Starring Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Gabriele Ferzetti, Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Paolo Stoppa

“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.

“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