The Whore, the
Killer, the Revenger and the Tramp
50 Years ago in
the West
By Didier Thunus
I’m probably not the only one for whom Once Upon a Time
in the West played a major role
in the passion that I developed for Leone’s cinema and
for Morricone’s music. Yet it took very
long for me to see the movie. For some reason, it was
never on TV, and in that time, it wasn’t
as easy as
today to see
all the movies
you wanted to see
especially if you
lived in a
small village far from movie theatres. You had to fall back on other,
less satisfactory, options. If like me you are from Belgium or France and old
enough for having lived through the seventies, youp robably remember the famous
French TV show aired on Sundays on TF1 called “La sequence du spectateur”: 3
times 10 minutes from movies of all sorts. West was in it about once a year,
and this was the sole opportunity for me to see parts of that film. I was
eagerly waiting for the final duel scene to show up again, and was glued to my
seat whenever it did. This long wait and frustration, this never ending period
of longing for more developed in me a holy grail kind of aching. A young
teenager acquiring his
sensitivity to art
and beauty was
an easy target.
For more than a decade, I was seeing only the tip of the iceberg. It
alone was already captivating me, and I knew there was a whole submerged part still to
be uncovered.
Dilatation of Time
When you see Once
Upon a Time
in the West, you
understand what Sergio
Leone had in mind
since the beginning.
You realize that with the Dollars trilogy, he was only warming
up. Those three
earlier movies may be masterpieces
in their own right,
they do not
showcase the director’s intent as well as his fourth
western of 1968. The latter surpasses its predecessors both in themes and
in style. The
three Clint Eastwood vehicles
were certainly already very
innovative, but they often made use of tricks
and techniques that
are known to “work”,
in order to
preserve the appeal, such
as cavalcades, twists
in the plots,
emphasized cruelty. It still made concessions to the
viewers, as if the director did not dare yet to be fully himself. Now we know
he had another purpose: Once Upon a Time
in the West is
the slowest of the
movies. Its story could have resulted in a 1 hour clear cut
film, but what
mattered to Sergio Leone
was to make
a deep, lasting impression on
the spectators. By slowing down his narrative, he amplified
the impact of his message. The film doesn’t only have the longest opening
credits in the history of cinema, it has the longest everything. There are some
shootings throughout the movie, some
scenes of tension,
but the film develops at a pace that is barely
bearable by the average audience.
After the opening train
station scene and McBain’s
family massacre, and before
the final showdown, there is not
so much happening. Not everybody is
a cinema expert
or a fan of clever
filmmaking who can appreciate the smartness
of a camera
angle or the
quality of the editing. The scenes where Jill searches McBain’s
house or where
Frank speaks to Morton
could have been downright boring.
Somehow, there is still enough
to keep the
spectators on tiptoes.
The development
of the characters,
the mystery around their
intentions, the enigmatic flashbacks...
The scene where Cheyenne is
killing Frank’s men
one after the other from the
rooftop of a train where Harmonica
is kept prisoner, is a smart one in that respect. It
is like Leone was saying: ok it is very slow, but bear with me, you’ll
see, it’s gonna
be fun, you
won’t regret it. However
it is only
when Frank will
ride back to Sweetwater
in order to
face Harmonica for the final confrontation, that we are
able to measure
the distance travelled. We are now holding our breath and can’t wait for the denouement. The
term “dilatation of time” has often been used for characterizing this movie.
The film is like a rope for which the strong beginning and the
formidable ending make
up the handles, hard
and inflexible, whereas the rest
of the movie makes up the braided wire in
between, bendable and
soft. The two handles can be
moved close to each other at will, as if there was nothing in between. Yet
there is something,
something without which you
don’t have a rope anymore, and its
intertwined laces are
unbreakable. The fact that the
movie lasts almost three hours is a
purely practical fact.
In reality, Leone managed
to rub out the duration of his picture.
A Multi Layered
Screenplay
Actually, what
Sergio Leone really
had in mind after The
Good, the Bad
and the Ugly, was already the
project that ended up being Once
Upon a Time
in America. If his filmography
looks pretty neat
with its two trilogies the
“Dollars” trilogy and the “Once
Upon a Time”
trilogy neither of them was
premeditated. They both resulted from
the changing dispositions of
the producers. In 1968, Leone had no choice but make yet another
western. So he reluctantly headed to the Spanish Sierra Nevada again and to the
US to shoot it, but with a bigger budget, with American stars, and determined
to give it its
own uncompromising touch thanks
to the freedom he could now enjoy. The screenplay, originally written with
Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento,
was then reworked
with Sergio Donati, finally
credited after having worked in the shadow
for Leone’s second
western For a Few Dollars More. However I can’t help seeing Bertolucci’s
touch in the most quirky turns of the story, such as the ambiguity around
Jill’s rape by Frank. The director of Last Tango in Paris or La luna was a specialist of
abstruse relationships between
man and woman. The contribution of Mickey
Knox, author of the dialogues should not be underestimated either.
