
Paramount Pictures
“Failure can be forgiven but success will always be punished.”
– Sergio Leone
In 1966, Sergio Leone completed The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly to critical and commercial acclaim for United Artists.
The film was the grandest, most expensive, and best European Western ever filmed to that point and, with it, Leone believed it was time to move on from the genre. The director had fallen in love with Harry Grey’s The Hoods, a fictional account of the rise and fall of Jewish gangsters in New York City over several decades and shopped the project to every studio in Hollywood. Paramount tentatively agreed to finance Leone on a project of his choosing…so long as he provided them with another Western first.
Leone holed himself up at his home with then aspiring filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento and binged on classical American westerns. The Dollars films had been rollicking adventures stuffed with plots and subplots, but this new film was envisioned almost as a postmodern exercise– it would be entirely constructed entirely out of references to classic Hollywood westerns. This was combined with a meditative, almost hypnotically patient build to quick bursts of violence to create a western that no one had ever seen before in 1968…and no one has tried to replicate since.
Once Upon a Time in the West revolves around four main characters who all orbit around the railroad like a solar system: Henry Fonda plays Frank, a psychopathic gunman working as a troubleshooter for a ruthless railroad tycoon; Jason Robards plays Cheyenne, a honorable bandit who Frank has framed for the massacre of an entire family; Claudia Cardinale plays Jill, a young woman with a sordid past who came out to the West to start a new life and found the family she had hastily married into dead; and finally Charles Bronson plays Harmonica, a haunting drifter who is stalking Frank for reasons he will only divulge at the point of dying.
From the opening moments, Leone is determined not to simply repeat the formula of his earlier successes. Consider how each Dollars film begins with a rollicking title song from composer Ennio Morricone (who returns here to great effect) but here the film opens with nearly ten minutes of nothing but diegetic sounds as three killers mysteriously await the arrival of their target on the next train. As the train disembarks, they begin to leave before the haunting refrain of Bronson’s Harmonica is heard and it’s almost like the film has arrived into the world by magic.
Speaking of Harmonica, it’s tempting to see him as a continuation of Eastwood’s sardonic, tight-lipped hero in Leone’s earlier films but he’s both more and less human than The Man with No Name: he’s clipped in the opening gunfight by a dying man’s shot and declines several times to jump into a fight, but he’s always, sometimes seemingly supernaturally, present where he needs to be and his silence is so deeply personal that the idea of money motivating him is ridiculous. That said, in their final moments, Harmonica betrays a kind of final respect for Frank that we could never imagine Eastwood showing for Ramon, Indio, or Angel Eyes– all of whom were simply madmen who had to be overcome.
For a film that was conceived as primarily referential to classic American westerns it feels like its own animal entirely with a pace that’s almost Japanese, and a set of circular mystery plots all surrounding Henry Fonda’s Frank and his massacre of the McBain family. This question sits inside the larger mystery, like the action sits inside long suspenseful silences, of why exactly Harmonica is after Frank like a set of Russian nesting dolls and is expertly paid off in the final act.
All of that being said, the soul of the film is Claudia Cardinale’s Jill– the most human of the four leads and the one who represents both the inevitable taming effect of civilization and the audience itself. Jill is tough, gorgeous, worldly, and a fish out of water. She impulsively married a mad Irishman who fell in love with her while she was working in a New Orleans brothel. She seemingly caught the bug of madness, like an STD, and married him on the spot and arrived in the West to find a dead family and a trio of hard men whom she can barely understand.
Extras include two commentary tracks, featurettes, and trailer.
Once Upon a Time in the West is one of those films that feels alchemical, magical, and ethereal. It is a perfect union of picture and sound (Morricone fully embraces his Wagner influence with an entire score that’s composed of variations of four leitmotifs) and a haunting yearning nostalgia for an imagined past of cruelty married to honor, to be juxtaposed by businessmen who hired others for the former, because they were incapable of the latter. It has never seemed to me to be outwardly political but that didn’t stop it from being read as such by student rioters in France and Italy where the film ran for years. It remains untouched by the world– an artifact of the fantasies of childhood reinterpreted by an artist at the peak of his powers and transformed into a secret coda– one that we can only say, as Cheyenne does about Harmonica in the finale, “has something to do with death”.
Highest Recommendation.


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