Once Upon A Time...
In Focus is a new collection of articles focussing on an important film appearing on Sky Movies Classics that month. In-depth, analytical and revealing, In Focus aims to shed new light on old films. To get a seat at the table, all we ask is the film be one of the finest examples of its genre.Focus No.1 is Sergio Leone's masterful horse opera, Once Upon a Time in the West.
"People scare better when they're dying." - Frank
If Sergio Leone had had his way, Once Upon a Time in the West would never have happened. The world would have got Once Upon A Time In America over a decade and a half earlier, but Leone's requiem for the violent West (and the Hollywood Western) would have been lost.
But, success is never forgiven, and when The Good, the Bad and the Ugly went stellar around the globe Leone was courted by Hollywood to make another Western.
Offered a $5 budget by Paramount Studios (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was made for approximately $1.2m) and the chance to work with Henry Fonda, Leone finally signed on to do another horse opera.
Once Upon a Time in the West was to be a modern Western; Leone intended his film to be pessimistic, an elegy for the Old West and the death of the gunfighter, an epic tale of how the new West would be run.
For the first time he would shoot in Monument Valley, that rocky red dust landscape immortalized by John Ford, and chose the beginning of America as the crux of his tale.
This would also be the culmination of Leone's obsessions with the West, his visual flamboyance, the unity of music and pictures, the instant creation of legends.
To achieve this he hired two young turks, Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, then working as film critics but who would become celebrated directors in their own right.
The three Italian cinephiles spent a year screening and discussing Westerns to make what has been called the world's first post-modern movie. But, unlike current achingly ironic post-modern films, Once Upon A Time In The West can be enjoyed with no knowledge of its references.
Quoting from up to thirty classic Westerns, Leone, Argento and Bertolucci carved out a story as mythic as the Monument Valley peaks and plains Leone insisted on shooting.
While The Good, the Bad and the Ugly boasted three central characters, the follow-up movie went one better, with four characters inexorably drawn together on the remote ranch of Sweetwater. This fourth character is female, giving Claudia Cardinale the honour of being the sole woman to play a main character in a Leone movie.
For a long movie, Once Upon a Time in the West tells a simple tale; despite its two and a half hour plus running time, there are only sixteen pages of dialogue.
In the town of Flagstone three gunmen await the arrival of Harmonica (Charles Bronson) who has arranged a meeting with their boss, the lethal gunslinger Frank (Henry Fonda). Frank is in the employ of crippled, corrupt rail tycoon Morton, who wishes to grab all prime real estate in the West so he can lay his own tracks.
Before Jill (Cardinale) arrives at her husband's ranch of Sweetwater he and his children are gunned down by Frank, who pins the murders on the romantic rogue Cheyenne (Jason Robards). While Cheyenne forms a fragile bond with Jill and Harmonica separately, Harmonica's unblinking gaze is fixed on a showdown with Frank to right a terrible wrong.
During the course of the film, these four characters will change each others lives and themselves be changed forever, some winding up on the wrong end of a gunshot.