It is worth noting that the Italian title of the movie
C’era una volta
il West actually means “Once Upon a Time, the West”. So Leone did
not intend to
depict a singular story somewhere
in the Wild
West, but to portray
the West itself its whole story. When he
shoots a scene
inside Monument Valley, like
John Ford did
before him, he means
it not to
be merely a
beautiful landscape for a given scene, but to represent an allegory of
the Far West. Flagstone and Sweetwater
(the two cities
or would be cities between which
his characters travel in that scene) are imaginary, so why would the
landscape between them
be the real Monument Valley we all know. It isn’t.
It is just a parable
that speaks to
our subconscious. The characters are not simply a bunch
of people that happened
to have been involved
in the same
story: they represent the
passing from a
period where people had to fight
for their lives by means of their physical strength, defending values such as
family, country, traditions,
belief, justice, to a time that will be dominated by ruthless
businessmen, where the only value that prevails is money. Except for Morton,
the businessman in question,
all the main protagonists belong
to the “obsolete” category. Those who will survive
are those who will be able to cope with the new state of things:
Jill because she is smart
enough to adapt, and
Harmonica because he has understood what was going on and can
take the necessary distance.
Frank himself admits that
he is not
able to become
a businessman even though
he believes that this would
be the smartest
way to go;
and Cheyenne is an outlaw, killed by Morton in a symbolistic
turn of the
plot not shown on screen,
as if the
murder itself didn’t matter much:
only its metaphor
does. Morton himself dies,
but as said
by Harmonic a towards the
end of the
movie, there will be
other Mortons to come and take
over.
But maybe Harmonica
did not survive actually. Indeed, in
the original director’s cut, Bronson’s character takes a
bullet at the beginning of the movie by one of the three characters just
before the latter
dies. The short scene where
Harmonica recovers and gets up was
not present in
the original European cut: it was
added to the American one and more
recently to all
editions that claim to
be complete. Later in
the movie, when Frank asks him
who he is, Harmonica keeps answering with names of dead people.
Symbolically again, Leone
might have meant that
Harmonica was Frank’s nemesis: not
a real character,
just a metaphor for the
fact that a
character like Frank cannot
survive the paradigm shift that is taking place.We must also mention the
omnipresence of the water element,
not noticeable by the
ordinary viewer, yet
obvious if you
pay attention to it. Water is the very reason why McBain wants to build
a town at that place, which he would call Sweetwater, naturally, so Leone
and its screenwriters have extrapolated around
the topic in
all its forms: Jill’s baths,
Cheyenne’s coffees, the wash house where
Harmonica tortures Wobbles, the
drops falling on
Woody Strode’s hat which he eventually drinks, the painting in Morton’s
train and his will to go from one ocean to the other, Cheyenne’s toilet
flushing when going in and out of the train
via the water closet,
Morton’s death with his
head in a
puddle, the well
from which McBain’s
witnesses his daughter’s death and
from which Jill
pulls water for Harmonica, the
water she brings
to the workers at the end,
and so many
more examples. It cannot simply be a coincidence.
Unconsciously, this creates
a sense of fluidity, a sense
of transparency, which impacts the perception of the movie by
the viewers. This kind of
details proves how high the maturity of the screenplay is. The movie is not a classic by
chance.
Dawn of the West
It was said that the box office failure in the US
was due
to the fact that
Henry Fonda was cast as a villain, an
inconceivable fact for the American
movie goers. But why would that be
conceivable at all
for the Europeans or
the Japanese, who
made the same movie an instant
success? They are also movie fans
who were used to see Fonda play the law abiding good guy. That failure was more
likely due to cultural reasons: the Americans
did not have
their Sam Peckinpah yet, author
of the first American crepuscular
westerns, soon followed
by those of Clint Eastwood himself. Both were following the footsteps of the Italian master, but were
able to make it in a way that was acceptable for their fellow country (wo)men. In 1968,
America was still considering the movies as pure entertainment or at best as an opportunity
to address social concerns,
and was waiting for Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn or
Francis Ford Coppola to shake this all up. Europe in the second
half of the 20th century, in contrast, was already the cradle of a
number of revolutionary movements in the cinema, such as neo-realism in Italy,
or the Nouvelle Vague in France.
