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.
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