Giù La Testa (Duck, You Sucker!) [Original Soundtrack]

A sea change in the film world and the public’s shifting tastes left directors reckoning with the Death of the Wild West at the turn of the ’70s. And Sergio Leone’s final Western, the Mexican revolution epic Duck, You Sucker!, is scored by his joined-at-the-hip composer Morricone in a way that feels like Ennio’s last big dance with the genre. Touches of experimental eccentricity — like James Coburn’s character Sean having his name turned into a semi-percussive vocal motif, or the froggy schlep of “March of the Beggars” — mingle with the most elegiac compositions for a Western that he (or anyone else) had ever scored, including the thoroughly devastating “After the Explosion.”