Deadsplinter Up! All Night: The Mercenary

7/7/20 Jonee 46

The great Ennio Morricone has died. It’s hard to quantify just how much of an influence he had on the art of scoring motion pictures. He changed the way the old west sounded single handed for one. As a big fan of Spaghetti Westerns, I’m a big fan of Morricone. It’s hard to imagine one of those movies without his sound, either directly from him, or someone else mimicking him. The music somehow surpassed the outrageousness of the films themselves with whistles, weird vocal noises, and bombastic horns. One of my favorite pieces is from Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary, one of the best non-Leone Spaghettis. Franco Nero plays a Polish mercenary and an off the wall Jack Palance in a hilarious wig is the bad guy, Curly. I’m not sure if it’s the same character that’s in City Slickers.

L’Arena from The Mercenary – Ennio Morricone

The Mercenary

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46 Comments

  1. One of my favorite soundtracks of all time:


     

      • Morricone was so much more than the spaghetti western music guy.  I worked for a few years writing and playing on low-budget film scores, and his energy, his output, his range were all formative and inspirational to me.  

        • That sounds like a hell of a cool job! We need to hear more.

  4. Ween – Buenos Tardes Amigo
     


    and since it is Twofer Tuesday…  the greatest mercenary tale of all time, Pain – Chuck Al Hasib
     

     

  5. I like this cowboy song and the movie is fun.


     

    • Dolly is a national treasure! 

  7.  More than a few rock bands have cited him as an influence too. Like Across Tundras . 

    Carrion Crow

     

     

     

     

    The Book of Truth

     

     

  8. This is not part of tonight’s theme – but still pretty topical.
    Also, practicing my linking.
    Song starts at 1:10.

  9. I grew up hating western movies (never as much as I hate musicals) but someone convinced me to watch 3:10 to Yuma which got me on a western movie kick. Then someone convinced me to watch Tombstone and I LOVE IT!

    In the words of someone else ’round these parts…

    “There’s a Jovi song for this”

    • You have to watch Lonesome Dove! 

        • It’s Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Glover, Diane Lane, and Anjelica Huston. It was a TV mini series based on the Larry McMurtrey book. 

          • I used to spend an hour in the video rental store as a teenager looking for a movie to rent and once decided on The Apostle because Robert Duvall was the lead…and I haven’t forgiven him since.

            I will watch this though. Thanks.

      • Ok, I will…this is a lot of promising I’m doing though. Thanks.

        • At least watch the first story, it is a series of short stories.  I am a huge Coen brothers fan & this one is a classic of dark humor & deep hidden meanings.  My history of film teacher in college spent a full semester on different Coen bros movies.  My semester we did Big Lebowski.  Good times

      • I haven’t watched it yet either, but it’s on the list.

    • It’s a much bigger and more varied genre than it gets credit for. And, like science fiction, there are a bunch of movies that are pretty subversive. Another great classic one is Winchester ’73.

    • You need to watch Hell on Wheels on Netflix.

      • Ok I will.  I might have to do a Westerns, Ranked post when I finish watching all of these. Thanks.

    • Proph, can you tell me again how to get text and a youtube video to appear properly in the same reply?  Nothing I’m trying works.

      • You have to hit the remove link icon after pasting the link. And leave a few lines of space between the text and link. Hope that helps.

      • Yep…and I apologise for not getting this issue with the new text editor fixed and I have spent too much time testing it than I have fixing…it will get done, though.

        So depending on your browser (which i recommend EVERYONE clear cache, sign out of Deadsplinter, fully close the browser and re-open to sign back in to take in the updates) for the most part, it’s as simple as clicking on the “remove link” icon in the text editor after you paste the youtube link.

        Through some testing, I’ve noticed it is different on mobile devices than on pc’s, but if you’re using an updated version of Firefox, you might need to highlight the link and then press the “remove link”icon. If you’re using Chrome, you might need to just click the “remove link” icon right after pasting (if it shows up as a highlighted-in-blue link right away). If you’re using Opera, it might not even automatically catch your link as a hyperlink and you’re fine. I have no microsoft devices in order to test with so I can’t speak for IE or Edge, but it’s on my to-do list to make a dual boot pc with windows.

        The issue will be fixed soon and there will be a “this is exactly how to do each thing” post that will work for everyone. In the meantime, if you do the cache clearing thing and it still doesn’t work for you on any browser the way I explained it, please let me know.

        There also has to be a line break (a double-spaced one) between text and link.

    • One of the best lines in Tombstone is near the end of the film. 
       
      “There’s no such thing as a normal life, Wyatt.  There’s just life.  Now, go out and live it.”

      • That I agree with.

        Val Kilmer was amazing in that movie and I don’t care what anyone says.

        One of my favourites is “I have two guns, one for each of ya.”

        • That movie was the first time I really started to appreciate Val Kilmer’s acting chops.

          • He pulled off Jim Morrison, that made him a God to me!

    • best western I’ve seen:

      Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C’era una volta il West, transl. ”Once upon a time (there was) the West”) is a 1968 epic Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone, who co-wrote it with Sergio Donati based on a story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Leone. It stars Henry Fonda, cast against type, as the villain,[8] Charles Bronson as his nemesis, Jason Robards as a bandit and Claudia Cardinale as a newly widowed homesteader. The widescreen cinematography was by Tonino Delli Colli, and the acclaimed film score was by Ennio Morricone.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_the_West

      trailer’s first 10 seconds are a still image:

  11. Mercenary God – Out Of Fashion

  12. Ennio Morricone – Once Upon A Time in America

  13. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

    • They looked like they had a ball playing it!

  14. Proph, can you tell me again how to get text and a youtube video to appear properly in the same reply?  Nothing I’m trying works.

    • I hit share under video and copy/paste in comments. It seems to work for me. Just leave a blank line between what you wrote and link.

      • Well, I’ll be.  I think it works.
         

      • That’s what I used to do, but then it stopped working, but now it’s working again.  Thank you, KB.

        • Looking forward to your posts.

  15. Way Out West by Mary McCaslin. A really haunting, unsentimental take on the modern American West. Not in a gruesome sense, just unfulfilled promises.

  16. ill go with this strange canadian who vaguely ties into the theme


    over here we seem to have a bit of a thing going for country/western music lately….i dont mind…the cookie cutter pop that most radio stations play was starting to bore me quite a bit

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