A Character Themed
Score
There are not enough superlatives to qualify Ennio
Morricone’s score to Once Upon a
Time in the West. It is considered the best movie soundtrack ever by
many, and that includes myself of course. This is the
score in which Morricone’s character theme approach culminated, each of the
five main characters receiving a distinctive theme. Just like in The Mission
where the choice of
the main instrument (the
oboe) was dictated by the screenplay, the harmonica plays here a major diegetic and non-diegetic role,
associated to Charles Bronson’s character.
Normally a popular instrument generally used as a
light counterpoint, it receives here the singular stature of a
carrier of death. Bronson’s theme is a simple three note motive usually played
by the character on screen, which then
develops into a complex cue intertwined with
Frank’s theme to form the Man with the Harmonica piece. Frank’s melody is more pastoral, often played by the English horn or by brass instruments.
But inside the Harmonica piece, it
is ascribed
to an extremely amplified electric guitar. No one
else than Morricone dared to
exaggerate an effect this much, to a point that
it becomes the
most striking element of the movie when it bursts into the loudspeakers.
And no one else than Leone allowed
his composer to go this
far and steal the scene.
It was a very clever
move to merge Harmonica’s and Frank’s
themes, accentuating the
strong connection between the two men. In the second part of the piece,
a new theme develops played by strings
and full chorus. Glorious, captivating and fabulous, it reaches the highest
degree of magnificence The mix
of Franck’s and Harmonica’s themes first appears at the
end of the massacre of the McBain family, when Frank and his men emerge from
the bushes.
The presence of the harmonica in this scene is
questionable however, because Bronson’s character is not
around. And it seems indeed that the original intention
was not to use
the harmonica there:
the piece called Il grande massacre on the expanded CD is
a version of
the theme deprived
of that instrument. It is very likely that Leone was unsatisfied with
that initial version and found that the
full version had a much stronger
impact. Therefore the film version
is a collage of the timpani roll followed by a fragment
from L’uomo dell’armonica,
seguing into the
finale from Il grande massacro. He was right: it made the
scene a classic moment of cinema, and the awkward presence of
the harmonica has
never annoyed anyone.
Both Jill and
Cheyenne also famously received their
own respective themes:
a wonderful vocal by
Edda Dell’Orso embodies both
the femininity and
the larger than life epic which
Claudia Cardinale’s character is going through, and a laid back
folk tune follows
the deeds of Jason
Robards’ tramp like personification. A fifth
theme has been
conceived for Morton,
capturing both the
ambitions and the fragility of
the businessman.
It looks simple at first sight: five characters, five
themes. But if you look at it a bit closer, you’ll realize
that the architecture
of the score is much more complex
than it appears. Frank’s theme, for
example, can emerge when Frank
is not around.
But is it
when Harmonica is around, confirming the
link between the two characters? Well, not even: it is heard once when
Jill is alone. Is this a departure
from the perfectionism
of the Leone Morricone pair, or
should we find a justification elsewhere? My
feeling is that not
only the characters
are allegoric: the music
also is. Frank’s
theme not only characterizes the man,
it portrays a
feeling of melancholy: things could be great in this new world,
but there are
killers and there will be blood. So you will never be
able to fully and carelessly embrace your new life. When played
in a suspense
mode (cf. L’uomo), it’s
telling you that the danger in question is
imminent. And when played by the
distorted guitar, it
is an explosion
of violence and sadism, the allegory of a world where a
whole family, including
young children, can be assassinated, where killing a man can become
a sadistic game that will mark the survivors ever after.
Harmonica’s simple motive
is an allegory of the agony: on the first degree it
amplifies the breathing of
a boy whose brother
is about to die, and later of his dying killer; on a more general level
it represents the agony of the Old West, and also the agony of the
American western – a theme
which Leone will exploit
further in Il mio
nome è Nessuno five years later,
again with Fonda and with an
additional layer as Leone will humbly
portray the agony
of his own western-style, making room for parodies.
Jill’s theme is
the allegory of
love, of the place of the woman in
this new world,
a woman who is fed up of only being a wife or a whore and now wants a
place of choice. Morricone saw it as the embodiment of the whole film as he
gave it the C’era una volta il West title. Morton’s theme is a metaphor of the dream and
of the fact
that the end justifies the
means. Finally, Cheyenne’s theme
symbolizes the man on the street, the normal
person, and in the end: us, the audience.
We see that the
music is not
only an illustration of the
director’s intent,
it is a prolongation of
it, it adds
concepts which are not portrayed
explicit ly by the images.
Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone were 40. They were at
the peak of
their respective
careers. They had
been to school
together and now they
were changing the
face of
cinema and music for ever.
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