Forgotten Movie Songs #28: "A Gringo Like Me" from GUNFIGHT AT RED SANDS

When I start to think about Ennio Morricone's career, my mind boggles. His 500+ film and TV score output seems like a world record, a career that would take an entire career to completely assess. A sample (and the amount of notable titles here could be endless, so I'm sorry if I concentrate only on the ones immediately familiar to me): The Good The Bad and the Ugly (my choice for the best film score of all time), The Mission, Once Upon a Time in the West, Days of Heaven, The Untouchables, A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in America, Duck You Sucker, My Name is Nobody, Bugsy, The Great Silence, Danger: Diabolik, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cinema Paradiso, La Cage Aux Folles, The Thing, In The Line of Fire, Malena, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, A Pure Formality, Frantic, 1900, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Lolita (the Adrian Lyne version), U Turn, Wolf, and The Stendahl Syndrome.

His output is unmatchable. Hundreds of classical pieces composed before his film involvement, multiple hundreds of orchestrations, both of symphonic pieces and pop songs and experimental pieces. electronic and rock and classical and so many more kinds of sounds. If you just sit and listen to anything done by Morricone, you will be transfixed, even if you have no connection to the event for which the work was written; he is in this way, along with maybe Britain's John Barry, the most immanently listenable composer out there. It's impossible to ague against the notion that Morricone, at the behest of his frequent filmic collaborator Sergio Leone, singularly changed--at the very least--the western film genre (and probably the crime film genre, too); for most of us, after we saw Clint Eastwood's The Man with No Name dispatching villains while backed with Morricone's growling guitars or howling vocals, we were haunted collectively. They so embodied the darkest machismo of the ages that it was impossible for most to imagine the Wild West without such sounds as accompaniment. Genre aside, though, and in trying to simplify such a complicated career, basically, I would say: if Morricone wrote it, it's worth listening to, over and over again. By 2007, when he finally won an Honorary Oscar, I had been predicting such a win for two of three years. It was long overdue, and when it happened, Eastwood was there with him. I only wish Leone could have been there, too (he died in 1989, way too early). 

This song, "A Gringo Like Me," is one of his many masterpieces. It's included in all the compiled overviews of his work, even though I would posit that .0001 of even the informed audience has seen the film it hails from (I haven't seen it either, I should say). But it's historically significant to a ridiculous degree. This main theme to Ricardo Blasco's 1963 film Duello nel Texas, later released as Gunfight at Red Sands and featuring Richard Harrison as Ricardo "Gringo" Martinez, represents Morricone's very first foray into the Western genre, and the first steps into his redefining of it. Morricone contributed to more Italian westerns and crime movies than I could ever attempt to see. Even so, always when I'm watching a film that's new to me, and from wherever in the world, I will hear an odd, burpy FLURR-FLURRRP or a strangely flutey FA-FLEEDLE-DEE-DEEEE, or a bizarre, life-affirming vocal cue ethereally intoning "OOOOH OOH WAAOOO WAAAOOOWAA" or a periodically low-toned "HOEWWUPP!, and I will comment "Is this a Morricone score?!" and sure enough, it turns out to be so. And I am delighted. Time and time, I am reminded of Morricone's work while I'm watching a film, and I comment so quickly to myself "Well, Ennio is here and all is well," because his presence enlivened everything he touched.

But Gunfight at Red Sands is his first, at least in the western genre. It's hard to imagine this as being initial the brick in such a monumental path that led to The Good The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in America. And it makes me wonder how many great tunes he scored. I mean, seriously, it must be in the hundreds. I don't immediately have the name of the lyric writer at hand (Jose Hierro is as close as I can get). But the composer--with that absolutely amazing buildup to the vocals--is definitely Morricone, and he definitely changed the way we hear the world. The boldly superb vocalist, by the way, is Peter Tevis.



Keep your hand on your gun
Don't you trust anyone
There's just one kind of man that you can trust
That's a dead man
Or a gringo like me

Be the first one to fire
Every man is a liar
There's just one kind of man who tells the truth
That's a dead man
Or a gringo like me

Don't be a fool for a smile or a kiss
Or your bullet might miss
Keep your eye on your goal

There's just one rule that can save you your life
That's a hand on your knife
And the devil in your soul

Keep your hand on your gun
Don't you trust anyone
There's just one kind of man that you can trust
That's a dead man
Or a gringo like me

Keep your hand on your gun
Don't you trust anyone
There's just one kind of man that you can trust
That's a dead man
Or a gringo like me
Or a gringo like me
Or a gringo like me
Like me