[Sergio Leone always did things extra big. For his
opening sequence at the train station, he ordered a football field-sized
platform of railroad ties, stacked end to end (shown). While he and a sound
tech were taping the sound of the creaky windmill, one assistant allegedly
said, “We should put some oil on those gears.” Leone replied, “If you touch it,
I will strangle you!” –All Once Upon a Time in the West images courtesy
Paramount Pictures].
True West Magazine
By Bob Boze Bell
January 24, 2017
The classic opening scene that Sergio Leone called the “summa” of his career was ambitious and complicated, and it wasn’t the easiest of shoots. With three successful Westerns under his belt, Leone had big plans for the fourth.
“I wanted to say farewell to the three characters from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and to do so in style…. So I hoped that the
three pistoleri who are killed by Charlie Bronson at the beginning of Once Upon
a Time in the West would be Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach. The
other two agreed, but Clint was the only one who didn’t want to do it—so there
wasn’t any point in using Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach. It wasn’t a question
of expense—he just couldn’t see the funny side of it…,” said Leone, the
legendary Italian director who crafted the so-called Dollar trilogy that made
Eastwood an international star.
Duster Mania
“The dusters were a mania of [Sergio’s], and they became
a mania of the time as well,” said Carlo Simi, production designer. “We went to
look at costumes at Western Costume in California, and we happened to find
these beautiful dusters, which were dustcoats for riding. They had also been
shown in the film by John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in the
flashback. They were white, so we changed them to chocolate brown. Before we
changed them, they looked like they were worn by ice cream vendors.”
A Hollywood production keeps extra costumes around as
insurance. When Eastwood showed up in Spain for his first assignment, 1967’s A
Fistful of Dollars, he was somewhat amused that the main actors didn’t have
duplicate costumes: two hats, two vests, two pairs of pants, because a vest
might get torn in a fight scene, or a hat run over by a train during a take.
Not so with the Italians. As we shall see, this costume arrangement gets pretty
bizarre by the end of shooting the opening for
Once Upon a Time in the West.
[Desperadoes
Waiting for a Train portrays the movie in Sergio Leone’s mind: Charles Bronson
breaks the lengthy period of waiting in the opening sequence to shoot down
(from left) Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood. – All illustrations
by Bob Boze Bell]
Dead On Arrival
The movie’s opening sequence portrays three gunmen
waiting at a train station: Stony (played by Woody Strode), Snaky (Jack Elam)
and Knuckles (Al Mulock).
Toward the end of the four-day shoot, Mulock jumped,
while wearing his costume, from the balcony of his hotel room in Guadix,
Granada, Spain; a crew member saw him fall past the second or third floor of
the hotel before he hit the street. Before the actor got taken away in an
ambulance, Leone shouted, “Get the costume; we need the costume!”
During the bumpy ride to the hospital, Mulock’s broken
rib pierced his lung, and he died. To finish the shoot, Leone outfitted a crew
member in Mulock’s costume. In several of the iconic shots of the trio standing
on the platform, you can see Knuckles looks a little off.
No one knows why 41-year-old Mulock committed suicide.
Born in Toronto to one of the wealthiest families in Canada, Mulock studied
with Lee Strasberg and later started, with David de Keyser, the London Studio,
which taught ‘’The Method’’ to British actors. His film and TV credits included
projects that ranged from 1967’s Hellbenders to 1959’s Tarzan’s Greatest
Adventure and 1965’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors to 1966’s Lost Command.
One crew member claimed Mulock was a drug addict who
jumped to his death out of desperation, because he couldn’t acquire drugs in
the isolated filming location.
[illustration by Bob Boze Bell]
The Sounds of
Silence
As for the squeaky windmill, Leone got the idea to
include the natural sound from film composer Ennio Morricone, who told him:
“I’d been, some time before, to a concert in Florence where a man came onto the
stage and began in complete silence to take a stepladder and make it creak and
squeak. This went on for several minutes and the audience had no idea what it
was supposed to mean.
“But in the silence the squeaking of this stepladder
became something else, and the philosophical argument of this experiment was
that a sound, any sound at all from normal everyday life—isolated from its
context and its natural place and isolated by silence—becomes something
different that is not part of its real nature.”
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