Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon a Time in the West

Opening Shot

Three men wait at a train station. A fly buzzes. A windmill creaks. Water drips on a hat brim. Nobody speaks for twelve minutes. Tonino Delli Colli's camera holds on faces, dust, wood grain, the textures of boredom and anticipation. Ennio Morricone's score is absent. Leone opens with the most famous display of cinematic patience in the Western genre: everything you expect from the genre (the showdown, the gunfight, the resolution) withheld until the silence becomes unbearable. Then Charles Bronson's harmonica enters. Then the shooting starts. Then the title card.

What It Does

Delli Colli's widescreen compositions are designed for extreme close-ups and extreme wide shots with nothing in between. Faces fill the frame like landscapes. Landscapes dwarf the figures to insect scale. The middle distance, where normal human interaction happens, barely exists. Leone's visual grammar says something about the West: it's a place where people are either too close to each other or impossibly far apart.

Morricone composed the score before filming, and Leone directed scenes to the music rather than the other way around. The result is the most symbiotic director-composer relationship in cinema. Each major character has a theme (Bronson's harmonica, Claudia Cardinale's strings, Jason Robards's banjo, Henry Fonda's electric guitar), and the themes interact musically the way the characters interact narratively. When themes merge, allegiances shift. When a theme drops out, someone dies.

Henry Fonda's casting as the villain Frank is the film's most audacious choice. Leone wanted the audience to see the face of American heroism commit a child murder in the opening act, and Fonda's blue eyes do exactly what Leone intended: they make evil look like the thing you trusted. Frank doesn't enjoy cruelty. He performs it with the efficiency of a man doing his job, and the normality is what makes him terrifying.

Why It's on the List

Leone made the Western about its own mythology and then dismantled the mythology on screen. Once Upon a Time in the West is set in a frontier that is already dying (the railroad is coming, the gunfighters are obsolete), and every character knows it. The film is a funeral for a genre conducted in the genre's own visual language. It was dismissed as bloated on American release, cut by thirty minutes, and has since been recognized as the final, most complete statement in the Western canon.

The Argument Against

At 166 minutes, the pacing requires patience that the genre's audience traditionally doesn't bring. The plot, involving railroad land grabs and revenge, is actually quite simple, and Leone stretches scenes past the point where tension becomes duration for its own sake. Claudia Cardinale's Jill, while central to the narrative, functions more as a prize to be won or protected than as an agent of her own story. And the film's reverence for its own genre can tip into self-importance.

Closing Image

Jill brings water to the railroad workers. The town is being built. The West is becoming civilization. Bronson's Harmonica rides away. He has no place in what's coming. The camera cranes up to show the railroad stretching toward the horizon. Morricone's orchestra swells. The myth is over. The country continues without it.