If I could be doing anything at all here in Prague tonight, it would be curling up on the couch under a blanket, drinking wine from the bottle and watching A Fistful of Dollars with the volume up too loud. That will be difficult, logistically speaking, as I don’t have the movie.
The writing is going well, too.
I was just having a spaghetti western film festival for one last weekend. Fistful of $, A Few $ More, Hi Plains Drifter and GoodBadUgly (the latter being my fave). These films just get better with age. The cemetery scene in GBU is one of the best shots in film IMNSHO. And the score is just awesome!
“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”
I think it was A Few Dollars More that first woke me up to the genius of the scores of some of those spaghetti western classics. The music breaks rules in a sense, because it is much more out-front than most movie scores. This is partly because there are long stretches with no music at all, just the wind blowing and the crunch of boots in the sand.
In A Few Dollars More, the music builds on a musical pocket watch, starting with the simple tinkling and building into a huge orchestral piece while the two regard each other under the hot western sun.
And when the playing is over, the shooting begins.