#569: Once Upon A Time in the West
Forget the Dollars Trilogy — this might be Sergio Leone’s greatest western
Initial release: December 20, 1968
Director: Sergio Leone
In the mid to late 1960s, Sergio Leone had made a name for himself on the strength of his so-called Dollars trilogy — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and, most especially, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. While the first film was a halting, uncertain thing, lifting heavily from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, by the second Leone had found his footing, and by the third he fully understood what he wanted to do as a filmmaker. Ugly is a cinematic tour-de-force, a whirling dervish about an unlikely partnership amidst one of the ugliest periods of American history. To this day Ugly is treated as the gold standard for how Westerns should be, at least when we’re not worshiping at the foot of 1950s American romanticism. But as good as it is, I think it was just a stepping stone on the way to what would be Leone’s greatest masterpiece: Once Upon A Time in the West.
Once Upon a Time in the West is a story about a lot of things. Revenge, redemption, cruelty, greed. Four people with checkered pasts happen to meet in the dusty town of Flagstone, an encounter that stands to make them either wealthy — or dead. Each one has their own baggage, their own cross to bear. It is the quintessential Western: a greedy baron making a land grab, an amoral mercenary doing the baron’s dirty work and then some, a gunslinging drifter with a grudge, a bandit with a heart of gold, and a fallen woman looking to build herself a future at any cost. There’s everything from train shootouts to high noon duels. But what this film really is, at its heart, is a story about hope. Jill is a prostitute from New Orleans, recently married to Brett McBain, an Irish immigrant who plans to build a watering station on the eventual path of the railroad about fifty miles from Flagstone. The land was worthless when he bought it — but he knew about the water underneath. His hope, then, was to not just build a new station — but to grow a town around it. And her hope was to build a new life, away from New Orleans. But when McBain and his children are murdered, she’s left to pick up the pieces — and greedy railroad tycoon Morton is not happy to hear that he can’t have the land yet. His hired gun and the doer of the dastardly deed, outlaw gang leader Frank, frames a fellow bandit named Cheyenne for the crime, but Cheyenne, for all he’s done, is adamant that he’s not the child-killing type. And in the midst of all this lurks a taciturn drifter known only as “Harmonica” who has his own grudge with Frank.
On the surface, sure, it’s practically a pastiche. But under Leone’s direction it’s transformed from a mere potboiler western to a human tragedy of redemption and simmering rage, of how hopes and dreams might be realized against the odds. With a primary cast of big names cast against type — Henry Fonda as a villain, anyone? — he throws these characters together, their every interaction uneasy, even dangerously tense. Claudia Cardinale might not be as commanding a screen presence as Fonda, or Jason Robards, or Charles Bronson, but she’s still convincingly tough, even as each of the men menace her in some way. Fonda leverages his reputation as a player of squeaky-clean heroes to play a sickly-sweet psychopath who’s just as happy murdering children as he is coercing women into sex in exchange for his not murdering them. Bronson is standing in for Clint Eastwood, who’d been offered the role but turned it down, but while Bronson does seem to have a lot of the mannerisms of Eastwood’s Man With No Name, he still brings his personal stamp that makes it more obviously his. (Though I think he more clearly develops his own western hero style in 1971’s Red Sun.) And lastly, Jason Robards as the bandit Cheyenne is perhaps the most human and likeable of the bunch, a wry, sardonic antihero who despite his criminal reputation is willing to do the right thing where it counts. And let’s be real here: I’ll watch anything with Jason Robards in it.
Of course, even with Leone in the director’s chair, equal credit must go to Ennio Morricone; Morricone has always been one of the great film composers, and his score for Once Upon a Time in the West is nothing short of a master work. Grief and triumph and bitter words are all punctuated, even emphasized, by his score; each primary character has their own leitmotif. It’s a beautiful, haunting score that’s up there with the funerary vibe of Robert Hossein’s Cemetery Without Crosses; it blends expertly with an incredible use of sound that makes the film feel more alive than almost any other western I’ve seen. That first scene, with the three gunmen (including Woody Strode) and no music whatsoever is so tense it almost sings, dead silent except for the constant squeak of the windmill and the buzz of lazy, heat-addled flies.
I’ve definitely mainlined a lot of westerns the last few months and to be quite honest with you while I have my favorites, which might not be most anyone else’s favorites, this is absolutely up there on the list for me, an almost-forgotten classic by the master. Sergio Leone understood the genre perhaps better than anyone else — why else would he film part of West in John Ford’s favorite shooting location of Monument Valley, Utah?
Once Upon a Time in the West was the kickstart to another loose trilogy by Leone, followed by what would be his last western, the Zapata Western Duck, You Sucker! (originally titled Once Upon a Time in the Revolution) and capped off by the mob drama Once Upon a Time in America. With these films, Leone sought to reflect an outsider’s perception of American myth-making and, perhaps, to understand America better. And what movie better represents that all-American belief in hope than Once Upon a Time in the West?
