Last week I had a chance to scratch a movie off my cinematic bucket list.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is mostly good, rarely bad and never ugly.
The 1966 film, directed by Sergio Leone, is an iconic film of the spaghetti Western subgenre - and is frequently cited as one of the best Westerns ever made.
Leone's Man with No Name/Dollars trilogy - A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - transformed Clint Eastwood from a minor TV actor to a major movie star.
But Leone's spaghetti Westerns wouldn't have been complete without the brilliant scores by award-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone.
In a 2011 interview with The Independent, director Quentin Tarantin said, "I think a case can even be made that with Leone and Morricone that they are the best director-composer team in the history of film."
If asked to whistle a Western theme, most people would whistle the "coyote howl" melody from Morricone's theme for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, even if they have never seen the film or know the source of the music.
Listening to the theme without the distraction of Leone's stunning visuals allows Morricone's talent to come to the fore.
To hear to the original film version of the theme, go online here: http://bit.ly/1aLpyDV.
A cover of the theme by Hugo Montenegro and His Orchestra released in 1968 reached the No. 2 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that year. Montenegro's version can be heard online here: http://bit.ly/1g1mg0N.
