live to be a hundred.

There has never been a more prolific composer working in film than Ennio Morricone. Until his passing, he may have been the most prolific living composer in any genre, having written nearly 500 film and television scores. The startling quantity of his output may wrongly downplay its quality. Morricone pioneered a new musical style for Italian spaghetti westerns, in which he employed unusual instruments, such as the new surf guitar and the mournful harmonica. His music for westerns, in particular Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” and “Once Upon a Time in the West”, deservedly brought him recognition early in his career. But to define Morricone merely as a western composer is a misrepresentation. The 500 credits comprise no more than 20 such films. The challenge faced by anyone attempting to understand Ennio Morricone is accepting that it is impossible to do him full justice.

ENNIO MORRICONE HAS PASSED AWAY. WE NOW HAVE THE REST OF OUR LIVES TO APPRECIATE HIS MUSIC. SOURCE: AP PHOTO/MICHAEL SOHN.

In the pantheon of film composers beginning their career around 1960 and after, Ennio Morricone will always radiate from the center. Only Jerry Goldsmith could compare to Morricone’s incredibly versatile, psychologically incisive, and powerful thriller music. Only John Williams could compete with Morricone’s masterful command of the classical orchestra and chorus to create memorable themes of sublime elegance. Only Georges Delerue could rival Morricone’s gift of writing beautiful melodies that from their first note haunt listeners. To fellow Italians, the Maestro, as they call him, was second to none. Early in his career Morricone was a counterpart to the older Nino Rota. Only Riz Ortolani approached the seductiveness of Morricone’s tunes for Italian filmic erotica. Ennio Morricone achieved it all in one score consistently throughout his seventy-year journey in cinema.

MORRICONE CONDUCTING IN AMSTERDAM. PHOTO BY JELMER DE HAAS.

The Maestro had a unique capacity to keep reinventing himself and constantly surprise. He often acknowledged the indebtedness for his classical training to his teachers, such as Goffredo Petrassi, a fine composer of concertos and Morricone’s composition professor who died aged 98. Morricone was a polystylist who honoured the needs of the larger picture. Nevertheless, his music consistently stands on its own when experienced apart from the film, a mark of a great composer. Morricone embraced and originally adapted the Classical concerto, the Baroque concerto grosso, the Romantic symphony and twentieth-century chamber music. He brought new richness to rock and beat. He experimented with jazz and electronic music, and even improved on pop.

Many of Morricone’s works still await rediscovery. That Morricone was a fertile concert hall composer is unfairly neglected. His cantata “Voci dal silenzio” (2007) explores subtle choral harmonies and contains stunning colouristic effects. The “Mass for Pope Francis” (2015) follows the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass ordinary but involves striking dissonances and complex antiphonal chanting. In addition, Morricone has written more than 60 concert works, including piano concertos, symphonic pieces, choral music and one opera.

From 1964 to 1980, Morricone was a part of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, or “The Group”. The collective recorded improvisations, experimenting with contemporary avant-garde techniques, such as serialism, musique concrète and free jazz. To experience Morricone performing on his instrument of choice, you can listen to his unorthodox trumpet sounds on The Group albums released by RCA and Deutsche Grammophon. “Omaggio a Giacinto Scelsi”, one of their striking compositions, uses a microtonal manipulation of a single note with uncanny sonoristic effects in honour of the eponymous pioneer of the technique.

GRUPPO DI IMPROVVISAZIONE NUOVA CONSONANZA IN 1978 PHOTOGRAPHED BY ROBERTO MASOTTI.

