| Like any western worth its saltlick, Sergio Leone’s 1969 masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West is punctuated by several tense showdowns between good and evil. What distinguishes Leone’s film from most others, though, is that these moral confrontations don’t always take place between rival gunslingers squaring off at high noon – instead, they are just as likely to play out within the psyche of a character at any given time.
It’s no secret that Leone’s spaghetti westerns are distinguished by the director’s audacious use of extreme close-ups – shots of his actors that reveal every pore and pockmark in the surfaces of their faces or fill up the entire screen with their steely eyes. Previously, Leone had cut between such shots to create tension in the gunfight sequences in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), but in Once Upon a Time in the West, close-ups are also used in counterpoint to the film’s majestic landscape cinematography, and they accentuate Leone’s preoccupation with the psychology of his characters.
And what a wild, troubled bunch they are. Charles Bronson is the man with the harmonica, an anonymous gunman bent on revenge. Henry Fonda, cast against type, is the sadistic killer who aspires to a more respectable sort of villainy. Jason Robards is the outlaw trying to mend his ways and leave his past behind. Gabriele Ferzetti is the robber baron, who pillages all and sundry in the name of nation building. And Claudia Cardinale, one of the great screen goddesses of her generation in her greatest role ever, is the New Orleans hooker struggling against all of them to hang on to her heart of gold in the Arizona desert.
By shooting many of the film’s exteriors on location in Monument Valley, where the great John Ford had earlier shot many of his famous dusters, Leone shows us that his characters are pitted not just against each other but also against the harshness of the landscape. In an environment of sagebrush and sand baked hard under an unforgiving sun, survival is never guaranteed. Nature cares little whether you’re a good guy in white or a bad guy in black, and even in Technicolor, this is one picture concerned with the greyer areas of the moral spectrum.
With its combination of pessimistic naturalism and psychological tension, Once Upon a Time in the West turned many archetypes of the western genre on its head. Although it romanticizes the Old West and the code of honour among outlaws, the film is also fairly cynical with respect to the corruption of the frontier spirit by the introduction of industrialism. Of course, there were entire nations of people wiped out by that frontier spirit before the industrial capitalists arrived, but in Leone’s version of the story the arrival of the railroad at the frontier marks a historic change in the way of life for the pioneers.
Still, this focus on the corrupting power of wealth is politically subversive, perhaps more so now than it was in 1969. Leone wasn’t just harnessing the mythomania inherent in the western in order to reinvent the genre – he was espousing a philosophy that suggests we all have evil in our hearts that we must face if civilization is going to flourish.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention composer Ennio Morricone’s innovative score, which employs distinct motifs for each main character and makes bold use of amplified natural sound at several key junctures. The film looks and sounds great on this special edition DVD from Paramount, but it would be preferable to see Once Upon a Time in the West re-released theatrically again soon. No matter how good your home entertainment system, there’s nothing like seeing Tonino Delli Colli’s masterful Techniscope photography on the big screen.
Also, Paramount has stretched limited extras way too far with this two-disc package – there’s too much overlap between the making-of documentaries and the commentary track. Nevertheless, the colourful anecdotes from Cardinale, Delli Colli and Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling are a nice addition. |
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