Anthony Selby

Cinema
Final
An analysis of Ennio Morricone's score in "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly"
It has been said that film music first appeared to cover up the sound made by the clunky
projectors that were used to show the early silent movies. Film music has come a long since the
days of the lone piano player or small orchestra. In fact, there are few films from which music is
absent. But why does film music exist? Well, the simple answer is that it's a way of emphasizing
and underlying the important dramatic aspects of the film.
In many cases, the music says even more than the words or the images on screen. One such
example is "The good, the bad and the ugly"(1968), directed by Sergio Leone, and the final
installment in his spaghetti western trilogy, so-called because the three films were made and
financed by Italians.
The film's score was composed by Ennio Morricone, a frequent collaborator of Leone's, and it is
regarded as an ideal fusion of film and film music. It has influenced numerous filmmakers over
the years, Quentin Tarantino among them. Tarantino attempted to employ Morricone to compose
the score for "Inglorious Basterds" (2009) but was turned down. Instead, Tarantino sampled
music composed by Morricone for earlier films, a tactic he also adopted for some of the music in
both versions of "Kill Bill." In fact, in the 2008 'Empire Magazine' poll for 'The 500 Greatest
Movies of All Time', Tarantino listed "The Good, the bad and the ugly" as his favoutite movie.
Morricones music informs the viewer in ways that the images and dialogue do not. Sergio Leone
considered music to be so integral to his films that he would involve Morricone in the early
stages of production, and they would work together on what each piece of music stood for and
how it represented the themes of the film. For The good, the bad and the ugly, the music was
composed and recorded before shooting had begun, so that Leone could play the score during
filming and create the right mood on set.
The films main title features the same five notes played three times; each time on a different
instrument, with each one signifying one of the three main characters. These notes are played as
the main characters are introduced, one by one, accompanied by their descriptions in Italian: il
buono (the good), represented by a soprano recorder; il brutto (the ugly), represented by
a scream from two male voices, performed an octave lower, a scream that Morricone called the
sound of a coyote; and il cattivo (the bad), represented by an ocarina bass, performed a
further octave lower. Just as boxers have their distinctive entrance music as they walk to the
ring, so too do the protagonists here. The audience knows which character is about to enter the
scene and perform. And it is the low bass instrument that stands for the lowliest of the characters:

Angel Eyes, a.k.a. the bad. However, because the same notes are being played, there are of
course similarities between their musical entrances, thus symbolising one of the underlying
themes of the film, namely the difficulty in recognising which of these characters is good,
bad, or ugly. For instance, Clint Eastwoods character, Blondie, who is the good in the
films opening titles, often behaves in a way that contradicts this description. In truth, they are
each comprised of a mix of these characteristics, although the mix has not been distributed in
equal parts.