#19: Once Upon a Time in the West

If there is one genre of film that I need to brush up on it’s got to be westerns. I never watched them growing up (more of Star Wars/fantasy movies for me) and this has, unfortunately, continued into my adulthood. Sure, I’ve seen a few; ‘The Alamo’ and ‘McLintock!’ with John Wayne, ‘High Noon’ with Gary Cooper, and ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ with Clint Eastwood. But unless you count ‘The Shakiest Gun in the West’ or ‘The Apple Dumpling Gang’ true blue westerns, I haven’t watched many more. Since I’m attempting a rundown of the Top 250, however, I need to watch a few essential westerns. One of which is ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ from Sergio Leone, the man behind the “spaghetti western” subgenre.

The plot of ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ is a classic tale of good-versus-evil and one-against-many with a woman thrown in the middle. The story follows a man who is never given a name (Charles Bronson) and plays a harmonica. He teams up with a notorious desperado named Cheyenne (Jason Robards) to protect a woman, Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), from a hired gun (Henry Fonda) working for the railroad. What starts out as a straight forward storyline, quickly changes into something more interesting once the film gains steam. While it is normally the action on-screen that keeps me interested, the story kept me watching this time around. I have to say that this is, by far, the most interested I’ve been in watching a western.

The cinematography and direction in this film is incredible, which is very typical of Sergio Leone. ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ is set at a very slow pace; every conversation is slow and deliberate, and just about every shot is a slow pan or zoom. There is plenty of close ups of leathery, sweaty faces to go along with the slow pans across the beautifully barren, desolate and wide American southwest. Leone was clearly a master director and it shows here. I like to think of it as almost a ‘The Godfather’-type film; one that takes its time and should. The interesting thing about this film is that it isn’t so much ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ as it is ‘The Godfather.’ The way the factions in the film are split up it plays more like a gangster film.

Performances in films such as this are difficult to gauge. There are not very many lines of dialog in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, and those delivered are not exactly riveting. Combine that with the fact that the direction and cinematography practically steal the scenes and there’s a problem. Having said that, however, Bronson and Fonda are both good actors and both do well here. Fonda is in his element here in that he’s in a western, but he’s not usually the villain, so this is a nice change of pace for him and he pulls it off very well. Bronson, on the other hand, is basically playing a typical Clint Eastwood role. He is the tough guy of few words with no name, sound familiar? Then there’s Claudia Cardinale. Besides being completely drop-dead gorgeous, she also holds her own along side the bigger stars.

If you like westerns, you owe it to yourself to see this film. Some may not enjoy the slower pacing of the film, it is over two and a half hours long after all, but if you just sit back and take it in, I think you’ll find a lot to like here. It’s not a John Wayne western, but a beautifully shot, slow serenade to the Wild West. In the end, I believe the voters at IMDb got this one wrong. The fact that ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ is ranked higher than this masterpiece is really a shame. I loved it. 9/10