The Great Alphabet of Films—O is For

Once Upon a Time in the West

      As a Scorsese loyalist, much like any made man, I can never pay respect to a film that robbed a Best Director Oscar (1980 Academy Awards) from Marty for his tremendous work on Raging Bull. The criminality of the Academy's heinous decision wreaks of the sordid criminality present in Henry Hill's breach of omertá in Goodfellas. The mafia doesn't look too kindly on Ordinary People. I'm sorry Robert Redford. As much as I love your work, especially in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I can't grant you my "O" spot. Kurt Russell's performance in Overboard is priceless, but the film is far from flawless. For the record, I'm a big fan of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's films (especially the first), but they don't garner placement either. So that leaves us with a double whammy of Once Upon a Times from Sergio Leone—Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America—the irreverent One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman), and the amazing, award-winning film that bequeathed future generations, with an eternal nugget of wisdom, about almost bein' a contenda, Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront. Oh, and Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) is terrific, but I'm a sucker for spaghetti westerns. 
      Therefore, without harboring any doubt, my selection is Sergio Leone's epic spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West. It wasn't an easy decision. But I had to stick to my Italian roots. As much as I don't want to wind up mistaking Joe Pesci for being funny, I also don't want to exclude Leone from my Alphabetic canyon of cinematic champions. His influence and talent remain unquestioned. 
      Once Upon a Time in the West is a nostalgic, methodical examination of Western culture; its heroes and its varied cultural undercurrents. Leone weaves his fable together in exquisite fashion, from a two-conflict narrative design, which operates quite plainly as a picturesque revenge story. In a deliberate effort to acquire prime railroad land in Sweetwater, a handicap railroad conglomerate named Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) hires a gang of mercenary assassins, led by blue-eyed ruffian, Frank (Henry Fonda). Under the ill-defined plans of the railroad Baron, the infamous gunslinger and his wretched band of outlaws annihilate the innocent, Sweetwater property owners, Brett McBain (Frank Wolff) and his family. To the utter consternation of Morton, McBain's newly arrived bride Jill (Claudia Cardinale), inherits the plum property. Cheyenne (Jason Robards), a modest outlaw and the unrelenting, notoriously enigmatic Harmonica (Charles Bronson), strike an informal pledge to protect Jill, and consequently, circumvent Frank's plans to seize her land. As alliances and betrayals mutate with increasing intensity, it becomes clear that Harmonica's obsessive fascination with Frank derives from another place of motivation entirely. 

      Much like his Dollars trilogy, Leone revamps the hackneyed, western blueprint by wielding his trademark arsenal of visual gusto—intense close-up and painterly long shots. This careful remodeling leads to a genuine, cinematic merger defined by sprawling railways, beautiful, widescreen landscapes, and a splendid, motley crew of characters. Once Upon a Time in the West is eclectic in dramatic detail, embracing the plots of at least a half-dozen Westerns. Among those who are credited with the story and screenplay is Leone himself and Bernardo Bertolucci, one of the most original Italian moviemakers of his time. Consequently, their dual craftsmanship bleeds a vigorous originality while cherishing movie styles and attitudes from the past. The end result leads to some of the purest movie exchanges to ever grace the big screen, especially when Henry Fonda confronts one of his men for betraying a confidence. "You can trust me," says the man. Fonda's reply: "How can I trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? He don't even trust his own pants."

      An ode to the fading American frontier, Leone's epic is set against the backdrop of the fast, encroaching railroad, which signals the dominant emergence of Industrialization. And with progress, these capitalistic locomotives carry death—death for the American West's unpolluted beauty, death for the harsh individualism of yesteryear, and death to the Old West cowboy. Leone, in his truest form, is a cinematic stylist, who has forged a tremendous career out of transforming melodramatic genre pictures into feral, fierce, and destructive statements about the country that had inspired his cinematic dreams. West's starling epic dramatizes that fateful instant when the Old West of gunslingers and shootouts mutated into the New West of manifest destiny-inspired avarice and exploitation. 

      Leone's grand fairy-tale is an amalgam of history and myth. He deposits this watershed moment of American expansionism, as a parable about the death of the Western itself. His devotion to classic Western iconography and archetypes is a stark departure from his earlier, revisionist westerns, which were famous for subverting the traditional western tropes (such as the noble, unadulterated cowboy). There are similarities between the characters in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, such as Charles Bronson's stoic harmonica-playing loner whose reminiscent of Eastwood's "Good " Man with No Name. But unlike his previous work—much like Henry Fonda's  standard good guy reversal, instead, playing a crude villain complete with his virtuous blue eyes—Leone eschews the pervasive immorality that gave his earlier films their avant-garde audacity, choosing not to restore western clichés, but to assimilate them into material components of his marvelous mise-en-scène. 
      This architecture is validated from the film's gripping opening sequence, in which a trio of rugged killers quietly awaits the arrival of a train at a derelict local station. The men, with the soaked swashbuckle and drenched villainy of desperados, are stock characters from a million other westerns. The way Leone orchestrates their waiting game, however, is something analogous to Mozart's arrangement of Messiah—awe-inspiring perfection. Using a mixture of intense close-ups, (Leone's signature styling touch) and artisanal long shots, and by casting the scene in unbroken silence (heightening the effect of the natural environment's sounds), Leone instills this perfunctory setup with unchecked grandiosity.
      When the train finally arrives with Bronson aboard, Leone marries Ennio Morricone's hauntingly powerful guitar riffs—an extraordinary usage of leitmotif resulting in one of my favorite, all-time scores—to a magnifient deep-focus shot angled upward from the ground near the trio's boots, with Bronson a miniscule but nonetheless imposing speck in the distance. The effect is a transcendent moment that encapsulates the quintessential, distressing instance in all westerns that occurs right before all hell breaks loose. 
      Claudia Cardinale, the feisty and gorgeous widow of McBain, matches the subtleties of Leone's dexterous direction. He uses his magnetic, mythical pacing to routinely tantalize us with whispers of things to come—and Cardinale's intricate performance embellishes this tone, and more powerfully, so does Bronson's. For instance, the identity of the man present in Harmonica's visions remains shrouded in an unfocused fog, so that Leone may manipulate his audience without revealing too much information too soon.
      Leon's epic eulogy to Western cinema is also an enthralling tribute to the dissolution of the mythical Wild West. The script's solemn style and tragic romanticism is an enchanting interplay between appearance and sound—marked by the dominant tone of forlorn resignation over the industrialist's arrival. Morton, who doesn't entirely agree with Frank's mechanisms, isn't vile. Instead, he is pathetic. His quest to trample through the West is portrayed, not as reprehensible, but merely inevitable—the first in a long line of capitalists plundering the land, in which Frank embodies the hideousness, corruption, and immorality of the Old World. 
      Frank's inability to blend Old World (shoot first, ask questions later) and New World (money is your weapon) developments, ultimately, leads to his demise: "You've learned some new ways," Harmonica tells Frank before their climactic showdown, "even if you haven't given up the old ways." Harmonica and Cheyenne, like Frank, are relics of an extinct species that cannot exist in the prospering modern world. In their weather-beaten dust jackets, gaudy leather boots, and signature Stetson hats, these wandering, mythic gladiators accept their fateful destinies and, with a mixture of anguish and adamancy, ride off into legend—the legend of Leone's final masterpiece to the antiquated Western. In its totality, Once Upon a Time in the West is a melodic masterwork, deserving of its legend-making title. 

*The epic trailer for Once Upon a Time in the West

Source Quotes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064116/quotes