Once Upon a Time in the West

There’s no longer any argument — Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is a modern classic, a dreamlike valentine to the American western. It’s been described as sagebrush Kabuki, as Grand Opera and by detractors as Sergio Leone telling a 40-minute story in 160 minutes.

Few Spaghetti Westerns are outstanding movies, and few besides those of Sergio Leone approach anyone’s idea of Art. After the  Dollars trilogy, Il Maestro shifted from comedic cynicism to a serious posture that would be pretentious if not held aloft by all the magic that cinema can offer — wonderful faces, beautiful cinematography, rapturous music. Once Upon a Time In the West is an ode to the Hollywood western, made by an outsider who couldn’t speak English. If you’re a Leone convert, you’ve perhaps seen it too many times already. For those who haven’t seen it, it will either be a frustrating exercise in slow cinema, or an opportunity to experience a revelation.

Paramount’s new 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray Combo edition has had fans excited for months. It is said to have been remastered from original elements in Italy.

The basic story setup — crediting Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento as contributors — is a grand epic extrapolated from Nicholas Ray’s  Johnny Guitar. Ex- New Orleans prostitute Jill (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in Flagstone, Arizona to announce her secret marriage to Brett McBain (Frank Wolff of  Beast from Haunted Cave), a landholder with water in the path of the oncoming railroad. But hired killer Frank (Henry Fonda) has already killed the entire McBain family, to insure a monopoly for railroad tycoon Morton (Gabrielle Ferzetti of  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). Morton would simply have Frank ‘remove’ Jill as an obstruction to his plans, but interceding on her behalf are a pair of expert gunmen, the notorious bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards) and a mysterious, nameless gunman known only as Harmonica (Charles Bronson). An epic showdown is inevitable.

Is this a Zen western?

OUATITW departs from the half-joking rakishness of Sergio Leone’s first three Clint Eastwood pictures. Eastwood strolled through his pictures like a bulletproof bill collector, wiping out opponents with a wry sense of humor provided by screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni. This time we get a serious saga told with a delicacy one would expect in a Visconti film. Leone infuses the proceedings with his visual acumen and stretches to achieve different effects. The picture centers on a woman, and the gun-downs are more mythic and ritualized than ever before. There’s a touch of Alain Resnais self-consciousness — the cowboys and gunmen walk and move as if they were in a dream.

Star Henry Fonda goes all-out with his superb villain. He’d just previously played a bad guy in the minor  Firecreek but nothing prepared fans for Frank, a dastard as black-hearted as they come. Fonda never looked this severe — his blue eyes and crooked sneer are genuinely disturbing. Tall, dark, and sunburned, Frank moves carefully, calculating everything he says and does. He’s magnificent whether riding a horse or just holstering his gun.

In the film’s central flashback, Fonda is made to look not only younger but more feral, like Gian-Maria Volonté in the first two Dollars films. Leone seems to have chosen a set of makeup colors that provide a maximum contrast with Fonda’s sparkling blue eyes. This Henry Fonda is another animal entirely from the calm, almost angelic pioneer of  Drums Along the Mohawk or the soulful, resilient Tom Joad of  The Grapes of Wrath.

Cast against type, Jason Robards is supposed to be Mexican in the script but comes off as an Irish bandit-philosopher. He’s easily the most talkative of the bunch, but much of his speechifying doesn’t seem to be addressed exactly to the person he’s talking to – they’re dream words as well.

As the patented Leone Man With No Name character, Charles Bronson would seem an expressionless brick — until his green-eyed gaze soaks in. His dry, squinting face looks like an unfinished clay sculpture, a Golem in a cowboy hat. Relatively short in height, Bronson nonetheless convinces as tougher than the rest of the cast put together. His Harmonica is the least talkative character in the Leone canon — he’ll stare for thirty seconds before returning a three-syllable answer.

Ritualized motions rehearsed since the beginning of time.

Traditional Hollywood action movies emphasize pace, if only to stave off audience boredom, doing their best to fill every moment with action and ‘activity.’ With this film Leone began staging even minor actions as drawn-out, ritualized set pieces. Just the act of handing a person a gun, and that person placing the gun on a table, becomes a careful 30-second event that’s given emphasis far beyond stage business. The style focuses on close-ups of faces and eyes that tell stories of their own. It’s a different kind of storytelling.

A full twelve minutes is afforded an amusing title sequence that exists for its own sake, a static observance of gunslingers waiting in ‘High Noon’ mode for Bronson to arrive at Cattle Corner. Leone cast recognizable American stars Woody Strode and Jack Elam to get gunned down, and for bad luck gave them a third henchman, Al Mulock, the fool that Eli Wallach blasts from his bathtub in  The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Dialogue parts are all covered by stars. Noted Italian names Paolo Stoppa and Gabrielle Ferzetti are on hand. Ferzetti’s central character is a powerful man who grows physically weaker as he grows richer.

