Once Upon A Time... (3)

"They were all alive until they met you, Frank."- Harmonica

Leone's coup in Once Upon a Time in the West was persuading Henry Fonda to play not just a bad guy, but someone inherently evil, suggested by his penchant for black suits and casual murder.

The camera pan around to his famous baby blues after massacring Jill's family still induces shivers, but for an audience who knew Fonda only as the epitome of Western virtue the shock would have been akin to Tom Hanks playing a paedophile.

Frank is a complex man who wants the power and wealth that comes with the surface respectability of corrupt rail tycoon Morton. But, in this particularly moral Western, Frank has murdered and anyone packing iron has no place in the brave new world.

Charles Bronson has the thankless task of taking on the Eastwood "Man with No Name" role, and could be argued as the film's weak link.

Following Eastwood's iconic performance in the Dollars films and facing down Henry Fonda requires an actor of greater stature - imagine Paul Newman in the role, two pairs of electric blue eyes standing off.

Bronson's major strength is his ethereal presence. In one of the many different versions of the film the scene when Harmonica patches himself up after being winged in the opening shoot-out is missing, the suggestion being he did perish but not even death can stop his vengeful appointment with Frank. Bronson's graceful movements and understated performance give him a ghostly quality that bears out this theory.

Leone took John Ford's maxim of the human face being the most fascinating landscape, and populates the film with authentic looking visages - using some of that $5m budget on Monument Valley location shooting and recreating a Western town on the Spanish plains to place those faces in.

As Jill, the only Leone woman who can match the men, Claudia Cardinale is given the toughest role: an embodiment of hope for the future. Often shot near or in water, and owner of the Sweetwater ranch with its natural spring, she literally brings life to the desert.

In most Leone films women are either Madonnas or whores, here Jill is both. A working girl from New Orleans who sees the chance of a new life in the West, by the film's close she is mother to the new world.

Stateside Once Upon a Time in the West was a critical and commercial flop on first release. Not a Heaven's Gate sized disaster, but Variety's bemused dismissal typical of original reactions.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had been a hit in the US but still suffered truncation, so Once Upon a Time in the West, paid for with American dollars, was not going to escape the "extra-showing per day" scissors.

Like that other classic oft-tampered with Western The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West surfaced throughout the seventies and eighties in different versions, before finally settling into its current 165 minute approved cut, although whether this represents Sergio's vision remains hotly debated.

However, like The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life, Once Upon a Time in the West has undergone critical re-evaluation in the decades since release, and is no.19 in the IMdb's Top 250, and has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating - a far cry from those early notices.

The film has also influenced directors from John Milius to John Carpenter to Joe Dante, and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford's takes its myth-busting directly from Leone's operatic classic, Brad Pitt's black clad James a cinematic descendent of Fonda's Frank.

Revealing something new on each viewing, Leone has created an evergreen classic that might not be as bouncy as his Dollars film, but rarely was the West writ so large. After Once Upon a Time in the West he would complete only two more credited feature films in the next sixteen years, A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon A Time in America, which make up an official "America" trilogy.

All are unmistakably "A Sergio Leone film".

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