Sergio Leone Movies

PP ... you have GOT TO SEE that film special on Ennio Morricone ... it will give you a much more interesting idea about these films and the film makers. On top of it, it was done by the director Tornatore, and if you want to see an impressive listing, his is ... insane, and the Ennio special is even more so.

I can't say one of the films is better than the other, but they are definitely special ... even if I think that the music in some of them is even better!

One important side note: Ennio had a special ability that was NOT the norm in creating soundtracks, and there is an example that is MASSIVE in this special. To our knowledge only a few folks that did soundtracks have EVER done so on their own, and not just create jingles as Hollywood has done for decades. One such person was Vangelis, and it is well documented in BLADE RUNNER ... and the other ? Yep ... Ennio Morricone, and the example in the film will leave you breathless. He had decorated one film in a certain way for an important part of the film, and the director who thought himself more important did not like it and Ennio decided to quit. The rest of the film was done and no music could fit ... and the director went back to look at what Ennio had done, and how Ennio had specified ... it works a lot better like this ... and the director stated ... he was right! And the film was adjusted/changed to make room for it.

But you gotta remember that the majority of directors don't even know how to use music in a film! And that the folks that do soundtracks that have a free hand on the work, can only be counted in one hand ... as (in general) the majority of the music used in films is not necessarily a part of the film at all ... there are some excellent examples, and we can look at "PURPLE RAIN" to find out how the music was used ... the music makes the film come alive, and also helps explain the whole story. That is rare and special at the same time, even we might not like Prince ... but there are some film directors, I should say there WERE, that were very good with music in their film and they made room for it ... Bernardo Bertolucci was one of them and Ryuichi Sakamoto had a very wide hand ... and Bernardo was not afraid to apply Vittorio Storaro's colors to it to make it even better!

2. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

3. A Fistful of Dollars

Ennio Morricone - Movie Music Maestro

For the Spaghetti - western genre, his peak is: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. 

Hi,

I also stopped watching a lot of the Sergio Leone films because of the dubbing, but he was not the only one that had some serious issues with it. Federico Fellini also had a hard time with it, and some Italian studios felt that they needed to get the American audience but couldn't because of the subtitles.

However ... please ... subtitles are not the issue ... in Madison (WI) while watching "Simon of the Desert" (Luis Bunuel), the subtitles were written by someone that obviously was not listening or interested in what the characters said ... and of course, I understood the Spanish enough to know what was being said, and laughed throughout the whole thing, and one person as we were leaving, asked me what was so funny? There was no translation of the words ... crap vanilla lines were invented to make sure they could keep the sub-titles clean, and not think they were corrupting the audience ... us poor folk ... corrupted? I translated about 10 of the words used, and the number of folks around me increased and some wanted to learn more words for them to have fun with!

Sergio Leone was, very likely, aware of the corruption and horrible subtitle issues, and I think that he decided that dubbing was better than the bad subtitles, and the wording would be more suited to the actors movement, though to anyone that knows film ... not just a Hollywood troll ... could tell that the lips were not in sync. But Sergio did something that we did not notice ... he kept the camera on the character but mostly not on the shots that made it obvious that the dubbing was used. So often, you got a medium to full shot so you could not exactly see the lips out of sync with the dubbing, or at least it was harder to see. I have to see it again to find if this was the case with Clint Hollywood!

FUN NOTE: At SCCC (City College) we had a group of friends that used a large Econo van of one member to go to the Drive In once in a while and one time we went to see the desert fox film (don't even know its title) and the 2nd film was one spaghetti film complete with Sabata (possible bad spelling), and after 5 minutes, all 6 of us (4 hidden under the queen sized mattress!!!!! ohh those fun days!!!) were instead treated to the Guy Guden special, who did the whole dialogue for more than an hour and had us in stitches ... it was a huge memory and lots of fun, but better translations and fun were never had on a spaghetti something or other as Guy also included his arsenal of voices and grumps, grunts and moans ... and everything else. And his death sequences were off the charts!