A mysterious stranger with a harmonica joins forces with
a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin
working for the railroad.
By Remy Dean
November 26, 2018
The opening 20-minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West
are utterly absorbing and a near perfect slice of cinema. To begin with, we’re
presented with a rich composition of textures: rude wooden walls and shutters,
a chalkboard declaring delayed train times, the Station Agent’s wizened face,
leather boots, canvas duster coat, the polished stock of a well-used rifle, the
strong features of Woody Strode, recognisable from a run of John Ford westerns
including Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance (1962). He’s soon joined by two other familiar figures who
are momentarily framed within the frame by doorways, backlit by desert glare.
Jack Elam had appeared in numerous westerns including classics like Rawhide (1951),
High Noon, and Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) — usually as a baddie, sometimes
as a comedic sidekick. Al Mulock, who was a prolific Italian B Movie actor, had
played a bounty hunter in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. After being a bit
sinister, and menacing the elderly Station Agent’s canary and the cleaning
woman (a cameo for Woody Strode’s wife), this grimy and very consciously cast
trio wait on the sun-drenched platform for the delayed train.
This is an inspired and beautifully crafted sequence,
devised and storyboarded by Dario Argento, and is still studied in film and
media classes to this day. We are treated to wide shots with incredible depth
of focus that often place two figures (one huge and one tiny) into a landscape,
intercut with extreme close-ups of what could be called ‘face-scapes’ that had
been established as a Leone ‘trademark’ in the Dollars Trilogy. The sequence
contains clear visual quotes from The Iron Horse and references a similar scene
in High Noon when three men wait at a station for a train and the confrontation
it will bring.
Although Leone had once again hired his former
school-friend and movie music maestro, Ennio Morricone, to compose what is
another brilliant musical score, his characteristic Spaghetti Western music is
conspicuously absent from this opening sequence. Instead, the soundscape is
provided by an ingenious arrangement of natural sounds: first the rhythms of a
squeaky wind-pump and clicking telegraph machine, then water dripping from the
storage tower onto Strode’s head, until he replaces his hat and anticipates the
cool drink that it will gradually collect. Mulock dabbles his fingers in the
horse trough and cracks his knuckles. These two references to water are
important clues, but their meaning only becomes apparent much later.
There is the intermittent buzz of a fly annoying Elam
until, with crack-shot precision, he traps it in the barrel of his pistol and
then enjoys its more subdued whine from within. Finally, the found sound
overture closes with the chuffs, squeals and clanks of the train as it slows to
a halt. The three gunslingers stand poised, clearly prepared to dispatch
whoever it is they have been waiting for the moment they alight from their
carriage. But no one does. As the train pulls away again, the three men turn to
leave but are stopped in their tracks by the mournful strains of harmonica
music and as the last carriage is drawn aside, a lone figure is revealed. I
mean, what an entrance!
This ‘Man With No Name’ is played by Charles Bronson, who
was already a well-established actor known for Westerns and war films and had
recently starred in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967). He’d been Leone’s
second choice to play the lead in A Fistful of Dollars, after Henry Fonda! Both
turned him down, as did James Coburn, forcing him to settle for the young and
relatively unknown TV actor, Clint Eastwood! This time around, he managed to
nab both Fonda and Bronson, and Coburn would star in his follow-up, A Fistful
of Dynamite (a.k.a Duck, You Sucker).
We’re more than 10-minutes in and, apart from the Station
Agent attempting to sell the three gunmen some train tickets, there has been no
dialogue. Even now, much of the interaction is through stares and changing
expressions as all the men try to get the measure of this stranger they’ve been
sent to meet and presumably murder. But when it comes, the dialogue is worth
waiting for and, in pure Leone-style, it’s at once both humorous and menacing.
“You brought a horse for me?” Bronson asks. Elam chuckles “looks like we’re shy
of one horse.” With a cool, almost imperceptible shake of the head and in
extreme, pore-revealing close-up Bronson says, “You brought two too many…” and
after the assuredly slow-paced build it’s all over in seconds. Violence as
short and sharp as a gunshot. Only one man walks away from the exchange.
Bronson plays his nameless mystery man with more solemnity than Eastwood’s, but
he’s still stoically super-cool and at times hints at a supernatural force that
Eastwood himself would personify in his self-directed lone avenger story, High
Plains Drifter (1971).
