ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969) C widescreen 165m dir: Sergio Leone

w/Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards Jr., Charles Bronson, Frank Wolff, Gabriele Ferzetti, Keenan Wynn, Paolo Stoppa, Marco Zuanelli, Lionel Stander

This iconoclastic fable is spaghetti-western wizard Sergio Leone's best film: it's stylized homicide on the range. The rather convoluted plot involves a mysterious man who is being tracked down by desperados sent by an evil gunslinger. The script is by Leone and Sergio Donati, based on a story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Leone.

From The Movie Guide: "Sergio Leone's masterpiece. In ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Leone pulls together all the themes, characterizations, visuals, humor, and musical experiments of the three 'Dollars' films [A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, and THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY] and comes up with a true epic western. It is a stunning, operatic film of breadth, detail, and stature that deserves to be considered among the greatest westerns ever made. Although the original release in America was a severely edited version (Paramount wanted to cram an extra show in every night to sell more popcorn), the film was rereleased, uncut, in 1984. (The videotape version is also uncut.) ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST's credit sequence is perhaps one of the most famous in cinema history. ... Casting baby blue-eyed, open-faced Fonda, with that underlying edge of hardness which Leone loved in Fonda's John Ford films, as a ruthless killer was a stroke of genius. His best bits: Frank's [Fonda] murder of a little boy, and the finale with the harmonica. Another major distinction is [Ennio] Morricone's brilliant score, featuring distinct themes for each of the four main characters (tuneless harmonica for Bronson, biting electric guitar for Fonda, humorous banjo for Robards's charming outlaw, and a lush, romantic score for Cardinale). What is really striking, though, is is that Morricone based his composition on the script rather than shot footage, and Leone had his cast adapt their body rhythms to the score. The paths Leone was struggling to develop in his previous three westerns finally merge and take shape here. Called a 'dance of death' by some critics who picked up on the strange relationship between the music and the actors, the film is an operatic eulogy for the western hero."