ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (C’era una volta il West), Paramount, 1968.
Dir. Sergio Leone, Perf. Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Gabriele Ferzetti.
Review by Dominic

Once Upon a Time in the West is a monument. In truth, viewing the film is so engrossing—conducive to such a childlike sense of wonder—that I find it difficult to step back into the exegetical posture necessary to pen a review. At any rate, we may as well leave any critical reserve at the door as I admit outright to considering this the greatest Western ever made, and that even if I was overcome by some extraordinary delirium it would not occur to me to deny it this site’s highest rating.

An enigmatic stranger (Bronson) stands on a desolate railway platform, signaling his presence with a haunting harmonica riff. Three gunmen answer, transforming one of the boldest, most surely handled credit sequences in film history into one of the most exhilarating. From its cryptic opening scene West’s sense of atmosphere is captivating: the massively warped boards of the railway platform, the sun-baked surrounds, the nerve-wracking squeal of a windmill. A lethargic face-off between Jack Elam and a fly prior to “Harmonica”’s arrival vividly conveys the hypnotic banality and anticipatory rituals of the men who made killing a living.

West is vaulting, majestic, and above all mythic—but it is also about the death of the Western myth and the dreamlike romance that spirited it along. It is an opera: an audacious elegy not to the “real” West, but a space-time of the imagination—America’s nostalgic dream of itself, the wonder of which the rest of world was able to share.

On the railway, Harmonica asks after a man named Frank (Fonda), whom we later learn is a ruthless gunslinger in the employ of crippled railway baron Mr. Morton (Ferzetti) to “clear small obstacles from the track.” Frank has sent three gunmen because Frank is busy clearing the McBain family—and just before a Mrs McBain (Cardinale) arrives by train to join them in the forlorn hope of making a life with her new husband on the frontier.

Framed for the crime is the boyish bandit Cheyenne (Robards), whose interest in discovering this “Frank” soon intersects with that of Harmonica.

Morton, meanwhile, grows apprehensive of his hired gun. The “simple weapons” with which Frank is so handy are capable of more than he had bargained on, and Frank’s brutish will to dominance overwhelms the “business deal” struck with his rickety employer.

And so, five figures are irreversibly deadlocked in confrontation, against the background of the West rendered as a Fordean landscape of death and dreams.

These characters are at once physical and ghostlike. Morton, the railroad baron, worn out by tuberculosis of the spine, moves with the help of a network of bars affixed to the roof of his carriage, the baroque opulence of which contrasts strikingly with the barren landscape around it. He is both loathsome and sympathetic, a money-stuffed host downgraded to a parasite, forced to rely on the men he hired to do his dirty work and by the West he told himself he could conquer. His obsession with a painting of the Pacific Ocean poignantly captures the depth of his self-loathing over his physical helplessness, as well as suggesting some never to be realized baptismal rite—the notion that this turbulent mass could somehow cleanse him of his wretched form and cure his inevitable collapse.

Fonda is unnervingly impenetrable from our first glimpse of him: his cheek derisively stuffed with tobacco as he gazes with a chilling mixture of affability and sadism at the child whose family he has gunned down. Cardinale shines as Jill McBain, a beacon of self-respect in a landscape that threatens to evaporate her spirit entirely—if it isn’t forcibly snuffed out first.

Bronson, finally assuming the Man with No Name role Leone reportedly wanted him for all along, is cast—like iron—in the role he was made for. His tanned, craggy visage is matched perfectly to the landscape: he is a relic of the free-roaming “ancient race” soon to be cast aside, forced into extinction by an impending world of emasculating capitalist drudgery.

Not only a rich and poetically phrased narrative, West is one of the most triumphantly bravura displays of movie style to grace a theater: this the film whose box of tricks has been a goldmine for directors for decades, and the unique interaction of image and music and the creativity of its cinematography stand among its landmark feats. Like a sorcerer Leone conjures apparently simple spectacles—the curt response, the stare, the sly squint, the pregnant pause—into intense, miniaturized epics. The film contains easily the most harrowing and deeply felt flashback sequence of any Western. It swells, like a wound, harmonizing the narrative with its traumatic opening scenes and spiriting the story to the emotional climax it has slow-danced dreamily—and fearfully—towards.

At an epic 159 minutes, West hasn’t an ounce of flab. Every line of dialogue is gem, and as well as being one of the grandest, nicest looking, and most stylish Westerns in history, it is also one of the most slyly funny. There are very few truly perfect films, athough Leone’s masterpeice is not just a testament to the expressive capabilities of the Western genre, but to the magic of cinema itself.