Lyrical Elegy for the Great Frontier (Once Upon a Time in the West (DVD))

Member Name: berlioz II

Product:	Once Upon a Time in the West (DVD)
Date:	27/03/09 (108 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Masterpiece

Disadvantages: Very slow and very long; if you have a short attention span, then you may better go elsewhere

1967 was the year that Sergio Leone shot to world fame. With the legal entanglements with Akira Kurosawa on the subject of plagiarism of Yojimbo for A Fistful of Dollars ending in a settlement, Leone's earliest western was now free for wider distribution with no worries, and it was in the year of 1967 that MGM imported Leone's films to the United States, with A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly premiering within only months of each other. What was even better was that the films were also successful there, just as they were in their home country of Italy, and this also opened up American eyes for this style of western that was much more violent and dirty than American westerns usually were. In its wake, the films also helped re-vitalise the western genre, which had in the 1950s and 60s become more and more stale. The concept of an anti-hero in place of the John Wayne type straight-faced hero's hero seemed fresh and interesting, and it quickly made Clint Eastwood a star too. For Leone, though, after three westerns he was starting to feel somewhat weary of the whole genre and was already starting to plan on filming an expansive gangster epic based on the book The Hoods. But with his fame now established in the revisionist western genre, the public also expected him to continue with it. With this in mind, he decided to go ahead and make one more western - a western to end all westerns - in which he'd pour all of the love that had attracted him to the genre as a child in the first place and make it a sprawling epic filled with nostalgia and affection. The result was Once Upon a Time in the West.

Once Upon a Time in the West deals with three men and a woman in the outbacks of the western frontier right at the turn when the railroad was beginning to infiltrate the last stretches of the open prairies, bringing with it civilisation as we know it today, and signalling the end of the old west of gunfighters and outlaws. In it, a former Orleans prostitute named Jill (Claudia Cardinale) arrives to these, as of yet desolate, sandy plains to meet her new husband, an Irish settler named Brett McBain (Frank Wolff) who lives in the middle of all of this with his family, the wife of whom had passed away some time ago. McBain has big plans for this patch of land, and Jill is one to come and share this vision he has of using the advancing railroad to his advantage to make himself rich by building a station to the site, since it is a fortuitous place where water can be found, a vital asset to the soon passing trains. However other factions, headed by the railway baron Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) and the more sadistic Frank (Henry Fonda) are also interested in this land and will stop at nothing to ruthlessly try and get it for themselves, ending up massacring the entire McBain family before Jill arrives. But it is not all that easy when a mysterious drifter (Charles Bronson) and a legendary bandit (Jason Robards) also show up on scene, ending up going against Morton and Frank, each for their own reasons that are not immediately revealed. All these characters then end up drawing thematic connections to each other in ways that make this perhaps the best spaghetti western ever made.

Now, more than anything, Once Upon a Time in the West is a treasure trove of homages to the great westerns of the past Leone grew up with. Practically everything in it is a throwback to one or another western film by people like John Ford, Glenn Ford and Fred Zinneman, referencing films like High Noon, The Searchers, Johnny Guitar and many others. In a way Leone was wanting to create a monstrous tribute to what made a western "western"; to weave a fairytale of Once Upon a Time in the West out of all the references and binding them together into a fairly straight-forward story and giving it a uniquely Leonian twist. He even went as far as to travel to America in order to be able to shoot at the legendary Monument Valley with its distinctive rock formations; where many a legendary western found its backdrop from and which here is dressed in as nostalgic a shade as possible with soaring Morricone music and extensively wide vista shots. Yet despite all of these tributes, the film is not a diffuse set of repetitions and reminiscences of other films and everything works perfectly in unison to be a nostalgic trip down memory lane, while retaining an identity all its own as a Sergio Leone film. This is widely thanks to Leone's pacing and characterisations, which are pure Leone through and through.

