This haunting piece of music comes near the end of Sergio Leone's classic 1966 Western. In the film, the "Bad" character Tuco (Eli Wallach) races through a vast desert graveyard of wooden crosses, attempting to find the one marked "Arch Stanton", whose coffin is supposed to contain a cache of gold. Hot on his heels are Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef (the Good and the Bad, respectively).
This is a recent orchestration conducted by Maestro Morricone himself, with Susanna Rigacci as the soloist.
The graveyard was created by the Spanish Army on loan to Leone and company for the shooting of the film. They also blew up a bridge for the cameras during a scene depicting an epic American Civil War battle.
A fairly famous rock band has also used this music to open its concerts.
ReplyDeleteBoth of these versions are awesome. "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" is one of my all-time favorite movies...
ReplyDelete"You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig."
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? Sounds like Congress! Hoho!
ReplyDeleteI love Morricone, indeed my favourite film is "Once Upon a time the West" and his music plays a big part in making it such a great film.
Y'know, I had the soundtrack recording when I was in high-school - and it's still one of my favorites, today.
ReplyDelete(If you're interested, TCM is running a Kurosawa special, including "Yojimbo" and "The Seven Samurai" from which this film and "The Magnificent Seven" were taken).
Mine too--has to be one of the top ten Westerns, period. Five stars to Sergio Leone for seeing the potential a guy like Eastwood had to play such an unsavory but memorable figure in those three films. He recalibrated the Western genre, that''s for sure.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes the dialouge is quite good. And you can't say enough about the music score!
Congress was never that entertaining, before or now Oakie, but I get your drift.
ReplyDelete"Once Upon a Time in the West" has a great score as well--more tender in parts, and meloncholy but just as powerful. A restored version was released a few years back and it that film even better.
I love the music as well when I first saw these films. Recorded a lot of the soundtrack right off the television because there were so many great passages like the one above. I finally got an album of music from all five of the major Leone Westerns.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I read about the Kurosawa films. I need to get TCM again. I have video copies of the two films yoy mentioned but there's a lot Kurosawa' and Mifune's earlier and contemporary work I need to see.
Some fine fellow has put the whole of the film on You Tube (Good quality) in a number of chunks. But I couldn't find a section that I could pop on my page because the film is so rich that any part of it would lose all context by itself.
ReplyDeleteThanks Oakie! I will do some viewing on that.
ReplyDelete