My love affair with movies began with Sergio Leone.  Sure, I watched movies before I saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in high school, but I was a changed man after I saw Leone rebuild the American western with an operatic scope.  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach seemed like nothing short of Greek gods, titans battling for treasure in the land of mortals.  Even their encounter with something as huge as the Civil War seems small when placed on the grand scale of their journey.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that experience showed me a power movies can possess that the stuff I was consuming on a Friday night at the multiplex not only didn’t possess, but didn’t even bother striving for.

Somehow, Once Upon a Time in the West is an even more massive experience than The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  It was Leone’s way of saying farewell to the genre, as he depicts the genre archetypes as being left behind by the changing times.  Like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, it depicts the heroes and villains of the old west finding their kind becoming obsolete as the ever-expanding railroads alter and modernize the western landscape.

The opening scene of this movie is one of my favorite scenes in a movie, ever.  Three gunmen, donning dusters (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, and Al Mulock), show up at a train station, and in that Leone fashion, they wait.  The sounds are a symphony of natural noises assembled by composer Ennio Morricone, and the face of the characters are as lived-in as the sets.  After patiently biding their time, a train finally pulls in, and a mysterious man (the great Charles Bronson) appears, playing an ominous tune on a harmonica.  A brief, ambiguous exchange occurs, guns are drawn, violence explodes, and the three duster-wearing outlaws are dead by the harmonica-players gun.  And that, ladies and gents, is how you open a movie.

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Can you remember the last piece of film score that made you want to jump into the screen and join in on the action — that made you want to destroy an arch-villain’s volcano lair or swing into ship full of enemy pirates…? But of all the genres, there’s nothing quite like a  Big Western Score. The best are rousing, moody, flavorful… They drive a sense of danger and adventure into your innards and make you long to be a cowboy, which is no small achievement for someone like me who would rather spend a night in jail than outdoors.

Here are my 5 favorites in all their YouTube glory.

1. Dimitri Tomkin – Red River (1949): Sweeping, epic, majestic and impossible to believe never nominated for an Oscar. An important part of scoring is deciding where to put the music and ”Red River” has some of the best spotting choices I’ve ever seen. It kicks in precisely when it should, not just to enhance a moment, but also to change moods and start fresh. Watch the scene again where John Wayne (who’s absolutely brilliant in his most unsympathetic role) tells Montgomery Clift (every bit as good as Wayne) he’s gonna kill him. This is “the” moment in the film and you expect dark, melodramatic music, but when Clift walks away and gets on his horse the score soars with adventure completely changing the mood and stripping the melodrama from the moment. (more…)