Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West) is a 1968 epic Spaghetti Western film co-written and directed by Sergio Leone. It stars Henry Fonda, cast against type, as the villain, Charles Bronson as his nemesis, Claudia Cardinale as a newly widowed homesteader, and Jason Robards as a bandit. The screenplay was written by Sergio Donati and Leone, from a story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Leone. The widescreen cinematography was by Tonino Delli Colli, and the acclaimed film score was by Ennio Morricone.
Once Upon a Time in the West | |
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Theatrical release poster by Frank McCarthy | |
Directed by | Sergio Leone |
Produced by | Fulvio Morsella |
Screenplay by |
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Story by |
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Starring |
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Music by | Ennio Morricone |
Cinematography | Tonino Delli Colli |
Edited by | Nino Baragli |
Production companies |
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Distributed by |
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Release date |
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Running time | 165 minutes |
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Language | English |
Budget | $5 million |
Box office | $5,321,508 (US) 14,873,804 admissions (France) 13,000,000 admissions (Germany) |
After directing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone decided to retire from Westerns and desired to produce his film based on The Hoods, which eventually became Once Upon a Time in America. However, Leone accepted an offer from Paramount Pictures to provide access to Henry Fonda and to use a budget to produce another Western film. He recruited Bertolucci and Argento to devise the plot of the film in 1966, researching other Western films in the process. After Clint Eastwood turned down an offer to play the movie's protagonist, Bronson was offered the role. During production, Leone recruited Donati to rewrite the script due to concerns over time limitations.
The original version by the director was 166 minutes (2 hours and 46 minutes) when it was first released on December 21, 1968. This was the version that was to be shown in European cinemas and was a box office success. For the US release on May 28, 1969, Once Upon a Time in the West was edited down to 145 minutes (2 hours and 25 minutes) by Paramount and was a financial flop. The film is considered by some to be the first installment in Leone's Once Upon a Time Trilogy, followed by Duck, You Sucker!, called Once Upon a Time... the Revolution in parts of Europe, and Once Upon a Time in America, though the films do not share any characters in common.
In 2009, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Screenplay
The film portrays two conflicts that take place around Flagstone, a fictional town in the American Old West: a land battle related to construction of a railroad, and a mission of vengeance against a cold-blooded killer. A struggle exists for Sweetwater, a piece of land in the desert outside Flagstone which contains the region's only other water source. The land was bought by Brett McBain (Frank Wolff), who foresaw that the railroad would have to pass through that area to provide water for the steam locomotives. When crippled railroad tycoon Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) learns of this, he sends his hired gun Frank (Henry Fonda) to intimidate McBain to move off the land, but Frank instead kills McBain and his three children, planting evidence to frame the bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards). Meanwhile, a former prostitute (Claudia Cardinale) arrives at Flagstone from New Orleans, revealing that she is McBain's new wife and therefore owner of the land.
The film had opened with a mysterious harmonica-playing gunman (Charles Bronson), whom Cheyenne later dubs "Harmonica", shooting three men sent by Frank to kill him. In a roadhouse on the way to Sweetwater, where he also encounters Mrs McBain, Harmonica informs Cheyenne that the three gunfighters appeared to be posing as Cheyenne's men. Cheyenne arrives at Sweetwater soon after and both men seem attracted to Mrs McBain. Harmonica explains that, according to the contract of sale, she will lose Sweetwater unless the station is built by the time the track's construction crews reach that point, so Cheyenne puts his men to work building it.
Frank turns against Morton, who wants to make a deal with Mrs McBain, and immobilises him under guard on his private train out in the desert. Instead Mrs McBain allows Frank to seduce her, seemingly to save her life, and is then forced to sell her property in an auction where Frank's men intimidate the other bidders. Harmonica disrupts Frank's plan to keep the price down when he arrives, holding Cheyenne at gunpoint, and makes a much higher bid with the reward money for the wanted Cheyenne. But as Cheyenne is placed on a train bound for the Yuma prison, two members of his gang purchase one-way tickets for the train, intending to help him escape.
Morton now pays Frank's men to turn against him. However, Harmonica helps Frank kill them by directing his attention to their whereabouts from the room where Mrs McBain is taking a bath – to her outrage. On Frank's return to Morton's train he finds that Morton and his remaining men have been killed in a battle with Cheyenne's gang. Frank then goes to Sweetwater to confront Harmonica. On two occasions, Frank has asked him who he is, but both times Harmonica only answered with names of men "who were alive before they knew you". This time, Harmonica says he will reveal who he is "only at the point of dying".
As the two prepare for a gun duel, Harmonica's motive is revealed in a flashback. A younger Frank forces a boy to support his older brother on his shoulders, while his brother's neck is in a noose strung from an arch. As the boy struggles to hold his brother's weight, Frank stuffs a harmonica into the panting boy's mouth. The older brother curses Frank and the boy (who has grown up to be Harmonica) collapses to the ground. Back in the present, Harmonica draws first and stuffs his instrument into the dying Frank's mouth as a reminder.