The Maestro’s most cherished music belongs to cinema. The famous film projection montage in “Cinema Paradiso” (1988) would feel empty without Morricone’s ineffably poignant theme. Clint Eastwood’s deadpan stares in “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) would lose their edge without the surf guitar combined with mariachi trumpets, wordless grunts and whistles. It would be hard to feel sympathy for Jeremy Irons were it not for the wistful flute and plaintive string harmonies that bespeak his doomed love for Lolita. It is also Jeremy Irons as Father Gabriel in “The Mission” (1986), through whose oboe Morricone expresses that even in tragedy life on earth may be as it is in heaven. The composer also liked writing wordless vocal parts for Edda Dell’Orso. Her ethereal voice embodied “The Ecstasy of Gold” in the epic finale of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (1966). Morricone again captured ecstasy, of an extraterrestrial encounter, in “Mission to Mars” (2000), brilliantly combining electronic music with a large chorus. Sean Connery’s death in “The Untouchables” (1987) could not be sadder with the elegiac saxophone bidding farewell to the hero.

“THE MISSION” SOUNDTRACK ALBUM COVER. COPYRIGHT: VIRGIN RECORDS, 1986

While Morricone is better known for his melancholy melodies, it would be an oversight not to emphasize his superb skill in expressing drama. Unmistakably the Maestro’s output contains some of the most unsettling music you will ever hear. Listening to the soundtrack for “The Thing” (1982) is not for faint ears. Morricone crafted a masterpiece of chilling electronica, a sonic incarnation of the frozen landscape. To musically render the nefarious alien, the Maestro turned to the art of fugue. Years later, Quentin Tarantino reused Morricone’s piece “Bestiality”. In his bizarre and not altogether coherent fashion, Tarantino employed in his films a number of preexisting Morricone works. If nothing else, the maverick director receives credit for introducing the Maestro to new audiences.

“THE THING” SOUNDTRACK ALBUM COVER. COPYRIGHT: GEFFEN RECORDS, 2020

Morricone’s exciting music for Italian and French crime films has fascinated me for years. The relentless percussive piano rhythms with screeching electric guitars chasing Charles Bronson in “Città violenta” (1970) presented a brash new sonority for cinema. In “Le Professionnel” (1981), Morricone treated Jean-Paul Belmondo’s secret agent with an engrossing study of a theme and variations. Recently, I had a chance to see “Ripley’s Game” (2002). Morricone’s music immediately drew me into John Malkovich’s world of intrigue. The Maestro succeeded in blending the sounds of the bass guitar with the harpsichord. The final 14-minute piece on the album, entitled “Collage per Ripley”, presents an alluring collection of seamlessly integrated motifs from the film, featuring bold instrumental combinations and a tapestry of mysterious timbres. In the film, the harpsichord solos nimbly oscillate between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Separate from the film, the music seeps through your skin. However, its depth does not yield to one hearing only. Repeated listening helps peel off the layers of the collage. Is multiplicity not a mark of art that stands the test of time?

“CITTÀ VIOLENTA” SOUNDTRACK ALBUM COVER. COPYRIGHT: GDM, 2012

Having established himself in major genres, Morricone rejected complacency. Music was a passion and an art, but also a craft and a discipline; the Maestro was always hard at work, exploring new directions. In 1997, he wrote a one-hour symphony for a rediscovered silent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” (1912). By contrast, the composer succeeded in humanizing Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Red Sonja” (1985), a brawny accomplishment. Morricone’s music for “Days of Heaven” (1978) presents part of his most endearing legacy. He enriched Terrence Malick’s stunning cinematography with simple, gorgeous pastoral lyricism. The score joins the camera in painting bucolic landscapes and conspires to ignite a ruinous conflagration. Morricone again proved a musical storyteller par excellence with a score that also enjoys an independent life.

Though he received an Academy Award nomination for “The Mission”, Morricone lost out to Herbie Hancock’s “Round Midnight”, which contained only 20 minutes of original music. Fellow nominee James Horner was so impressed with Morricone’s score that he voted for it instead of his “Aliens”. Nominations followed, but similarly to Jerry Goldsmith, the Oscars were not in Morricone’s favour, as if implying the irrelevance, or the irreverence, of the Best Original Score category. Morricone garnered popular success and critical acclaim for his work in American films, but he never really embraced Hollywood. His decision to remain in Italy and not to move to America empowered him to keep composing with a more European perspective.

