The western classic Play Me the Song of Death is one of those films that already has become the best works ever in the first 15 minutes. The opening scene alone is enough, which electrifies you wordlessly and with bombastic visual power through the meeting of three mysterious gunslingers at the train station. And that is just the beginning…
If you haven’t seen Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod or want to watch it again, you have the opportunity to do so on Saturday evening at 10:00 p.m. on NDR. Cult director Quentin Tarantino also loves Sergio Leone’s film.
Tarantino wrote a declaration of love to Play Me the Song of Death director
According to IndieWire, the director wrote the foreword for the book Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece. In it he explains, among other things, that he Leone for the greatest Italian director of all time holds:
I would even say that he is the best combination of a complete film stylist who creates his own world and a storyteller. The two are almost never combined. To be a great stylist like him and to create this operatic world and to do it within a genre and to respect the rules of the genre and at the same time keep breaking the rules – he gives you a wonderful Western.
Tarantino also makes no secret of the fact that he himself was heavily inspired by the style of the director’s A Song of Death. He later collaborated with Leone’s brilliant composer Ennio Morricone himself on his own films such as The Hateful 8.
With long, quiet camera shots full of epic wide angle shots and the equally brutal and tragic revenge story, Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod is not only a western milestone, but clearly one of the best films ever. Tarantino quite rightly loves him more than anything.
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