We spend the next 10-minutes or so being introduced to
the McBain family, as they prepare a celebration feast on their gingham-draped
tables in front of a rather impressive ranch-house built from sturdy
lumber — just one of the film’s magnificent sets designed by Carlo Simi, who
also worked on all three Dollars movies. Brett McBain (Frank Wolff) deals out
some old-school kid-slapping but also shows some affection to his three children
and when he witnesses his daughter drop at the crack of a gunshot, he’s
suitably distraught and ineffectually heroic as he and his eldest son are also
shot dead.
From the dusty wilderness, a gang of gunmen emerge dressed in the long duster coats that seem ubiquitous in Leone Westerns — but pay attention, an important plot point hangs on them here. As the gang approach the ranch house, little Timmy (Enzo Santaniello), the youngest McBain, runs out to see the rest of his family lying dead in the dust. We don’t know it at the time, but this is a poetic re-enactment of another character’s backstory. Then we get another of the film’s early reveals.
As dramatic guitar chords ring out, the camera curves
round to give us the first close-up of this monster who’s just killed the
little boy’s father, brother, and sister… and lo, it’s none other than Henry
Fonda, his laughing blue eyes twinkling in the shadow under the brim of his
black hat. The intensity of the scene, aided by Morricone’s emotive score
becomes almost unbearable until Frank’s evil is confirmed beyond doubt with a
gunshot edit. So far, most of the characters we have spent any time with have
died within minutes — clearly, nobody is safe in this movie.
Sergio Leone once said:
…the rhythm of
the film was intended to create the sensation of the last gasp that a person
takes just before dying. Once Upon a Time in the West was, from start to
finish, a dance of death, all of the characters in the film, except Claudia are
conscious of the fact they will not arrive at the end alive…”
It’s a fine quote that, although slightly misleading (and
I’m not saying how so), has been used in subsequent marketing. Which brings us
to the leading lady, Claudia Cardinale.
It was Bernardo Bertolucci who wrote in the character of
Jill McBain and, after overcoming some resistance from Leone, worked her into
the central role and rearranged the plot around her. Leone was reluctant to
feature a female character so prominently, partly because he hadn’t directed a
strong female lead, and perhaps feared it may detract from his tried-and-tested
formula of intense macho menace. The women in his Dollars Trilogy had been
little more than plot devices to move things along, but Jill McBain is central
to the entire narrative which only really kicks off when she arrives in the
frontier town of Flagstone. Apparently, the cost of building the Flagstone set
was greater than the entire budget for A Fistful of Dollars and Leone uses it
to great effect, first revealing it during an ingenious, uncut sequence that
involves some carefully planned tracking, and an audacious crane shot…
We soon learn that Jill’s an ex-prostitute who Brett
McBain met in New Orleans and had offered her a new life with his ‘ready-made’
family after his first wife died. However, when she turns up for what was to be
her wedding, she finds it is now a wake for her entire family-to-be. It’s
unclear whether she speaks the truth or simply thinks on her feet when she
explains that they were already legally married in New Orleans. The ranch now
falls to her but when she tries to sell it off, she begins to realise its
importance as a water-source positioned strategically in the path of the
approaching railroad.
Claudia Cardinale is superb in the lead role and this film wouldn’t have worked without her. She manages to balance aspects of the shrewd whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, the widow, the women in peril, and the matriarch in control. Clearly, she has a sexually-charged screen presence and the male characters are circling her like sharks throughout, but she’s not punished for being sexy. We feel the sense of threat she always endures, yet she remains courageously defiant and empowered. She is forced to use her charms to manipulate the men around her, but is strong enough to do this strategically, manages to stay alive and is as in control of her own destiny as any of the characters…
She forges links between the three male leads,
‘Harmonica’ (Charles Bronson), the bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards), and Frank
(Henry Fonda), who are, respectively, this film’s versions of the Good, the Bad
and the Ugly. She uses her powers to play them off against each other,
believing for part of the film at least, that Cheyenne is responsible for the
murder of her family but gradually learning the truth about each man and
finally being tragically attracted to ‘Harmonica’. As with much of the script,
the dialogue is often only implied through body language and facial expressions
and Cardinale totally nails this, adding a whole extra psychological dimension
to her character.
Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) resembles a James Bond
villain. He’s a powerful railroad magnate who’s as morally bankrupt as he’s
monetarily bank-rolled. Yet he’s physically weak, suffering from progressive
skeletal-tuberculosis and can’t freely move out of his specially adapted train
carriage. He’s obsessed with seeing his tracks connect the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts, spanning the continent and consolidating man’s control over the land.
Indeed, Ferzetti was to play crime boss Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service (1969) just a year later.
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