In retrospect, the Academy made amends for their omission when they bestowed on Morricone the Honorary Award for his lifetime achievement in film scoring. Incredibly, the 2007 Academy Awards ceremony marked Morricone’s first trip to Hollywood. In his acceptance speech, interpreted by Clint Eastwood, Morricone thanked the Academy with his characteristic modesty and sincerity. The composer was accompanied by his loving wife Maria Travia, who was moved to tears when he expressed his deepest gratitude to her. Aged 78, Morricone knew and promised the audience he would continue composing, and with a renewed resolve. He honoured the promise with his distinctive prolificacy, composing several scores each year. In 2016, at the age of 87, Ennio Morricone finally received the Academy Award for Best Original Score. After years of admiration, Quentin Tarantino invited the Maestro to write music for his film “The Hateful Eight” (2015), an idiosyncratic re-imagining of the western genre. Morricone supplied a dark, intensely suspenseful, string-driven score that earned him his first Oscar.

AT THE 88TH ACADEMY AWARDS, MORRICONE WINS AN OSCAR FOR “THE HATEFUL EIGHT”. HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH IS MARKED BY CHARMING GRACIOUSNESS AND SELF-EFFACING GENEROSITY.

Morricone will be sorely missed. Borrowing and recycling prevail in today’s cinema while experimentation tends to be discouraged for fear of financial loss. Mediocrity is often allowed to be the common denominator for the arts. Some of the most original recent films have no musical score at all. Melodic themes appear to have fallen out of fashion. Emotions are forced on audiences by super powers and visual effects, rather than elicited by a subtle human touch that music can be. Morricone never tried to push sentiment, instead he possessed the rare power of generating our excitement, evoking our terror, and moving us to tears, often without our realization that music is the emotional heart of the film. His music is always honest. It shows a cultured sensibility, a passion for storytelling, a mastery of the craft, daring innovation with economy of means, and a deep understanding of the human nature.

The passing of Ennio Morricone marks the end of an era in music and in cinema. Time will reveal if the modern computer driven-approach to film scoring deserves a place in history. It is unlikely that Ennio Morricone will ever by eclipsed by another composer, or a computer. Consider also the magnitude of the long list of directors with whom Morricone collaborated: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Zeffirelli, Giuseppe Tornatore, Roland Joffé, Sergio Corbucci (Italy); Roman Polanski, Henri Verneuil (France); Don Siegel, Mike Nichols, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Warren Beatty, and John Carpenter (USA). No composer since Georg Philipp Telemann (over 3000 compositions) and Johann Sebastian Bach was as successfully prolific as Morricone. Collecting his albums creates a full-time job for soundtrack aficionados. Some report more than 800 titles in their library. The list expands with several labels specializing in restoration and publication of Morricone’s music.

Our Maestro is more than a film composer. An unfounded divide seems to separate the worlds of concert and media music. When music is written to an image, the image somehow subjugates the music, therefore the music is artistically inferior to the so-called absolute or classical music. This holds true most of the time. However, Morricone bridges the divide. While he spent most of his career composing for film, to call him a film composer does not do him justice. Morricone’s music serves the moving image, but it also transcends it. Film composers count as success the achievement of this transcendence with a theme or two in a single score. In contrast, many Morricone scores are fit for a concert performance in their entirety. They are aesthetically and artistically complete without the film.

I have spent the last two years researching Mozart’s music. While on the whole I would not compare anyone to Mozart, I dare say Morricone was capable of writing beautiful melodies of irresistible charm and natural effortlessness like Mozart. Doubters are encouraged to seek out the video in which Morricone discusses how he writes a melody before listening to, for instance, the curiously titled collection “When in Doubt Turn to Ennio Morricone”. A box of tissues at hand is strongly advised, even for stoics including Clint Eastwood, to go with the near six-hour themependium. Not one tune repeats or resembles any of the other 99. Moreover, the 100 still represents a fraction of the sum total of Morricone’s melodies.

