**** (out of ****)
Starring Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Gabriele Ferzetti, Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Paolo Stoppa
Directed by Sergio Leone & written by Sergio Leone, Sergio Donati, and Bernardo Bertolucci
1969
165 min PG13
“Was it necessary to kill all of them? I only told you to scare them!”
“People scare better when they’re dying.”
“Once Upon a Time in the West” is the purest distillation of filmmaker Sergio Leone’s crazed vision of the spaghetti Western. It’s all dirty, expressionless faces, ominously goofy music, uncaring and desolate landscapes, buzzing flies, deadpan gallows humor, terrible dubbing, and quick-draw contests drawn to ludicrous lengths by men staring at each other. Precise, stylized movements replace dialogue as a kind of summarized storytelling: these are hard, experienced, ruthless men, who explain nothing, and who are cool, calculated, and patient. Is “Once Upon a Time in the West” over the top? At nearly three hours, with only about 15 minutes of dialogue, you’d better believe it. Sometimes you wonder if there’s enough plot to fill a sentence, let alone 165 minutes.
But that’s the point: it’s a style built entirely out of vast, empty spaces and pauses, contrasted with spurts of grungy close-ups (or “faces as landscapes”) and quick, merciless acts of violence. On the DVD extras, director Alex Cox calls it “the longest art Western ever made.” It’s not quite as much pure fun as Leone’s “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly,” but if you remember how that film drew out a three-way quick-draw contest to unbearable suspense, think of “Once Upon a Time” as outdoing “Good-Bad-Ugly” by suspending one crucial plot point for nearly its entire runtime. It is a bold gesture in extreme abstraction of storytelling: by slowing everything down, Leone can paint his vision of the West, of progress, of the hunger in men to conquer and destroy. And paint is the right word, because hardly anyone “says” anything.
“Once Upon a Time in the West” is a Western about Westerns. It couldn’t stand on its own without the conventions established by the likes of John Ford and Howard Hawks. It’s light on plot and characterization because it knows we already know how all these things work. We know the whore is a whore because she says she’s from New Orleans.
All Westerns are about the end of the Old West, about violent men being integral to bringing civilization and then having to abandon that civilization. “Shane” is probably the most concise example of this, as the hero blows away the bad guys and then rides off. In a very American way, old Hollywood Westerns seem satisfied with this rather hypocritical use of violence, and Leone is not, despite his adoration for them. By drawing out and meditating on the conventions of the Western, he can show the merciless, westward push of progress more cynically. The modern world is made by bloodshed and money, and when people die and kill for it, life goes on and nobody cares, at least not for long. Leone’s mankind is ultimately ruthless, but we are at least romantic enough to realize it, mourn it, and ponder our ruthlessness ironically for a couple of minutes.
The resulting film is strangely surreal, even nightmarish. The abstraction is so great that we know so many things without having been told, yet there are so many things left unexplained and unrevealed. The motions of the characters to their particular dooms are almost ritualized. Yet “Once Upon a Time” is a brightly-lit, clear-eyed, daytime nightmare, which, if done well, is my favorite kind of nightmare. Only one short scene is shot at night, yet many indoor shots are filled with shadows and hard blackness, like our eyes are still getting used to being indoors after so long outside.
“Once Upon a Time” is an appropriate title for a story that is as simple as a fairytale. The first act of the movie is nothing but spectacular entrances. Any of the first five or six scenes could serve as the opening of a movie (or even a short film in itself). The plot enlarges the trio of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” to five and replaces the box of Confederate gold with a railroad land grab. Henry Fonda is Frank, the villain in service of the railroads, given the best introduction of all. Seeing the blue-eyed and beloved Fonda mow down an entire family just for the hell of it must have hit the movie’s first audiences like watching Jesus Christ blowing people away. Claudia Cardinale (slobber drool) is the widow McBain, who owns the land the railroads want. In place of Eli Wallach’s Ugly is Jason Robards as Cheyenne, a chatty outlaw (or least chatty for a Leone movie) who is saintly when compared to the movie’s real villain. He’s been framed by Frank. Gabriele Ferzetti is the tuberculosis-stricken railroad magnate desperate to have his trains reach the Pacific before he dies. He stumbles about in braces and crutches in a railroad car that has as much gold as a Baroque cathedral.
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