Once upon a Time in the West (1968)

Sergio Leone’s operatic widescreen elegy to the old American West, with the forces of corporate capitalism coming down the railroad.

Sergio Leone brought international renown to Italian spaghetti westerns with his violent ‘Dollars’ trilogy. Written in collaboration with Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, his next film was an epic compendium of borrowed situations from the cowboy films he loved.

Beginning with a bravura, drawn-out prologue in which gunmen await the arrival of the noon train, Once upon a Time is a story of the ruthless advance of the railroad and of the dangerous men, including the mysterious Harmonica (Charles Bronson), caught up in the struggle for power.

Slow, tense showdown sequences are made electrifying by Leone’s distended widescreen compositions and Ennio Morricone’s score, which favours each of the protagonists with their own motif. Henry Fonda plays against type as the rail company’s sadistic gun-for-hire.

“It may not be the definitive western, but it might just be the most western: part parody, part eulogy, part apotheosis, Once upon a Time in the West is every narrative and formal cliché, every grandiose gesture, every ambiguous, every subversive, every troubling commentary on American history that its parent genre deals in condensed into a sumptuously operatic melodrama that stands tall as one of the most purely cinematic spectacles ever put to film.” Alan Mattli

1968 Italy, USA
Directed by
Sergio Leone
Produced by
Fulvio Morsella, Sergio Leone
Written by
Sergio Donati, Sergio Leone
Featuring
Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards
Running time
168 minutes

Ranked in The Greatest Films of All Time poll

Sight and Sound

Who voted for Once upon a Time in the West

Critics

Lucy Bolton
UK
Guido Bonsaver
Italy/UK
Philip Brophy
Australia
Adrian Danks
Australia
Tom Dawson
UK
Jean-Philippe Domecq
France
Jordan Farley
UK
Wostry Ferenc
Hungary
Zalaba Ferenc
Hungary
José Fuentes Navarro
Argentina
Julian Hanich
Netherlands
Kevin Harley
UK
James Harrison
UK
Jamie Healy
UK
Maori Holmes
USA
Bruce Isaacs
Australia
Gábor Köves
Hungary
Jan Langlo
Norway
Tim Lucas
USA
Alan Mattli
Switzerland
Varja Močnik
Slovenia
Kim Morgan
USA
Meaghan Morris
Australia
Nikolaj Nikitin
Germany
Marko Njegić
Croatia
Xavier Pillai
UK
Katie Rife
USA
Joshua Rothkopf
USA
Yael Shuv
Israel
Anne Thompson
USA
Marcos Vieytes
Argentina

Directors

Sanjay Leela Bhansali
India
Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
France
Mong-Hong Chung
Taiwan
Thomas Clay
UK
Lucy Cohen
UK
Asghar Farhadi
Iran
Alex Gibney
USA
Mark Gustafson
USA
Asif Kapadia
UK
Juho Kuosmanen
Finland
Alexandre O. Philippe
Switzerland
Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Denmark
Nicolas Winding Refn
Denmark

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