ENNIO MORRICONE USED SILENCE AS A MUSICAL SOUND. PHOTO: ENNIO MORRICONE OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Despite his age, the amazing Morricone increasingly put more energy into conducting his music around the world. Morricone’s concert tour tempo kept climbing into his late 80s. Yet he never returned to a city with the same programme. Unnamed agencies repeatedly advertised in certain cities in Europe his concerts as “the last”. Morricone gave one of his final concerts in Prague at the age of 90. The opportunists may retreat now that the ruse is true. Nevertheless, Morricone lives on.

Our deepest condolences to Ennio Morricone’s family, friends and all those who know his music.

As technology and storytelling evolved, the second half of the twentieth century brought forth a plethora of iconic films that changed the way we see and understand cinema today. Directors of a previous generation delivered their last masterpieces, bowing out gracefully as the new generation emerged with daring new concepts. Young actors we worship today as legends were only just getting started, and from 1961 until 1971, many of their performances made cinematic history.

1961: A New Era Begins

Let us begin with an artistic bang, as it’s ‘Viridiana’ (1961) by Luis Buñuel that marks his return to Spain from a lengthy exile after the 1936-1939 Civil War. The film is notorious for its alleged blasphemy—a crown of thorns tossed into the fire, a cross disguised as a switchblade, and a few other equally controversial elements. It led to the banning of its distribution by the Spanish dictatorship, with support from the Vatican. It’s the parody of ‘the Last Supper’ that drew the clerics’ ire, a medieval feast of fools in which the order of things is inverted. The scene itself is fundamental to forging the film’s merciless black humour.

‘VIRIDIANA’ (1961)

John Huston’s ‘The Misfits’ (1961) is a heart-breaking work of art, showing us Marilyn Monroe like never before. Her Roslyn ends up running into the desolate flatlands, a raw animal howl bursting from her throat and cutting through our souls as the line is blurred between the character and the real woman—it all comes spilling out: the foster homes, the sexual abuse, the divorces, the beatings, the miscarriages, the drugs… Two years later, Ms Monroe would be found dead. I see this particular scene as a foreshadowing of her epitaph, in a way. ‘The Misfits’ is also her last movie and her legacy, a condemnation of the public who kept staring but could never really see how capable an actress she truly was.

‘THE MISFITS’ (1961)

‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ (1961) by Blake Edwards did not only present a mesmerizing Audrey Hepburn in an iconic role. Holly’s party could very well be the best party scene in movies—made up of easy, loping group shots following people from place to place. We start out small, with Holly’s agent telling stories about her to Paul, her new neighbour. Soon, more people arrive, and it gets crowded. They run out of booze, but a delivery boy brings more. The place becomes packed, wall-to-wall with guests, a couple making out in the shower. This is what people move to New York for, in the end, and it’s why they want out of a party once they’re there: proximity.

‘BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S’ (1961), ©JURROW-SHEPHERD

1962: Drama Like Never Before

When it comes to conspiracy thrillers, we cannot discuss proper paranoia without John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962), starring Frank Sinatra. The circular shot that takes over, eleven minutes into the film, is a surreal 360-degree moment that embodies the visceral fear of mind control. The nightmare scene begins with Sinatra’s Captain Marko seated with other soldiers on a dais at a ladies’ garden society meeting which transforms into huge blow-ups of Mao and Stalin, while a Chinese mind-control expert explains that these American soldiers are test subjects of brainwashing. It is rife with unsettling discontinuities, forcing viewers to alternate between horticulturalists and Communists. This sequence doesn’t just recount mind control. It visualizes it.

