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August 27, 2005
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
by Grouchy
As film buffs, we've seen a lot of movies. Too many of them. And, obviously, some of them stay on our mind more than others. Mentally, subconsciously, we've been making a personal library of movies we carry around with us all the time. And our brain activates them with a keyword that has different meaning for every one of us. When someone says "western", I think of Sergio Leone and his Once upon a time in the West. I watched it shortly after The good, the bad and the ugly, in the middle of my big Leone craze, and I just couldn't believe a movie this perfect was capable of being for real. I still can't.
In 1966, Leone did his masterpiece, the symbol of spaguetti western The good, the bad and the ugly. His only next wish was to pursue the life-long dream of giving the gangster genre the same treatment with what would become Once upon a time in America. Still, shit doesn't always turn out the way you like it and, contractually, Leone was forced to do at least one more western before getting the cash for his gangster project. Uninterested, Leone was lucky enough to run into two of his biggest fans, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, and all three of them co-wrote a story that strives to be the ultimate crepuscular western for a new era - and succeeds.
Plot-wise (not that Leone loves sticking to the plot), the movie is about Claudia Cardinale's Jill McBain, a prostitute disguised as a lady that comes from New Orleans to marry Ed, a man with a lot of money and naive at heart. She finds out two things - Ed has been killed and there isn't that much money, just a bunch of dirt near a well of water. The plot thickens. Ed has been killed by sadistic villain Frank, brilliant casting with Henry Fonda, working as an associate to the railroad people, but evidence has been planted that sets everyone after the trail of charming bandit Cheyenne, played by Jason Robards. Yet more complicated, there's a mysterious guy playing a harmonica at all the wrong moments in town, and he's frigging Charlie Bronson to boot.
The movie takes place in the last days of the traditional western, where gunslingers are old, weary and tired and there aren't too many of them left, what with shooting each other so often and such. At the same time, the men with the money are coming from the big cities in the East, with a new idea - the railroad - and the means to build it. The three male leads are from the old school, people who have been under the sun a lot and solve their problems with their guns. "So you found out you're not a business man after all?", Bronson asks Fonda. "Nope - just a man". "An ancient race". It's clear which party is winning the unseen battle this time, though, and the movie focuses on them, the old, dying legends of the western. Every character in the movie seems very aware that he's going to die very soon, and their actions are often not so much about survival as they are about playfully spending their last days being themselves while the world leaves them behind. Leone himself liked to call it an opera of Death.
And, like, a good opera, it's all about the sounds. I don't think I've ever seen a movie that makes a better use of music (and sounds) than West. From the beginning, a long, fascinating, gloriously pointless sequence of cowboys standing around without any music, just amplified ambient sound, to the great peaks of the most epic Morricone score, this is a movie that looks great, but sounds even better. At times, sounds are used in unnatural ways that defy logic. When Cheyenne leaves Harmonica at the bar, he stops when he hears Bronson pull off a false note. It's not only impossible to do that with a harmonica, it's also ridiculous that the sound could be interpreted as a signal of challenge, yet the illusion that's the basic ingredient of Leone cinema makes it a shocking moment - we buy into the importance of that sound. The score is one of the greatest ever composed. There's an explanation to how great it fits, too, which I learned watching the extras on the DVD. This is the famous movie in which Leone actually played the score while the movie was being shot and had the actors move to its rythm. The music is not the compliment for the film - it creates it, like the random fantasy it's supposed to be.
It's the same way with the performances. Performances in Leone cinema are not restricted to great thespians. Leone is actually dressing up figures, icons of cinema he loves. Charles Bronson is not Clint Eastwood - his tough guy image actually comes with the package, it's not the result of good acting. Yet, because Leone has found him the part of his life and directs him step by step, little gesture by little gesture, he totally shines as Harmonica. Jason Robards, who is a great actor, appears to be in the same level. The movie is so well directed in that sense that it seems to spring completely from Leone's head, and I honestly believe it must be the most fucking blatant example of authorship in cinema ever.
Comparing this to the previous westerns by Leone is the old apples and oranges sentence. West is definitively less dynamic, less funny, less cartoonish. It has other qualities - it's much more of an intellectual's movie. Even the slow, epic pacing, which had been evolving since Leone's first film A fistful of dollars, is here much more of a joke, and sometimes the opposite effect is accomplished by telling the most important stuff in a few cuts and doing enormously long sequences about nothing that are pure style and nothing else. Leone's obsession with human faces continues. Cutting from widescreen landscapes to widescreen shots of squinting eyes and meaningful gestures, the movie hints at some pretty deep poetic shit when it juxtaposes Bronson's mug with the wide view of the desert. One man's face is the entire world for Leone.
The movie was succesful, yet controversial. It's not the awesome, energetic crowd-pleaser The good, the bad and the ugly is. In fact, it barely qualifies as a spaguetti western. Some people just didn't know what the hell to do with it back in '68. While it's openly a movie about America and its birth (much anticipating Scorsese's Gangs of NY on its cynic, bloody way of showing progress), Americans didn't get it and butchered the key scenes for its release, arguing it was too slow. This was not the mess they did with Leone's actual America epic, but it still sucks. The film was not even all that acclaimed in Italy. The French got it quicker than anyone else, as usual, and then it became trendy, and then the true classic it deserves to be. And, much later, it became one of my favorite movies and one of the most pleasant times I've found in cinema.
Posted by astor at August 27, 2005 09:36 PM