When his shows increased to three hours in length, subsequent cuts tore holes in their continuity. Even at full length, OUATITW displays what at first seem to be puzzling story gaps. Leone will let his actors stare at one another for what seem minutes at a time, but other scene changes appear to skip big clumps of action. Frank takes Jill to a Navaho cliff dwelling, and then returns her to town for a phony rigged land auction, but Leone reduces all that action to an isolated sex scene. It took maybe five viewings to realize that Frank and Jill get together at the cliff dwelling, not the ranch. Is she inside the cave when Frank talks to Morton?  These giant elisions made us wonder if scenes were out of order.

A great deal of seemingly important action happens off screen. Jason Robards is constantly being caught and liberated, but we see almost none of it. Some of this adds up to excellent storytelling. When Frank discovers the remains of a couple dozen gunmen scattered around Morton’s idle train, we quickly surmise that Cheyenne’s men had a battle with Morton’s gunfighters. Was everyone killed, down to the last man?  But the time sequence becomes muddled when Cheyenne escapes from his train ride to Yuma, organizes the attack on the train, and then, seriously wounded, rides back to the McBain homestead. That’s a lot of content to be skipped over. First-time viewers can’t be expected to follow some of these compressed events.

Jason Robards clocks in good character time but he’s been shortchanged for action scenes. The only time he ever shoots a gun may be in the train-roof gag. Skipping the train battle isn’t a bad thing, as the reveal of Frank discovering the aftermath is classic content. But Robards is robbed of a standoff all his own, for us to see how he measures up to the other, more stoic gunfighter heroes. Is he just a talker?  At the end when Cheyenne prepares to draw his gun, not knowing whether Frank or Harmonica will come through the door, we assume that he’s no match for either of them.

Once Upon a Time In the West works best in the present tense, with men set in the landscape like gods in a ritualized pageant. Bronson and especially Fonda move and gesture with great economy. Leone’s Western Cool combines Hollywood myth with Milanese design. The final showdown is one of the purest in film; it might as well be something out of a Japanese Noh play. With Frank no longer on the Morton payroll, he’s reduced once again to the level of an honest samurai-like gunfighter. He and Bronson meet as equals, following through on a pact carved in stone.

It’s a movie and a music concert.

The pace is set by Ennio Morricone’s glorious music score, which cues movements and moods with sweep and majesty. The film is like Opera in that the music drives the visuals. The music score was recorded first, and was even played on the set to influence the actors. For Morricone fans, this is like dying and going to heaven. One legit complaint is that each character’s theme is repeated at least two times too many. The Paramount butchers that chopped out Jason Robards’ last scenes — and their surprise revelation — surely sought to eliminate yet another replay of the Cheyenne theme.

We saw Once Upon a Time In the West in the summer of 1969. The fact that it was screened on the bottom half of a double bill with  The Green Slime indicates how much respect it got from distributors. I can’t claim to have been one of the enlightened few that appreciated it on first sight. It was slow and confusing. We had no way of knowing that it was 21 minutes shorter than what had premiered in New York back at the end of May. It didn’t perform and after three weeks was gone. Paramount then dropped entire scenes, including the introduction and exit of a major character. The same thing happened with The Wild Bunch — most of us had no idea that Warners chopped it down by a reel just a week or so after its premiere.

Once Upon a Time In the West’s epic approach to pulp fiction has had a lot of influence. 1970s Japanese samurai films (especially the Lone Wolf and Cub series) seem touched by Leone, even if we remember that Leone’s architecturally stoic standoffs were originally inspired by Kurosawa. At Cannon Films we groaned when Albert Pyun ripped off entire scenes and dialogue from this movie for his sci-fi action film Cyborg. Quentin Tarantino may be the only filmmaker to keep his footing while recreating Leone’s stoic ritualization for genre works like his Kill Bill.

Leone was not one to push boundaries for sex and nudity. We see Jill’s bare back, and the roughest things get is when Cheyenne pats her behind ‘with feeling.’ The relaxing of censorship that occurred between this show and Leone’s next allowed him to be more vulgar, for  Giù la Testa indulges a string of relative crudities. Ants are urinated on in the first shot, as if commenting on the beginning of  The Wild Bunch. Leone’s final feature film  Once Upon a Time in America alternates beautiful scenes with directorial excess, almost as off-putting as the rougher content in films by Paul Verhoeven. In France Leone’s three post-Dollars films were marketed as another trilogy, with the second installment Giù la Testa titled  Il était une fois… la révolution  (Once Upon a Time… The Revolution).