‘THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE’ (1962), ©M.C. PRODUCTIONS

‘Jules and Jim’ (1962) by François Truffaut is a romantic drama of the French New Wave whose ending brings tragedy and transcendence into a whole. Set in the era of the First World War, it chronicles the profound friendship between Oskar Werner’s Jules and Henri Serre’s Jim, both young intellectuals sharing an affection for Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine—the freewheeling beauty that bounces between them. She chooses to marry Jules, yet she doesn’t forsake Jim, either. Jules would rather tolerate their infidelity than lose either of them. This triangle eventually pushes Catherine to kill herself and Jim, forcing Jules to attend their funeral. After he watches their bodies slide into the crematorium furnace, we’d expect him to be most miserable. However, Jules walks out with a spring in his step. Yes, he lost the two people he loved most, but his existential ordeal is now over. He’s entitled to relief.

‘JULES AND JIM’ (1962), ©LES FILMS DU CARROSSE

Despite its light focus on battles and the mass movements of men, David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962) remains a strangely withdrawn film, an epic work of cinema whose lead, T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), dies in a motorcycle accident before the story properly begins to unfold. Mr Lean is visibly more concerned with the collapse of Lawrence’s project than with anything else. Our final view of Lawrence, for that matter, is also his, as he sits down in the jeep and is driven away, his face disappearing behind the dirty windshield. Ejected from the arena where he had hoped to emerge as extraordinary, Lawrence has become invisible.

‘LAWRENCE OF ARABIA’ (1962), ©HORIZON PICTURES

1963: A Year of Epic Cinema

You might remember ‘Cleopatra’ (1963) by Joseph L. Mankiewicz as the dazzling historical film that brought a stupendous Elizabeth Taylor onto the silver screen. Some might recount it’s also where she met her future fifth husband, Richard Burton. But ‘Cleopatra’ made a different kind of history, as Ms Taylor broke $1 million for her performance. Producer Walter Wanger had just lost Joan Collins to scheduling problems for the part, leaving him vulnerable to high demands. Taylor’s contract specified 10% of the film’s gross earnings, racking up a total of $2 million for her acting services alone. She also collected a fee from the use of Todd-AO, an anamorphic widescreen process developed by the late third husband, Michael Todd, which she insisted be used on ‘Cleopatra’.

‘CLEOPATRA’ (1963), ©TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ (1963) is but one example that showcases the visionary director’s ability to express complex ideas through visual imagery. While it apparently focuses on the patriarchal figure of Prince Fabrizio Salina, eloquently portrayed by Burt Lancaster, the film is more concerned with the changes of Italian society when power is passed from the older generation to the younger. The main representatives of the latter are Salina’s nephew, Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon) and Tancredi’s wife-to-be (Claudia Cardinale), whom we see embracing during the party sequence through the film’s final hour. In one astonishing shot, a distant view of them kissing is suddenly invaded by the line of dancers—the contrast between joy and the drabness of conformity gives this scene and the film itself a type of melancholy that is a staple of Visconti’s work.

‘THE LEOPARD’ (1963), ©TITANUS

‘The Great Escape’ (1963) by John Sturges is a venerated object of action cinema. Steve McQueen’s Virgil Hilts flees on a motorcycle with Nazis in hot pursuit. After so many minutes of camp prisoners tunnelling toward freedom, the open countryside becomes a beacon of hope. But high barbed fences threaten to thwart Hilts’ narrative of escape—until McQueen himself, the cool stunt daredevil, merges with the P.O.W. escapee and guns the bike’s engine before zooming up over the barrier. I can almost hear the audiences gasping inside a packed movie theatre when this key scene came on. This is the magic of movies, so often linked to the marvel of flight. It’s quite easy to understand why ‘The Great Escape’ is such a great moment in the history of film.

‘THE GREAT ESCAPE’ (1963), ©THE MIRISCH COMPANY

Alfred Hitchcock had already established himself as the master of suspense, yet ‘The Birds’ (1963) took things to a whole new level. The scene outside the schoolhouse is the most memorable. We are in Bodega Bay, and there have already been several attacks by the apparently crazed birds. Tippi Hedren’s Melanie Daniels is waiting for Veronica Cartwright’s Cathy to come out of class—she sits in the playground, elegantly smoking a cigarette with plenty on her mind, plenty enough that she doesn’t even notice the birds landing on the climbing frame behind her. When fluttering finally grips her focus, we’re given a camera swivel from her point of view to find the frame completely covered with birds. We know they will attack. This is a textbook example of building suspense in an apparent narrative dead spot, as all hell is about to break loose.

