A few years ago, the Film Forum was running a Spaghetti Western festival. Ethan and I went to a bunch of them. Which meant that we spent a lot of time sitting in the theaters, between showings, seeing the inter-movie sequence. Featured prominently was this song, the theme from Gunfight at Red Sands.
I saw it enough times that it worked its way into my brain.
And I started speculating about the lyrics. "There's just one kind of man who tells the truth, and that's a dead man." Well, dead men don't actually tell the truth; they simply don't lie." So I started wondering if the song had originally been written in Spanish or Italian, with the line being something like "There's just one kind of man who never lies, and that's a dead man."
I asked Keith Crocker, who's my go-to for questions about the film-making industry. He said it's most likely that the song was written in English and that line is simply that line.
I shouldn't really let it bother me. And I'd be a better songwriter if I could just let it go. Just like the way the song "Who Do You Love" annoys my ears because it should be "whom."
No comments:
Post a Comment