American Opera

When I first found out that as a software developer I could get away with listening to music while I worked, I was completely elated. Of course, music quickly turned into old time radio plays, which I don't imagine any manager, even of software developers, would encourage, but it worked out fabulously well for me--worked, that is, until my workstation got "upgraded" and realplayer stopped working. (Red Hat, it seems, has a way of making the simplest multi-media tasks nearly impossible.)

So after months of suffering through the monotony of music, mostly via YouTube, I was caught by the advertisement for their feature-length films: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, collectively referred to as The Man With No Name Trilogy. Only available online until November 30? But I'm busy. I got things to do when I get home. I mean, I could find the time if I made it a priority, but why would I do that when I already own the movies? No. Clearly, the only way for me not to miss out on enjoying these movies as YouTube is offering them is to watch them while doing something else--to watch them at work. The logic was inescapable. At least, I would listen to them. Let the video play in some other browser tab, what difference would it make? I know the plots. I know the characters. Listening to the dialog should be pretty good, right?

Anyone who knows anything about Spaghetti Westerns has got to be raising a cynical eyebrow at this point. For those of you not caught up on this brilliant trans-Atlantic phenomenon, in the mid 1960s, Spanish and Italian film crews cranked out low-budget films in the style of American Westerns of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It made perfect sense: in the heyday of American Westerns, the films were factory made.

The plots were so formulaic that they wrote themselves. There's a reason why Western television series Gunsmoke, running from 1955 to 1975, is currently tied with Law and Order for longest running television series and (mostly) Western novelist Zane Grey is credited with writing the material for--believe it--110 films. Of course, you have to hand it to a film master who knows when to rip off another film master. A Fistful of Dollars does a great job dressing Akira Kurosawa's samurai Yojimbo in cowboy clothes, which ought to be reason enough to watch, given how well Kurosawa characters stack up in later movie adaptation (cf. Han Solo).

Italy and Spain had the landscapes to get the job done, and done beautifully. My first year of college, I went on a Western kick because I had gotten so tired of being a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, as, apparently, is expected of you when you attend a major American research university, that I just wanted to take some time to be an American. Of course, I eventually wound up watching The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the common room when an international student from India came in and proclaimed "My God! Your country is beautiful! I can't wait to see more of it!" I needed to hear that, even though he was certainly not looking at my continent. He was looking at picturesque Andalucia, Spain.

Most importantly, Italy and Spain had cheap actors. And this is why anyone who knows the genre has an eyebrow raised right now. To start with, most Spaghetti Westerns were filmed in Italian or Spanish, and subjected to the most horrific dubbing process imaginable. The voice-over actors speak English with an accent, which is completely absurd, and while there are plenty of extras to fill as many parts as necessary, anyone with under twenty lines ends up with the same voice in English. Of course, some of the actors were Americans. It didn't happen all the time, but often enough to make Clint Eastwood a star from this trilogy. Charity bids me hope that whatever languages they were dubbed into were not drowned with English accents. All the minor characters end up with the same voice, except the requisite toothless old man. Worst of all, the voices sound flat and often drowned out by the soundtrack or sound effects. Maybe it just wasn't technologically possible to record a believable voice-over session and dub it onto the film. But hold the phone, people! Wasn't this the same decade that the Beatles were making recording history at Abbey Road? Wasn't Revolver released the same year as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I think a good dubbing should have been possible, if difficult.

But who cares? The audio on these three particular films is absolutely incredible, dialog aside. Two things make it stand out. First, director Sergio Leone is a complete master of dramatic pacing. I'm not sure which is cause and which is effect, but working with actors in different languages demands a vision that uses more than the lines on the page to convey character. And when the characters being portrayed are laconic sociopaths, everything comes down to dramatic build. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly takes upwards of ten minutes to begin the dialog; A Fistful of Dollars is similarly drawn out. It is surprising to realize just how much building is done with the deliberate repetition of footsteps. Not that I would necessarily recommend listening blindly if you aren't familiar with the movie, but it's an interesting exercise if you are, and I certainly enjoyed it.

Even better, though, is the soundtrack. Apparently, the composer Ennio Morricone has had a long, successful career writing scores for hundreds of movies. But I can't seem to pick out his style well when I listen to many of his scores. But when he wrote for Sergio Leone, it was magic. I find it funny that the theme for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly should have become so familiar, not because it doesn't deserve to be remembered, but because it sounds so horrible whenever we try to hum/whistle it. Yet the original is recorded with whistling, and yodeling, and--arghilofono? I hear tell it's like an ocarina, which we all know was invented in the 90's when the N64 came out. The other two movies are not too much different in terms of instrumentation, although they lack some of the structural complexity of the third movie. But I'm just guessing when I say that, because I know nothing about music, and, well, because I'm listening to this at work, trying to benchmark how much jmx rmi impacts performance in java processes. It is wonderful, though, to listen to how well woven into the narrative the music is. There is much of the story that is told between the lines with brief instrumental flourishes that do so much to fit together the footsteps or gunshots or other sound effects that pace the movie along. It's really a beautiful thing.

Much more subjectively, these scores put across all the grandiosity that should go with an epic with an unsettling, almost elegiac aftertaste. I don't know all that that might possibly say about Morricone's and Leone's vision, but the braggadocious, bittersweet revelry is definitely there. It's there and even more pronounced after some slight scene and instrumentation changes in Leone's later Western, Once Upon a Time in the West, and it's there again after some radical scene and instrumentation changes in Once Upon a Time in America. I don't know entirely what to make of it, but there's something, for lack of a better word--for lack of a clearer thought--so Italian about it. Maybe it's best not to look at these films as Spaghetti Westerns. Maybe this isn't just an American form reproduced (with thorough revisionist criticism) on another continent. Maybe this is just opera, borrowing (or recreating) an American stage.