Flicks in Five: Ennio Morricone's 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'

If you're a certain age, like I am — that is, a baby boomer — you might remember hearing the melody from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, by Ennio Morriconeon, on AM radios across America when the movie came out in the late 1960s.

Morricone's style of music ranges from those Sergio Leone films — he composed the music for all of them ever since A Fistful of Dollars — right on through things like The Mission, Ripley's Game, Bugsy, Mission to Mars — just beautiful and diverse scores that he has done over a long career. He did star in jazz bands in the 1940s playing trumpet, and then he became a studio arranger for RCA Victor and started ghostwriting for film and theater.

Throughout his career, he also has done music for Paul Anka and Andrea Bocelli, among other entertainers. But he probably is most remembered, from 1960 to '75, for writing music for westerns. His score to 1966's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most memorable and influential soundtracks in history. When cellist Yo-Yo Ma decided to record Morricone's music, the album stayed for more than 100 weeks on the Billboard top classical albums chart.

Morricone received an honorary Academy Award in 2007, and he was nominated in total for six Oscars. But it wasn't until 2016 that he got his first Academy Award for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. That made him the oldest person ever to win an Oscar.

The recognizable and wonderful music to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly includes "The Ecstasy of Gold."

Saturday Cinema

Tune in to Saturday Cinema at 10 a.m. CST Saturday, Feb. 10, to hear music from composers who have received the most nominations but never won Oscars, including Danny Elfman, Alan Silvestri and Alex North.

Just click on the Listen button below to hear the live stream.