“You remind me of my mother. She was the biggest whore in Alameda and the best woman in the world. Whoever my father was, either for an hour or a month, he must have been a happy man.”
Fonda usually plays Abe Lincoln, Cardinale is a European art movie regular in stuff like “8 ½,” and Robards and Ferzetti are veterans of legitimate theatre. All are cast against type, except Charles Bronson as the Man with the Harmonica, who is relentlessly hunting Frank for reasons he will explain to no one but Frank, and only then “at the moment of dying.” When he relates these conditions to Frank, Frank replies “I thought so.” Maybe it’s because Frank stole Harmonica’s ability to emote facially. Leone’s characters are as nasty as they come; even the nice ones are capable of being mercenary or violent. Yet he feels affection for them. Even if they die alone with dirt in their mouths, he plays wistful music and lingers on them so that at least we can keep them company at the end. He sympathizes with Frank’s desire to become a legitimate businessman, with the magnate’s desire to see the ocean, and forgives the whore for marrying half for love and half for money. He even lets the characters share in this sympathy and creates strange visual bonds of respect, admiration, and even affection between men who’d really like to put lead in each other.
Each character is given his or her own musical theme by the great Ennio Morricone, and the themes are often interwoven when the characters are together or thinking about one another. Harmonica’s theme is usually blended with Frank’s, even when Frank isn’t there, because Harmonica only exists because of Frank. In place of the manic overture of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” Morricone instead “orchestrates” natural sounds in the opening sequence of “Once Upon a Time.” The score was composed and recorded before a foot of film was shot. The result is operatic: no one could position and move figures and cameras like Leone, yet the result isn’t the same without Morricone. Their partnership spanned the entire “Man with No Name” trilogy all the way to Leone’s grand finale, “Once Upon a Time in America.” Morricone is to Leone what John Williams is to George Lucas or Hermann is to Hitchcock. Not to pick on screenwriters, but sometimes it’s the composer who is the second-in-command on so many great films.
“Once Upon a Time” has a considerably larger budget than the “Man with No Name” films, and Leone doesn’t waste a cent of it. The houses in the desert are all creaking wood, rundown, and filled with shadows. The primordial city of Flagstaff is bursting with activity and Leone takes enormous pleasure in rising high above it to watch wagons, people, and horses weaving in and out of each other. In this film and in “A Fistful of Dynamite,” Leone is especially fascinated with trains and watching railroads being built, bombed, robbed, or otherwise as the arteries of growing civilizations. Leone shoots in both Spain, where he filmed the Clint Eastwood movies, and in John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley, with all its huge, shadow-casting sheer cliffs, huger plains, and hugest cloud-filled skies. Where men are bustling, there is always as much choreography as a ballet. In many of Leone’s films, he will often divide a single frame into close-up of a face and a long-shot of a landscape. This time, when there is stillness and no zooms or close-ups are necessary, he will rotate his camera behind his figures, as if the landscape itself is threatening them.
“Once Upon a Time in the West” is not a movie for everyone. I watched it on a big ol’ HDTV with nine friends, four of whom lost interest and went into another room to make nice, while the six of us who remained agreed it was incredible. In the end, it’s all so grand, so ludicrous, so oversized, so magnificent, so weirdly humorous—how could I not love it?
Finished Monday, August 1st, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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