At the house again, Harmonica and Cheyenne say goodbye to Mrs McBain, who is supervising construction of the railway station as the track-laying crews reach Sweetwater. As the two men ride off, Cheyenne falls, admitting that he was mortally wounded by Morton during the fight with Frank's gang. While Harmonica rides away with Cheyenne's dead body, the work train arrives and Mrs McBain carries water to the rail workers.
- Claudia Cardinale as Jill McBain
- Henry Fonda as Frank
- Jason Robards as Manuel "Cheyenne" Gutiérrez
- Charles Bronson as "Harmonica"
- Gabriele Ferzetti as Mr. Morton
- Paolo Stoppa as Sam, the Coachman
- Marco Zuanelli as Wobbles
- Keenan Wynn as the Sheriff of Flagstone
- Frank Wolff as Brett McBain
- Lionel Stander as the barman
- Woody Strode as Stony, first gunman
- Jack Elam as Snaky, second gunman
- Al Mulock as Knuckles, third gunman
- Enzo Santaniello as Timmy McBain
- Simonetta Santaniello as Maureen McBain
- Stefano Imparato as Patrick McBain
- Antonio Palombi as the old Stationmaster
- Claudio Mancini as brother of "Harmonica"
- Dino Mele as young "Harmonica"
- Michael Harvey as Frank's Lieutenant
- Benito Stefanelli as Frank's Lieutenant
- Aldo Sambrell as Cheyenne's Lieutenant
With the death of Gabriele Ferzetti in 2015, Claudia Cardinale is the sole surviving member of the film's main cast.
Origins
After making his American Civil War epic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone had intended to retire from making Westerns, believing he had said all he wanted to say. He had come across the novel The Hoods by the pseudonymous "Harry Grey", an autobiographical book based on the author's own experiences as a Jewish hood during Prohibition, and planned to adapt it into a film (this would eventually, seventeen years later, become his final film, Once Upon a Time in America). Leone though was offered only Westerns by the Hollywood studios. United Artists (who had produced the Dollars Trilogy) offered him the opportunity to make a film starring Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson, but Leone refused. However, when Paramount offered Leone a generous budget along with access to Henry Fonda—his favorite actor, and one whom he had wanted to work with for virtually all of his career—Leone accepted the offer.
Leone commissioned Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento—both of whom were film critics before becoming directors—to help him develop the film in late 1966. The men spent much of the following year watching and discussing numerous classic Westerns such as High Noon, The Iron Horse, The Comancheros, and The Searchers at Leone's house, and constructed a story made up almost entirely of "references" to American Westerns.
Ever since The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which originally ran for three hours, Leone's films were usually cut (often quite dramatically) for box office release. Leone was very conscious of the length of Once Upon a Time in the West during filming and later commissioned Sergio Donati, who had worked on several of Leone's other films, to help him refine the screenplay, largely to curb the length of the film towards the end of production. Many of the film's most memorable lines of dialogue came from Donati, or from the film's English dialogue adapter, expatriate American actor Mickey Knox.
Style and pacing
For Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone changed his approach over his earlier Westerns. Whereas the "Dollars" films were quirky and up-tempo, a celebratory yet tongue-in-cheek parody of the icons of the Wild West, this film is much slower in pace and sombre in theme. Leone's distinctive style, which is very different from, but very much influenced by, Akira Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata (1943), is still present but has been modified for the beginning of Leone's second trilogy, the so-called Once Upon a Time Trilogy. The characters in this film are also beginning to change markedly over their predecessors in the Dollars Trilogy. They are not quite as defined and, unusual for Leone characters up to this point, they begin to change (or at least attempt to) over the course of the story. This signals the start of the second phase of Leone's style, which would be further developed in Duck, You Sucker! and Once Upon a Time in America.
The film features long, slow scenes in which there is very little dialogue and little happens, broken by brief and sudden violence. Leone was far more interested in the rituals preceding violence than in the violence itself. The tone of the film is consistent with the arid semi-desert in which the story unfolds, and imbues it with a feeling of realism that contrasts with the elaborately choreographed gunplay.
Sergio Leone liked to tell the story of a cinema in Paris where the film ran uninterrupted for two years. When he visited this theatre, he was surrounded by fans who wanted his autograph, as well as the projectionist, who was less than enthusiastic. Leone claimed the projectionist told him "I kill you! The same movie over and over again for two years! And it's so SLOW!"
Locations
Most of the film was shot in Cinecittà studios, Rome. The brick arch where Bronson's character flashbacks to his youth and the original lynching incident was built near a small airport fifteen miles north of Monument Valley, in Utah and two miles from U.S. Route 163 (which links Gouldings Lodge and Mexican Hat). The opening sequence with the three gunmen meeting the train was one of the sequences filmed in Spain. Shooting for scenes at Cattle Corner Station, as the location was called in the story, was scheduled for four days and
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