Track Listing

1. Once upon a Time in the West (Morricone)
2. As a Judgement
3. Farewell to Cheyenne
4. The Trasgression
5. The First Tavern
6. Man With the Harmonica
7. A Dimly Lit Room
8. Bad Orchestra
9. The Man
10. Jill's America
11. Death Rattle
12. Finale

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2569 in Music
• Brand: RCA
• Released on: 1990-10-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Soundtrack
• Original language: Italian
• Dimensions: .19 pounds

Amazon.com essential recording
One of the most lyrical Western movie scores from one of the all-time greatest movie Westerns. Unlike the slightly more cartoonish music (in the Raymond Scott sense) for Sergio Leone's earlier "Man with No Name" Westerns starring Clint Eastwood (Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), Once upon a Time in the West is epic in scope and elegiac in tone. Composer Ennio Morricone uses a haunting, wordless female vocal on the main theme (and in the equally beautiful soundtrack for Leone's companion gangster epic, Once upon a Time in America, many years later) that sends chills down your spine and may even bring tears to your eyes. --Jim Emerson

Customer Reviews

Haunting
I was driving through the Utah desert years ago and popped this CD in. I chose to play it because, well... I couldn't find my Donny and Marie tapes. No. I played it because it was the perfect soundtrack to a solo drive through every western I've ever seen or heard. Morricone is, of course, one of the great composers. From "The Mission" to "Cinema Paradiso", his music haunts and stays with you long after the credits roll.

"Once Upon a Time in the West" was a brilliant movie. From the insanely haunting title track to the soft beauty of "A Dimly Lit Room", this soundtrack will touch you. Listen to "Death Rattle" and you'll imagine yourself standing in the middle of the desert with the hot sun beating down on you - waiting for something bad to happen. Your mind will play tricks on you. Is that... is that a mirage off in the distance or.. are they coming for you? Can you feel it all around you - the smell of death?

One of the best soundtracks. Period.

A Great Western Film Score--Italian Style
In popular terms, when one thinks of composer Ennio Morricone, the first thing that they're likely to think of is "spaghetti westerns"--namely the scores he composed for director Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy of the 1960s. Morricone's output, of course, is much bigger than that now. But one of the best scores he ever did for any film, western or otherwise, was the one he composed for Leone's 1969 western epic ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. And like the film itself, Morricone's music has gained a foothold as one of the very best film scores ever composed for a western.

Amazingly, Morricone composed the film score by reading the screenplay by Leone and Sergio Donati, and doing this before a single frame of film was exposed by Leone himself. This meant that Leone could choreograph the main characters' movements in the film. Thus, you get certain sound elements weaving throughout the score--a lush, haunting score (with a wordless female voice) for Claudia Cardinale's frontier widow character; a stinging electric guitar for the ruthless railroad killer portrayed by Henry Fonda; a jaunty banjo for Cheyenne, the outlaw portrayed by Jason Robards; and an ominous, tuneless harmonica for Charles Bronson's character.

One element that is strangely never mentioned when it comes to Morricone's scores for either this film or the "Dollars" trilogy is how attracted he is to minor keys. The themes attached to the Bronson, Robards, and Fonda characters are all in the key of A Minor (the famous "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" is in D Minor). It is this penchant that Morricone has for the minor keys in his composing that gives his western scores the ominous and deadly charge they have.

One previous reviewer compared the Leone/Morricone collaboration to those of Hitchcock/Herrmann and Spielberg/Williams. I think this is an extremely apt comparison, and it goes a long way in explaining the success of the films, the filmmakers, and the composers who help them. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is a sterling example of the Leone/Morricone collaboration, and is well worth finding.

The newer version sounds better and has more songs
Be sure to pick up the 2005 edition of the soundtrack, also available here at Amazon: The remastering (sound quality) is better *and* there are 20 tracks, instead of the 12/13 on the previous releases, like this one from 1988/1990.

So I give this release 3 stars, but would give the newer release 5.