Sergio Leone had to be talked into making Once Upon a Time in the West. He'd moved on; he wanted to make movies in America, and he'd already begun pre-production on a gangster epic he hoped would do to the golden age of crime pictures what he'd been doing to the golden age of westerns for a decade. But a lot of producers had made a lot of money off of his so-called 'spaghetti westerns', and they wanted to make more. So they dangled such a big paycheck in front of him that, in 1968, he agreed to go back to the well one more time. He was going to finally fulfill his threat to totally dismantle the western and rebuild it from the ground up; and he wasn't going to do it without Ennio Morricone.
Though he scored a number of Leone's best films and came to be associated with the 'sound of spaghetti', Morricone is largely still known to American audiences as the author of the memorable main theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And while that's a pretty strange piece of music in terms of traditional film scores, it doesn't even begin to give you an idea of what a truly wierd musician Morricone really is. Capable at any given moment of unleashing nearly cacaphonous serial music, floods of distorted, ultra-loud guitars, haunting minimalist refrains, bizarre and atonal free-jazz sounds, shrieking electronic tones, or simple and elegant variations on traditional folk music. Such wide and varied sounds are in ample evidence in the composer's vast catalogue; many of his best (and strangest) pieces of music were composed as soundtrack music for long-forgotten Italian movies, but put all together in one pot, a service performed by American avant-garde aficionado and punk vocalist Mike Patton on his indispensable Crime and Dissonance series, they represent one of the most restless imaginations of any contemporary musician. With Ennio Morricone, you knew you'd be getting something of quality, but you might not have any idea whatsoever what it was going to be. Such was the case with Once Upon a Time in the West.
Amazingly -- especially given what a total triumph the final product turned out to be -- Morricone's score for Once Upon a Time in the West almost didn't get used. He wrote its major pieces to fit an early version of the script, and by the time the memorably bleak western started filming, the plot -- as well as the cast and much of the action -- had changed and Morricone was no longer available to rewrite. But Sergio Leone, who was always a good judge of talent, knew what a winner he had on his hands with the stellar score, and did something nearly unprecedented in the history of motion picture production: he changed scenes and tailored the action on screen to fit the parts of the soundtrack that had already been recorded. This wasn't always easy, as Morricone's passion at the time was for incorporating ambient environmental sound into his music, and many of the tunes contained strange, if effective, bits of background noise that were hard to fit to the action on screen; but Leone kept at it, and the result is one of the most perfect blends of film and music of its decade.
BEST TRACKS: The soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in the West -- which, for all its perfection as a compliment to the film, works very well on its own as a listening experience -- starts out with three of the most powerful, precise and stunning pieces of music in all of motion picture scores. The opening theme, named for the film's title, is a glorious, majestic piece of symphonic music, evoking the wide-open spaces of the West and invoking pure Americana as it echoes the intertwining themes of Charles Ives. The second track, "As a Judgment", brings us some perfect gunfight music, ramped up to a maximum of chaotic tension with vibed-out, reverberating, echoey, feedback-driven guitars whose distortion carries in them a mood of hate. And the third, "Farewell to Cheyenne", is a pitch-perfect conjuration of traditional cowboy movie music, with its propulsive percussion and wailing harmonica. The whole score is simply fantastic -- other great tracks include the 12-tone masterpiece "The Transgression", the eerily heroic "Man with a Harmonica", and the subversively folksy "Jill's America" -- but it starts off with nine minutes of utter perfection.
