Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon a Time in the West is about the same thing as today's first film, with the word "sound" replaced by "railroad".

Its central proposition is that the West did not die in a gunfight; it died of infrastructure. Wherever the railroad went, the land acquired a price, and once somebody was willing to pay money for a patch of desert with water on it, guns stopped mattering. The villain of the film is not killing for gold — he wants a route to the Pacific.

And by 1968, when Leone made it, the American Western had itself run out of road. So he did something unusually self-conscious: he brought in Bertolucci and Argento, and the group spent a year at Leone's house watching classic American Westerns (High Noon, The Iron Horse, The Comancheros, The Searchers) before assembling a story out of references to those films. The result is a Western and an elegy for the Western at once — a film that buries its own genre.

Set beside Singin' in the Rain, it shows two different routes to the same conclusion: one film shoots "how an era becomes obsolete" with laughter, the other with silence; one in 103 minutes, one in 165.

The second reason is genre coverage. The archive holds sixteen films, and there is no musical and no Western in it at all — the two largest genre holes on the list, closed today. To be honest about it: today's choice is genre-driven, not region-driven. Both films are rooted in the United States (this one is an Italian-American co-production), and regional coverage does not change today.

The third reason is internal to the archive: the 1968 slot already holds 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also 1968, also a film whose entire scale is established by an opening passage with almost no dialogue — the ten-minute wait that opens this film and the Dawn of Man sequence are the same grammar.

铁路正在往西修。修到哪里，哪里就变成地图上的一个名字。

Jill McBain 从新奥尔良来到西部一个叫 Sweetwater 的地方。她嫁给了一个叫 Brett McBain 的男人，但她下车的时候，站台上没有人接她——她等来的是一队骑马的人，和一栋刚刚出过事的房子。

Brett McBain 在 Sweetwater 买了一块地。那块地很荒，只有一口水。但铁路要从那里过。

同一条线上还有三个人：一个吹口琴的陌生人（Charles Bronson），一直在等一个叫 Frank 的人；一个叫 Cheyenne 的土匪（Jason Robards），被指控了一件不是他做的事；还有一个眼睛是蓝的、笑起来很温和的男人（Henry Fonda），他叫 Frank。

五个人，一条铁路，一块有水的荒地。

（这里不再往下说。）

A Western assembled out of references

Late in 1966 Leone commissioned Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento to help him develop a treatment. Over the following year the group watched a large number of classic American Westerns at Leone's house — High Noon, The Iron Horse, The Comancheros, The Searchers — and discussed them.

The story they built is almost entirely composed of references to American Westerns. This is not a gesture of homage; it is a method. Leone wanted to use the symbols American cinema had manufactured in order to tell a story about those symbols ceasing to work.

Even the place names come from this process. The town is called "Sweetwater"; Bertolucci said he had looked at a map of the American Southwest, found the name in Arizona, and decided to use it. Both "Sweetwater" and "McBain" appear in The Comancheros.

Putting the screen's best good man in the role of the villain

Henry Fonda refused Leone's first invitation. Leone flew to New York to persuade him, and what he said was this:

"Imagine: the camera shows a gunman from the waist down, drawing and shooting a running child. Then it tilts up to the gunman's face — and it is Henry Fonda."

Fonda had never seen any of Leone's films, including the Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood, so Leone had him watch all three. Fonda also consulted his friend Eli Wallach, who had worked on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Wallach told him to take it: "You'll have the time of your life."

He arrived on set wearing brown contact lenses and a moustache, thinking dark eyes and a beard would heighten the character's evil. Leone immediately had both removed: he did not want Fonda to look like a stock villain. He wanted that familiar, reassuring face, unaltered, placed inside the least forgivable act in the film.

It is the clearest instance of Leone ironically rewriting the American Western tradition.

The music came before the images

Ennio Morricone composed the entire score before shooting began, at Leone's instruction, and it was played on set for the actors during filming.

There is a symmetry worth noting here: in both of today's films the music predates the film. Singin' in the Rain was built around a catalogue of songs written between 1929 and 1939; Once Upon a Time in the West had its score finished before a foot of film was shot, and Leone staged scenes to it. One film treats music as its subject (how cinema learned to speak); the other treats music as its blueprint (sound first, images after).

The opening ten minutes: nothing happens, and everything happens

The film opens on an almost wordless wait: three men at a derelict station, waiting for a train.

Leone uses natural sound — a windmill turning without stopping, water dripping from the roof onto a hat brim, cicadas, pigeons taking flight, gunshots, and a harmonica (diegetic sound: the characters hear it too). Apart from about a minute of the "Judgment" motif, there is no music at all until the second scene ends and Henry Fonda first appears.

It is one of the hardest treatments of waiting ever put on film. What it wants is not suspense but the weight of time itself.

The railroad is capitalism

The villain's motive does not follow the usual Western logic. Frank is a killer for hire, but behind him stands Mr. Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), a railroad capitalist who is dying — and what he wants is not gold but a route to the Pacific, and the right to price every parcel of land along it.

The real conflict is therefore not good against evil but a collision between two scales of time: one measured in the speed of a draw, the other in miles of track laid. The second always wins. That is where the film's tragedy lies, and what makes it colder than other Westerns.

A film that failed in America first

It premiered in Rome on 20 December 1968 and opened in Italy on 21 December, in Leone's original 165-minute version.

In Europe it was an enormous success: the biggest film of 1969 in France, with 14.8 million admissions, seventh in French film history; 13 million admissions in Germany, third in German film history. It even triggered a short-lived duster-coat fashion, to the point that department stores in Paris put notices on escalators warning customers to keep their long hems clear of the steps.

In the United States, Paramount cut it to roughly 145 minutes and it failed, taking $2.1 million in North America. The US version removed: the entire Lionel Stander trading-post scene; the Morton–Frank scene at Navajo Cliffs discussing what to do with Jill; much of Morton's death; and Cheyenne's death, cut completely. The only passage that is longer in the US version is Harmonica getting to his feet after the opening duel — Leone had cut it, and the American distributors put it back for fear audiences would not understand.

Roger Ebert gave it 2.5 stars out of 4 in 1969, complaining about the length and the confusing plot. He later changed his mind, calling it "an unqualified masterpiece" in his Great Movies essay on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Where it stands now

• Selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2009
• Sight & Sound 2012 poll: No. 78 with critics, No. 44 with directors
• Empire's 2008 "500 Greatest Movies": No. 14 — the highest-ranked Western on that list
• Rotten Tomatoes: 96% from 68 reviews, average 9.1/10. Metacritic: 82/100 from 9 critics
• Directors who have cited it as an influence include Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino and Vince Gilligan; Paul Schrader called it "one of the greatest films ever made"
• A 4K restoration was released by the Cineteca di Bologna in 2018

Which "trilogy" it belongs to

This is the first film of Leone's "Once Upon a Time" trilogy, followed by Duck, You Sucker! and Once Upon a Time in America. The three films share no characters. What they share is the proposition: how an era ends.