Once Upon A Time... (2)
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.
"Do you know anything about a guy going around playing the harmonica?" - Cheyenne
More than any other Sergio Leone Western, Once Upon a Time in the West is operatic, a literal horse opera.
Ennio Morricone wrote the score before shooting began (something Leone had wanted on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly but had not been possible) and the film's mood was dictated by this music.
Whereas Morricone and Leone had been in a playful mood for the Dollars trilogy, the music here is a darker affair. Each character has a theme and Harmonica's and Frank's have "something to do with death".
Even Jill's theme, while lighter, is a choral lament for her dead family and the life denied her. Only Cheyenne 's theme, a jaunty number reflecting his roguish nature recalls the pulp mastery of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, yet is frequently interrupted by sudden danger.
While a perfect fusion of sound and image, Leone realized the score's stately pace put him in danger of making a five hour movie. He recruited Sergio Donati, who had previously done an uncredited polish on For A Few Dollars More, to tighten the script but this remains the spaghetti Western responsible for the genre's snails-pace reputation.
Characters move deliberately, speak only when necessary and brave amounts of information is conveyed through gesture and eye movement - Leone loves his characters' eyes in this film almost as much as his Monument Valley vistas. 
Gunfights are not the scrappy, messy and brief explosions of revisionist history, they are rituals with unspoken rules of engagement and the whole world stands still for them. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review at the time, "Why hurry at good shout-out?"
Here Leone reveals the true influences on his movie: the Japanese masters Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. While the film references oaters from John Ford's epic silent The Iron Horse to the snappy cult favourite 3:10 To Yuma, its tempo and mood are more in synch with Seven Samurai, another film that lamented the death of the warrior, pushed out of place and time by progress.
Tellingly, Seven Samurai was remade as the evergreen The Magnificent Seven and Leone's own A Fistful of Dollars began life as Kurosawa's Yojimbo.
Like Kurosawa's duelling samurai, Leone's gunfighters spend as much time circling each other, reading each others movements, as they do getting on with the business of killing.
Other Westerns Leone threw into the mix were John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers, Johnny Guitar and High Noon.
Yet, his mastery of the genre by this point and his brilliance with a camera meant that Once Upon A Time in the West would eventually eclipse most of the films that had inspired Leone.
The famed ten minute opening sequence, the family massacre, the revelatory flashbacks and epic final shot are moments that crystallize the genre's grandeur.
