Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West)

Director: Sergio Leone
Screenplay: Sergio Donati & Sergio Leone (story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, & Sergio Leone)
Stars: Henry Fonda (Frank), Claudia Cardinale (Jill McBain), Jason Robards (Manuel “Cheyenne” Gutierrez), Charles Bronson (Harmonica), Gabriele Ferzetti (Morton), Paolo Stoppa (Sam), Woody Strode (Stony), Jack Elam (Snaky), Keenan Wynn (Flagstone sheriff), Frank Wolff (Brett McBain), Lionel Stander (Barman)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 1968
Country: Italy / U.S.
Once Upon a Time in the West Blu-Ray
Once Upon a Time in the West

Director Sergio Leone did two things better than just about any other director before or since: shooting close-ups and choreographing memorable entrances for his characters. Those two skills, which are on impressive display in every feature-length film he ever made, were never so stunningly combined as in the revelation of the villain, Frank, in his masterpiece Once Upon a Time the West (C’era una volta il West).

The scene takes place near the beginning of the 165-minute western, and it begins with a homesteader family, the McBains, preparing a feast to celebrate the arrival of the widower father’s (Frank Wolff) new wife. The celebration is cut short, though, when bullets from unseen assailants take down every member of the family--father, daughter, and son. There is one son left, a 10-year-old boy who come scampering out of the house and is met with the grisly sight of his entire family dead on the ground, gunned down in cold blood. Then, the men emerge out of the brush, tall, hulking men in full-length leather dusters.

The camera slowly dollies around the leader, an imposing figure dressed all in black, and when it comes around to the front, we are given one of the great shocks in modern cinema: This ruthless killer is played by Henry Fonda, the longtime Hollywood leading man whose name up until that point had been virtually synonymous with upstanding characters of great moral integrity. This was Wyatt Earp from My Darling Clementine (1946) and Honest Abe from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), both directed by John Ford. This was the dissenting juror as moral voice in 12 Angry Men (1957). Yet, here he stands, and Leone gives the audience a moment to register the delicious irony of it with a sustained close-up that takes Fonda’s sparkling blue eyes and instantly recognizable smile and turns them both into instruments of evil. And when Frank guns down the kid, it’s clear we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Once Upon a Time in the West is Leone’s masterpiece, the pinnacle of his storied career. He didn’t want to make another western, having just finished his Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood--A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)--but U.S. financiers would only give him money if he made another one, so he took their offer and made one of the greatest westerns ever. Grandly operatic in both scale and tone, Once Upon a Time in the West is more about the western genre than it is about anything that actually happened in the southwest United States in the late 19th century. Brimming with homages to just about every memorable western imaginable, particularly John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), Once Upon a Time in the West is a brilliant metafilm that plays as both a stirring melodrama and a film geek’s cornucopia of in-jokes and movie references. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that French theorist Jean Baudrillard called Leone cinema’s first postmodern director.

Like many westerns in the late 1960s, most notably Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Once Upon a Time in the West is about the end of the era associated with the western genre. In this case, it is the railroad that is the primary symbol of the industrial and mechanical advances that would soon render cowboys and their codes of honor obsolete. As the title of the film suggests, Leone’s opus aspires to the heights of both grand storytelling and literal mythmaking. It’s a fable about the violence of progress.

Like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West revolves primarily around three men who fit into different western stereotypes (the story was concocted by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Leone, all men who were well-versed in the western genre). The strong, silent hero is a man known only as Harmonica (Charles Bronson) because he keeps the instrument tied around his neck and his presence is often signaled not by the immediate sight of him, but by his harmonica’s forlorn call (the tune of which is courtesy of Ennio Morricone, who scored all of Leone’s spaghetti westerns). The wily, rambunctious bandit is Cheyenne (Jason Robards), who at first appears to be a bad man, but eventually wins us over with his charisma and wit. And, of course, the bad guy is the aforementioned Frank, played with sadistic glee by Fonda in what is truly one of the greatest instances of casting against type. His role is so shockingly memorable not because it’s simply “Henry Fonda being a bad guy,” but because, as Alfred Hitchcock did with James Stewart in Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), Leone unearthes a dark mirror image of Fonda’s morally upright persona; the good we associate with his previous roles intermingles with Frank’s unmitigated badness, making him a disturbingly complex villain.

However, unlike Leone’s other westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West also features a central and complex female character: Jill (Claudia Cardinale), the woman who travels from New Orleans to marry McBain only to find him and the rest of his family massacred by Frank and his goons (the fact that we later find out Frank wasn’t supposed to kill anyone makes him seem all the more ruthless). Jill is not your typical western female, as she does not fall squarely into the “whore” or “Madonna” category. Rather, Jill bridges the character types; as a former prostitute, she is an unabashedly sexual character, but her sexuality is not used against her. Rather, it is one of her strengths, something that helps her survive in a harsh world.