‘THE BIRDS’ (1963), ©ALFRED J. HITCHCOCK PRODUCTIONS

1965: Rules Change for Women and Action in Film

Russ Meyer’s ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ (1965) brought forth the warrior queen in a format that had been abandoned by other creative mediums. Exotic dancer and martial-artist-turned-actress Tura Satana gained an impressive cult following after her performance as the fierce Varla, a masochist’s wet dream with sharp bangs, cat’s eye make-up, and a stunning hourglass figure wrapped in tight black denim.

While the top-grossing movie of that year portrayed saintly femininity in ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965), Ms Satana was kicking ass and taking names in the California desert, racing cars for kicks and cackling in the faces of men. She pioneered future female-led action flicks such as ‘Kill Bill’ (2003), ‘Alien’ (1979), and ‘The Terminator’ (1984). The way in which Varla, an unstoppable wolverine of a woman, pulls Tommy’s wrists back, presses the heel of her boot to his neck, then snaps his spine with a loud crack, manages to redefine the lead female in action films.

‘FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!’ (1965), ©EVE PRODUCTIONS

1966: New Western, Dystopia, and Hell’s Angels

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966) by Sergio Leone is a film that insists on two kinds of people existing in the world. The director’s fondness for contrasting two types of shots—close-ups and long shots, finds its conclusion in the grey or blue of the two kinds of soldiers who move toward Eli Wallach’s Tuco and Clint Eastwood’s Blondie from afar. Leone easily turns grey soldiers to blue through a visual instrument of dust, cutting to Blondie and Tuco chained in a prison camp for having worn the wrong disguise in their chase for gold in the middle of a Civil War. Movies were invented for ideas such as this.

‘THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY’ (1966), ©CONSTANTIN FILM

Ray Bradbury’s writing is a paragon of exquisite science fiction. Few were able to transport his works onto the screen—few, among them being François Truffaut’s take on ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (1966). Its credits sequence stands out as a work of its own since Mr Truffaut thematically integrates it into his adaptation of the dystopian novel. Reading is banned in the world of ‘Fahrenheit 451’, and so the titles are spoken, not printed. We listen to the credits like the characters receive the programs they watch on TV. We see a series of photos like the picture-comics they gaze upon instead of reading books or newspapers.

‘FAHRENHEIT 451’ (1966), ©ANGLO ENTERPRISES

You’d think the low-budget biker movie craze started with ‘Easy Rider’ (1969), but Roger Corman’s ‘The Wild Angels’ (1966) was the true flame to light that fuse. It’s a quintessential guilty pleasure of that decade, starring Peter Fonda as Heavenly Blues, leader of a California chapter of Hell’s Angels. The transgressive script was penned by Peter Bogdanovich and Monte Hellman, and it features some interesting performances from Diane Ladd (Laura Dern’s mother), Dick Miller, and Nancy Sinatra.

1967: Here’s to You, Mrs Robinson

Aside from Arthur Penn’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967) featuring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as the notorious outlaws, no other movie has rocked that year’s box-office as firmly as ‘The Graduate’ (1967), directed by Mike Nichols. It gives us a young Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, adrift after college and uninterested in a conventional career, who’s lured into an affair by Mrs Robinson, the family friend brilliantly portrayed by Anne Bancroft. Ben gets together with Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, and soon they fall in love. It breaks down when Elaine discovers his affair with her mother and gets engaged to another man. Even then, Ben refuses to back down as he frantically rushes into the church and basically steals the bride. They board a city bus, headed towards an unknown future. Their lives will never be the same again, and neither will the movies.

