Once Upon a Time in the West

I watched the 1968 Sergio Leone western epic Once Upon a Time in the West by myself a few nights back. Clocking in at just about three hours, I didn’t finish it until nearly 1 am.

Some people find the film agonizingly slow, with long minutes passing in glacial silence as characters stare meaningfully at each other. