After the absolute knockout punch that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly gave me, I was really looking forward to this film. I was not disappointed, but what I thought I was expecting, I did not get. That's a very good thing. Just like how I have come away with different thoughts and feelings on the three Corbucci films I have seen, Once Upon a Time in the West leaves me in a different headspace than where I ended up with after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Film #17 Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Here is the imdb.com cast listing. Here is the wikipedia page about the production.
Once Upon a Time in the West (Which I will now shorten to 'Once Upon.' As much as I love wordy titles, it does prove a bit much to type out each time) starts with a three men (two wearing dusters) taking control of a distant train station. Once the train pulls in, no one gets off, or so the three men think. As the train pulls away they hear a haunting harmonica melody. It is coming from across the tracks and belongs to a nameless man (Charles Bronson), who was expecting to meet a person named Frank. Frank is not there and sent three men to kill this nameless man. It doesn't go well for them.
We then meet the McBain family as they are preparing for a large party on their homestead. Mr. McBain (Frank Wolff from The Great Silence) is getting married and his new wife is arriving by train that day. While the family is getting everything ready, a gang of bandits show up wearing dusters and kill the whole family except for the youngest son. When one of the gang asks the leader 'What are you going to do about the kid, Frank?' Frank (Henry Fonda) states well now since the kid has heard his name, he promptly shoots the kid.
The wife of Mr. McBain, Jill (Claudia Cardinale), arrives at the local train station and is taken to her new home, new family, and new life. Along the way, she stops at a trading post. Once inside, a sudden eruption of gunfire and violence occur outside. With everyone looking at the door with hesitation, a man by the name of Cheyenne (Jason Robards) walks in with his hands chained together. While getting his chains broken, he hears harmonica music playing before seeing the nameless man sitting in the back. Cheyenne refers to the man mockingly as Harmonica and the name sticks for the rest of the film. Cheyenne's gang, who wear dusters, show up to free him (which he already did himself) and they leave.
Jill ends up at her new home and life and sees that the whole family has been murdered. The locals say that it was a group of men in dusters and believe Cheyenne and his gang did this.
We then learn that the railroad's western expansion, overseen by Mr. Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), has been using Frank and his gang to intimidate and remove whoever is getting in the way of the railroad. Frank used the dusters as way to frame Cheyenne and his men for the murders as Cheyenne is a known and wanted bandit. Morton despises that Frank killed the family but is willing to overlook it as he has a crippling disease that is killing him rather quickly and he just wants to finish the railroad and see the Pacific Ocean.
Thinking that McBain's land now has no owner, Morton and Frank think they will be able to get the land easily. Neither one knew about Jill and her rightful ownership of the land. Her very existence has complicated their plans.
So you have a widow that lost the life she didn't even have, a bandit that was framed for killing a child, a harmonica playing stranger that isn't telling anyone his reasons for coming to town, a hired killer who wants more power than what a gun can bring, and a tycoon that has the power but not the time to complete his vision. All of their paths are crossing due to one homestead in the middle of nowhere.
This film is a slow burn. Again, that isn't a negative, but you have to have patience in order to see how Once Upon places it pieces on the table and how those pieces will then play against each other.
It will show you things that make you question a character's...well, character, but then down the line their actions make sense. Hell, you don't get to Harmonica's underlying motivation until the last 20 minutes of the film and keep in mind the run rime is 2 hours and 46 minutes long.
Each of the main characters in this story is not without sin and that makes for a more complex story. Cheyenne is a bandit but he actually didn't commit this crime, Harmonica has no problems killing people if they get in the way of what he wants, Frank is always looking for the advantage and will turn on his own if it benefits him, Mr. Morton has let his disease push him into make morally troubling decisions, and Jill didn't really love Mr. McBain, but she used his proposal (and his supposed wealth) to get out of working as a prostitute in New Orleans. They all have things they want, but the path to them is complicated.
There is something different about this film versus the others I have watched on this list but it is a little harder to put into words what it is exactly. I have seen flawed characters in other films (3:10 to Yuma's Ben Wade comes to mind) but this group is different. Maybe it is because they all have different motivations for their actions but the ends line up together so you get some alliances but those come at cost with friction. The only truly evil character in the film is Frank, but even then you have Harmonica helping him out when Frank's hired men get a better offer and turn on him. When Jill calls Harmonica out for saving Frank's life, he says to her, "I didn't let them kill him, and that's not the same thing." His statement sums up the film. This is a film set in the west with guns, trains, horses, and murder. But it's not the same thing.
Upon reading about how this film came to be, I found out that Leone wanted to step away from westerns as he felt that after the Dollars Trilogy, he had said all he wanted to about westerns. He was only drawn back in for two reasons; he would get to make the gangster film he wanted to do (this would eventually become Once Upon a Time in America) and that he would get to work with Henry Fonda. So Leone agreed and spent almost an entire year watching other westerns and working with two other people and came up with this love letter to the American western. I know he would go on to make one more western (and it is on the list, so I am sure I will have more to say about that at that time), but this feels almost like a deconstruction of what he did in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
The pacing is slow by design. The individual shots go on and on. There are times when all you see (or hear) is the aftermath of violence. The first showdown in the film doesn't go the way you expect. The final showdown is behind a building, with rocks, dead trees, and dirt. This is not the grand circle of white stones that you saw in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This is not epic, it is personal.
I have put both of those scenes down below. Spoiler warning: if you do not want to know the ending. Don't watch the second one.
Charles Bronson as Harmonica is great and a different take on the man of few words. I know Leone wanted Clint Eastwood for this role, but I think Bronson is great choice. He doesn't have the expectation of character that Eastwood would have had from the Dollars Trilogy. Bronson does't have the squint of Lee Van Cleef or the burning gaze of Eastwood, he has a haunted, unflinching, stare that gives you all you need to know about Harmonica. I really liked his performance and he still was able to have some awesome small bits of dialogue that would sound sarcastic from anyone else that he manages to make sound very matter of fact.
Henry Fonda's performance as Frank took a role that could have been a mustached twirling bad guy and turned it into a really compelling character. It is one that you still hate, but you can see he has more going for him than just being 'the bad guy.' Reading up on this casting, I didn't realize how much of a departure this was for him as he was always the good guy in westerns. The only way I can imagine that impact is if they did a remake with Tom Hanks as Frank (Frank Hanks?). When you see Fonda smiling at the end of the film, and to finally see what he is smiling at, is monstrous. When I do a look back on all of these films after finishing the 30, Fonda's Frank will be up there with great performances and villains.
Jason Robards as Cheyenne was another surprise. When you first see him enter the trading post, you assume he is going to be one of the main bad guys that Harmonica is going to have to deal with but he takes a turn and his goals line up with Harmonica's and and Jill's, at least for a little while. Robards plays Cheyenne with some compassion and that seperates himself from Frank. They both take, but Cheyenne doesn't take everything. When Jill assumes that he and his men will take whatever they want and rape her, he just asks if she has any coffee made. He may be a bandit and he may be wanted, but that doesn't make him unsympathetic. There is some nuance here that Robards brings and it is welcome.
Claudia Cardinale as Jill is a frustrating experience, not because she played her role poorly or that her acting wasn't effective. For being a main character in this film, I wish they would have given her more to do than be 'former prostitute that wants to change her life but still falls for men that aren't good for her.' She isn't as paper thin as that description sounds but it isn't that far off. The film wants you to believe that by the end she is going to be a major player in the developing of the town around her but it never gives you a moment to see her take control and lead the way. It would have been nice to maybe get a smidge more of Joan Crawford's Vienna from Johnny Guitar in Jill's character.
What is not lacking is Leone's direction. There are some amazing long takes where the camera pans with a character and then moves into a large crane shot showing the amazing hustle and bustle of Flagstone. There is one really great shot (you can see it in the trailer) when Frank enters a train car but the camera stays outside at ground level and tracks right with all the dead bodies strewn across the dirt and then stops when Frank exits the train car. These shots tell so much story with no words and with so much style. Every frame of this film is filled with detail. You could watch it without the sound on and still be blown away with how the camera flows in the scenes.
Speaking of sound, the sound design here is amazing. The first 10 minutes or so of the film has no music what so ever and very little dialogue. You hear the wind of the desert, the flies buzzing, a repetitive screeching of a rusty windmill blade spinning. It creates a sense of tension as you don't know when it will stop or when someone will finally take action. Later on, you hear the sound of Morton's train engine at rest and it sounds like the beat of a large steel heart. It is the sound of progress. When Harmonica plays the one fragment of a song he knows, it sounds almost like a banshee wail.
There is a wonderful score here, again done by Ennio Morricone, and it is used more sparingly than the other films I have watched recently with his work in it. It helps build the bigger moments and make them more epic. There are some beautiful strings, horns, and a distorted electric guitar bit that is the backbone for the score in Red Dead Redemption. I loved it.
Once Upon a Time in the West is a damn near perfect film. I do like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly more, but I know that this one is the better of the two. If you are a fan of masterfully made films, watch this film. It is a western, but its not the same thing.
Western Checklist (nowhere near official or scientific):
- Weird gang member names? The three gunmen at the beginning are named Stony, Snaky, and Knuckles.
- Beautiful landscapes? Yes. I honesty thought the whole film was shot in the US but the majority was shot in Italy. There was a sweeping shot of Monument Valley that was Leone's John Ford moment.
- Any terrified horses? No, there were some pheasants that looked like they totally got shot at the beginning though.
- How many Ernest Borgnines? Keenan Wynn appeared as the sheriff and didn't get much screen time. He played the lead in one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, A World of His Own.
- Were there any intense close ups of people's faces and eyes. Plenty and it was wonderful. I don't think I will every have a moment in my life where I will look as focused as Bronson or Fonda.
- Does it have a theme song with the name of the film in the title? No, but like I was saying above, the Morricone score is beautiful and shows more variety here than some of the other compositions I have heard.
- Bonus item: In honor of a man named Harmonica, I bring to you Bob's Burgers song about a fictional western character named Banjo.
Rating:
I am giving this 5 out of 5 tin stars. This is a sweeping epic that has great performances, beautiful composition of camera shots and sound design, and a wonderful score. No matter your predilection for westerns, you should watch Once Upon a time in the West.
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