‘THE GRADUATE’ (1967), ©LAWRENCE TRUMAN PRODUCTIONS

1968: Of Zombies and Apes and MPAA Ratings

A lot happened in 1968. George A. Romero, the father of the cult horror, brought ‘Night of the Living Dead’ to theatres worldwide. It is rightly regarded as a film that made the entire genre enter its modern age, and it also anticipates the trend in more recent horror flicks toward an encouraged use of self-reflexivity. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ also offered one of the most famous lines in the horror department: ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara!’.

In Franklin J. Schaffner’s ‘Planet of the Apes’ (1968), Charlton Heston is an astronaut stranded on a planet ruled by evolved races of apes. He can never be sure of anything here, and he learns that best in the final scene when he discovers a half-buried Statue of Liberty on a beach and realizes that all this time he was still on Earth. The ending forces viewers to put everything they’ve seen before into a new perspective—a trick that future sci-fi and horror filmmakers will gladly use again.

‘PLANET OF THE APES’ (1968), ©TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

In November 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America enacted its rating system as a response to the constantly eroding strictures of the old Hollywood Production Code from the 1930s. Despite being looser than its predecessor, the MPAA rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17) was viciously called out by Kirby Dick in his 2006 documentary, ‘This Film Is Not Yet Rated’. His claims focused on the lack of transparency in the board’s decision-making process, along with the fact that it was more hostile to explicit sexual content than extreme violence, stigmatizing gay sex more severely than heterosexual coupling.

This year also gave us ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s eponymous sci-fi novel. The premise of this cinematic oeuvre is that some unknown breed of beings has been observing life on Earth from the beginning, only intervening on rare occasions to encourage the evolution of human intelligence. The cut from flying bone to soaring spaceship in the subtitled ‘The Dawn of Man’ first chapter is a legendary cut in modern cinema, making a comment on the possibilities of human evolution that’s as incredibly condensed as a singularity in deep space.

‘2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’, ©METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER (MGM)

1969: ‘I’m Walkin’ Here!’

Dennis Hopper directed ‘Easy Rider’ (1969), which brings Peter Fonda back as a biker, alongside a young and enthralling Jack Nicholson. The success of this film convinced studios to take a chance on new ideas, new filmmakers, and new audiences, thus reducing the number of screenplay deaths in the fearsome ‘slush pile’.

But it was John Schlesinger’s ‘Midnight Cowboy’ (1969), starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, that made this year all the more memorable through its famous street-crossing line, as the petty criminal of the lower depths demands respect: Hoffman’s Rizzo stumbles onto a Manhattan street just as a taxi nearly runs him over, inciting him to slam his fist on the hood with such force that his cigarette drops from his lips. ‘I’m walkin’ here!’ he shouts, asserting his right to existence.

‘MIDNIGHT COWBOY’ (1969), ©JEROME HELLMAN PRODUCTIONS

1971: The Rise of Bruce Lee

In the United States, Bruce Lee had developed the Jeet Kune Do, ‘art of the intercepting fist’, a combination of Chinese wing chun, Korean taekwondo, and Western boxing and wrestling. Returning to Hong Kong, he put this mastery to good use, making a grand name for himself in Lo Wei’s ‘The Big Boss’ (1971). It is here that the legend of cinema’s dragon was born, as this was the first Chinese martial arts film that crossed over to Western audiences. Like many overnight successes, Mr Lee toiled for years before he became a star of the silver screen. He struggled with Hollywood’s Asian stereotypes, and the last drop was being passed over for a lead role in ‘Kung Fu’, the TV series that had David Carradine as a Shaolin Monk wandering through the American West.

‘THE BIG BOSS’ (1971), ©GOLDEN HARVEST FILMS

Mr Lee brokered a deal with Golden Harvest Films in Hong Kong, instead, and the rest became history. Audiences had never seen someone like Bruce Lee before: insolent, charismatic, fast like a panther and effortlessly cool, all-steel physique and whipcrack kicks and punches. He broke the mould and put the world on notice that Asians were more than Hollywood had made them out to be.