As has already been evidenced by his previous two westerns, Leone is a director who likes to take his time in telling a story without needing to rush it forward. Thus is the case with Once Upon a Time in the West, which is extremely slow and extremely deliberate in all its motions. In a way the film is a nearly three hour long elegy on the old west, which in its own multifaceted way, while being a nostalgic tribute, is also an extended death rattle for the whole concept of the old west; a lyrical - if somewhat pessimistic - poem of the passing of the great frontier. This also reflects with the characters themselves, with all the men in the film coming across as throwaways of an age that is about to pass away. Bronson's Harmonica is a perfect example of this, an Eastwoodian hero type... yet this one is not a boyishly cool gunslinger; a bounty hunter after reward or a box of gold... No, Harmonica is more like a phantom, roaming around the west with a specific goal in mind and perfectly aware of his own mortality. A man haunted by memories of his past and who has nothing else in his life left but revenge. Or the old gunfighter Cheyenne, who is more like a roguish leftover of the past, equally aware that his time is soon going to be over as the world no longer has any need for the likes of him. Even Frank, who is more attempting to adapt to the developing world around him, is in the end too stuck up on his old habits to be able to escape extinction for he cannot embrace the same values as Morton does in which money is taking the place of more straight-out settling things with guns. And in this world where men must either adapt or die away, is Jill who is exactly this type of person to be able to change and take the world forward toward the future where it is going, the only person who clearly can escape from the death sentence hanging over all the other characters.

The composition of the film is also one of utter brilliance. The character interaction is absolutely fantastic in many ways, with each of the four main characters extending their tentacles to each other. Harmonica's secret objective, his connection to Frank, Frank's connection to Jill, Jill's connection to Harmonica, Harmonica's connection to Cheyenne, Cheyenne's connection to Jill etc. makes this one of the most multifaceted spaghetti westerns ever produced when it comes to the character interplay and intention... and well even in westerns in general. And all of this is draped in Leone's usual calm pacing which goes to fantastical lengths here. The opening scene alone is a perfect testament of the patient tension Leone builds around his characters without making it feel portentous or long for the sake of being long. Who else could pull off 10 minutes of three people silently waiting for a train and only focusing on the creaky sounds of the old train station and the faces of the people waiting? Off hand I can't think of any. Also it is telling irreverence on Leone's part to place a truly terrifying massacre scene near the beginning of the film, and then reveal that the man behind such brutal inhumanity was Henry Fonda, a man known for always playing the hero! The entire mythical placing of an actor like that into a role such as Frank's was a stroke of genius... as was the final seal in the coffin of him shooting a 10-year-old boy just to make a point that yes, this is Henry Fonda.

Finally the film itself is filled with Leone's trademark ways of shooting his scenes, from the wide Techniscope panoramas and close-ups, as already said, moving at an excruciatingly slow pace. Or how he could take a scene depicting something solitary like a quiet train station, and then transforming it into a spectacle shot of a bustling town without ever cutting off from the tracking movement. What is furthermore new for Leone is the use of pre-recorded music, an aspect he had been wanting to do even in the Dollars films, but never really had the opportunity to do so. Ennio Morricone's score is one of his greatest classics, melding in the lyrical, impossibly beautiful theme for Jill with Edda dell'Orso's soprano solos, the grungy electric guitar rammings for the theme of vengeance toward Frank, the humorous tramp music of Cheyenne, and the alluringly dissonant harmonica of Harmonica, the music very much defines a lot of the film, and Leone would use it to edit and set-up the scenes in his film by listening to the operatic magnificence of what Morricone conjured up for him. It is one of the most legendary pairings of music and images, a homogenous combination that works in such an utterly symbiotic way to make the two practically inseparable from one another. In conclusion, one can only summarise that Once Upon a Time in the West is a film that succeeds in being a homage to the old western films, a sprawling epic of operatic dimensions, a great study of its characters and their relationships, a cinematic experience that uses images in as purely a narrative structure as possible, that uses sound as fully as it can and, which in the end, is a sad film of death, yet counterbalanced with the motif of rebirth and a promise for the future. It is an elegy... a violent, yet also a gentle farewell to a world irrevocably gone... a film that will forever retain its classic status as Sergio Leone's masterpiece beside Once Upon a Time in America.

© berlioz, 2009

Summary: Spaghetti Westerns Vol.4