For reasons that are not made clear until midway through the film, a railroad baron named Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) is determined to see Jill dead, and he uses Frank as his mercenary. Meanwhile, Harmonica is determined to see Frank dead, but only by his own hand because he has a score to settle (the reason for this score is deliciously drawn out in fragmented flashbacks that don’t come together until he and Frank are squaring off for their duel in the sun). Cheyenne is caught up in the middle of it all, and eventually he and Harmonica become unlikely allies.

Narrative aside, Once Upon a Time in the West’s chief strength is its impressive visual scope. Leone was a master of intercutting widescreen vistas of the western landscape (usually shot in Spain or Italy, although several key scenes in this film were shot in Utah’s Monument Valley, home of eight John Ford westerns) with vistas of the human visage. It has been said many times that Leone treated the human face like a landscape, and no one was better as utilizing the ’Scope frame to turn a hardened stare into a moment of pure myth. Leone underscores his mythical impulses with the distention of time, which is most clearly articulated in the film’s opening sequence, where three killers await the arrival of a train.

Unlike today’s frenetic, MTV-inspired action directors who feel that their films are lagging if there isn’t an edit every three seconds, Leone was content to linger on his images, allowing them to derive power and depth from that concerted focus. It adds a level of intrigue and grandiosity that befits his larger-than-life narratives and brilliant upturning of western clichés. He gets away with reworking cherished genre staples because he’s never parodic or insulting. Rather, he finds new depths in previously two-dimensional characters and situations, imbuing the old with an exhilarating sense of infinite possibilities.

Once Upon a Time in the West Blu-Ray
This Blu-Ray disc includes both the original theatrical version and a restored version that adds 39 seconds of additional footage.
Aspect Ratio2.35:1
Audio
  • English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround
  • English Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural
  • French Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural
  • Spanish Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural
  • SubtitlesEnglish, French, Spanish, Portuguese
    Supplements
  • Audio commentary by film historians Sir Christopher Frayling and Sheldon Hall, coscreenwriter Bernardo Bertolucci, actress Claudia Cardinale, and directors John Carpenter, John Milius, and Alex Cox
  • An Opera of Violence documentary
  • The Wages of Sin documentary
  • Something to Do With Death documentary
  • “Railroad: Revolutionizing the West” featurette
  • “Locations Then & Now” stills gallery
  • Production stills gallery
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • DistributorParamount Home Entertainment
    SRP$24.99
    Release DateMay 31, 2011

    VIDEO
    Once Upon a Time in the West was originally released on DVD by Paramount back in 2003 in its 165-minute international version. Apparently, there was a 171-minute version that originally premiered in Italy, but the scenes that were cut from it have been lost. Paramount’s new Blu-Ray contains both the 165-minute cut and a slightly (and I mean slightly) longer version that was recently restored by the Film Foundation. The restored version adds back about 39 seconds of footage, although I confess that I was unable to determine where that new footage appears (searches of several prominent forums suggested that those seconds were slight extensions on a few scenes and some corrected music cues). At any rate, the presentation of the film in 1080p high definition is simply outstanding. The image is nicely textured with great detail, particularly in those gritty close-ups, where you can make out every crease and wrinkle and blackhead. The warm, slightly desaturated color palette is perfectly represented, and any damage in the form of nicks, scratches, or dirt is virtually nonexistent. The image may appear slightly soft to some eyes, but this is because Leone shot it in the 35mm Techniscope format, which creates a widescreen image by dividing a traditional 35mm film frame in half, creating two wider frames out of one squarish frame, but losing 50% of the resolution in the process. The original monaural soundtrack is included on the disc for purists, although the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround remix sounds excellent. Ennio Morricone’s memorable musical score is nicely spaced out and given additional depth, and the surround speakers create good ambiance with echoes and the sounds of wind and dust blowing.

    SUPPLEMENTS
    All of the supplements that were included on the 2003 Special Collector’s Edition DVD set are included here. The audio commentary is something of a mixed bag, but one definitely worth spending some time with. It features film historians Sir Christopher Frayling and Sheldon Hall, coscreenwriter Bernardo Bertolucci, actress Claudia Cardinale, and directors John Carpenter, John Milius, and Alex Cox. Some of the commentary is screen-specific, while other parts are not (such as when Bertolucci tells of how he came to be one of the cowriters with Dario Argento and Leone). The three making-of documentaries, An Opera of Violence, The Wages of Sin, and Something to Do With Death, are actually three parts of one large documentary that runs more than an hour in length. It features interview footage with everyone included in the commentary track, along with archival footage of interviews with Leone and Henry Fonda. “Railroad: Revolutionizing the West” is a 7-minute featurette that is both a quickie history lesson on the development of the railroad and a study of how it figures into the film. The “Locations Then & Now” slideshow gallery contain dozens of stills from the film and corresponding images of the locations as they appear today, while the production stills gallery is a five-minute automated slideshow of black-and-white production and behind-the-scenes stills, including seven images of Harmonica being beaten in a scene that was cut from the international version (the footage has been long lost). Also included is the original theatrical trailer, now presented in high definition.

    Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick

    Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

    All images copyright © Paramount Home Entertainment

    Overall Rating: (4)




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