and rock music by 1972, Dylan had no formal musical training whatsoever and Fielding eventually backed out in frustration. Despite this, Fielding returned to score Peckinpah's surreal anti-Western, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). In this black comedy Fielding again expresses the despairing subtext and unspoken whimsy of his frequently inchoate collaborator, this time in a film whose exercise in futility seems a personal statement by Peckinpah indeed. "In many ways, Sam doesn't know what the hell he's talking about", Fielding said of the director, whom he considered a close friend. "In other ways, he's a fantastically gifted man." Fielding claimed the two used to sort out their differences in fist fights. Fielding had fruitful and rather less stressful relationships with two other leading 1970s action directors. For Michael Winner he demonstrated his versatility through six films, from the first jazz-tinged score for a Western in Lawman (1971) to the Gothic period melodrama The Nightcomers (1971), where Fielding delighted in creating a neo-Baroque orchestral score of which he was most proud. Winner would go on to team with Charles Bronson in Death Wish. His last film for Winner was the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, starring Robert Mitchum and considered a classic of 1970s neo-LA Noir. His collaboration with the famously jazz-loving Clint Eastwood began when Eastwood chose Fielding to compose the score to The Outlaw Josey Wales. Fielding presumably didn't know that the author of the original novel, Forrest Carter, was a Klansman and segregationist. Fielding, assuming he was scoring a popular young people's Western novel, researched and included Irish folk tunes from the Civil War, creating another newly explored direction for period films and winning his third and final Oscar nomination. On that Oscar night, Fielding was up against Jerry Goldsmith's The Omen, Lalo Schifrin's Voyage of the Damned, and the two final scores by his former hero in 1930s radio, prolific Hitchcock favorite Bernard Herrmann, for Scorsese's Taxi Driver and de Palma's Obsession. (Goldsmith won.) In his next two films for Eastwood, Fielding employed urban scores featuring living jazz musicians for The Enforcer (1976) and The Gauntlet (1977). Other notable scores were for Demon Seed (1977), that included electronic instruments and atonal passages; and The Bad News Bears (1976), inspired by the 19th century opera Carmen by French composer, Bizet. Funeral Home (1980) was the film he was scoring at the time of his