Monday Movie Review: Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) 10/10
Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) comes to join her new husband on his farm. But when she arrives he and his three children are dead. Three gunmen are converging on the farm: Frank (Henry Fonda) killed the McBain family. Cheyenne (Jason Robards) is a wanted killer who behaves gently towards Jill, and "Harmonica" (Charles Bronson) is a sharpshooter with mysterious motives. Directed by Sergio Leone.

I like watching highly-regarded movies, and I like Westerns. So there was no way I could skip this one. But at first I had a certain amount of misgiving. I expected, I guess, misogyny; abuse of the one woman on-screen. Instead, I found that Once Upon a Time in the West is actually very much a woman's movie, at least one told from the woman's point of view, which can be said of very few Westerns indeed.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the film is feminist—not even close. Co-writer Bernardo Bertolucci has said that Leone didn't want this viewpoint, and then wanted to sex it up. As it is, Jill is a former whore (of course), and at the end, her viewpoint is skewed, although until then, I found her remarkably human and affecting in ways that Western women don't often get to be.

So what's the movie like? Well, it's a masterpiece. It's complex and subtle. Leone is lavish in allowing his actors to simply be, long, long closeups of Jill's sorrowful eyes, of Harmonica's icy-cold ones, slow establishing shots that linger on detail, while exposition takes place off-camera. I didn't catch everything that was happening, but I'm okay with that. The plot construction was thoughtful, and if I didn't keep up, well, that's what thinking it over the next day is for.

Henry Fonda: Villain. I'm guessing that's what people talked about in 1969, and it's worthy of discussion. He's amazing and terrifying. All the actors are great, but Fonda is the most surprising, in a role no one else would give him. Jason Robards is touching, and Gabriele Ferzetti (a Bond fanatic favorite) is fascinating.

The movie is sweeping in its themes; it's about greed, revenge, loss, and finding a way to live in a hard world. The four leads move in different directions, each seeking something only peripherally connected to the others, but all drawn together. You can see that some characters are bad, but it's hard to say who's good. This West is a morally ambiguous place, not because people are amoral (although some are) but because "every (wo)man for him(her)self" is constant and crucial. There's also a certain subtle mockery of the "code of the West" going on; a certain heightened ridiculousness to the long slow build up towards shoot-outs. Not that it's camp, or satire, but rather that it's seen for being kind of crazy, which it is. Over-amped. The idea, then, of trying to find a way to be decent, of finding some sort of peacefulness, however compromised, seems all the more worthwhile, and some of our characters seem like they might find just that.

The action is outstanding. There's a fight on a moving train that is flat out thrilling, and a showdown in town that is purely classic.

Once Upon a Time in the West is a movie I'd very much like to see on the big screen, with a big bucket of popcorn and some hardcore movie buffs as company. It's a movie that needs to be lingered over.

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