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 performances are all superb, even when verging on the
expressionistic. Admittedly, this arises from masterful casting. I mean Henry
Fonda just has to play his own ‘evil twin’, albeit with some nice new nuances.
Bronson has to maintain a granite exterior and seem detached from pretty much
everything except his enigmatic quest, giving very little away. He may not be
the most versatile actor, but I think his restraint here makes this his best
performance and it defines the single-minded tough-guy persona he would
continue to exploit through the 1970s.
Cheyenne could easily have veered into either broad
comedy or pantomime villainy, but Jason Robards humanises his character as a
loveable rogue and imbues him with pathos. Interestingly, Robards was to star
in another post-modern western about a water source and the passing of an era,
Sam Peckinpah’s partly pretentious broad comedy The Ballad of Cable Hogue
(1970), in which he plays a luckless hobo who accidentally discovers a desert
spring and builds a trading post and way station on the site.
The unusual dual narrative structure can be confusing and
does fall apart a little in the middle, but really it’s this along with perfect
pacing, and Leone’s inimitable visual flair, that has made Once Upon a Time in
the West the enduring classic it’s become. It’s the stylistic culmination of
everything that made the Dollars Trilogy stand out: the extreme close-ups in
unforgiving widescreen, the striking innovation of the double close-ups and the
deep-deep focus (all realised with the help of Tonino Delli Colli’s clever
cinematography), the assured pacing that hits the beat of a scene so perfectly
that it never drags nor bores, even when there’s very little happening. And the
essential contribution of Morricone’s distinctive music can’t be overstated.
The final act builds inexorably to a more than satisfying denouement and the
full explanation of Harmonica’s motivation, told in a cleverly shared flashback
sequence, is emotionally devastating.
The magic of Once Upon a Time in the West is how Leone
managed to capture the essence of those classic Westerns that had enchanted him
as a boy and cast the same spell over a modern audience. For all its brutality,
violence, and pessimism, it retains a sense of glee and an almost fetishistic
fascination with all the regalia of the Old West; the livery, the barrels, the
trigger guards, boot buckles, bustles, buttons, and bows. Those kinds of
details are all celebrated. And there’s that Italian flippancy and sense of fun
that pervaded its pulp cinema through the 1960s and ’70s. For example, keep a
lookout during the protracted shootout between Frank and his unloyal henchmen
for a super-clever High Noon-inspired visual joke when the shadow of a sniper’s
rifle extends down the painted face of an unfinished clock that has no hands
fitted, creating the illusion of the clock striking noon.
After completing the principal photography in
Spain — which, for the final scenes, involved laying functional railway track,
moving a mountain (well, actually a sandy hill more like a dune), and trucking
in a full-size steam locomotive to be craned onto those tracks — Leone went the
extra distance, literally, and finished up with location filming in the US. He
wanted to capture some of the expansive establishing shots in the famous
Monument Valley, Arizona, to place the story more definitely in Wild West
territory. One suspects what he really wanted was to visit those distinctive
locations that John Ford had adopted into his iconography — to finally break
that fourth fantastical wall and walk in the footsteps of his childhood heroes.
At 175-minutes, the original cut was deemed too long.
Leone agreed and did some trimming here and there, but the distributors chopped
a further half-hour off the US print, which included the key scene that
introduced Cheyenne, established a rapport between him and ‘Harmonica’, and
set-up a key plot point. They also trimmed some of the more protracted death
scenes and excised the death of one main character entirely! Not surprisingly,
it didn’t perform well at the box office and struggled to recoup its $5M
budget. By contrast, the international theatrical release did very well in
Europe, where it ranked as 1969’s most popular film in France and Germany and
made the all-time Top 10 in both countries. A restored print of 165-minutes was
given a successful re-run in 1984 and subsequently released on home video.
There have been various versions available on DVD and now Blu-ray, but the
159-minute cut is generally accepted as the original.
Critically, it’s close to perfection and deserves its
ranking in many greatest films of all-time lists. In 2009, the Library of
Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film
Registry, recognising it as “culturally, historically or aesthetically
significant.” Once Upon a Time in the West formed the first part of what Leone
was to refer to as his ‘Once Upon a Time Trilogy’, which continued with Duck,
You Sucker and concluded with the director’s final feature Once Upon a Time in
America (1984). It’s hard to believe that, apart from his debut, The Colossus
of Rhodes, these two trilogies represent Sergio Leone’s entire output as a film
director, and yet there’s no denying his importance and resounding influence. A
fine example of quality over quantity.
In memory of
writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci — 16 March 1941–26 November 2018.
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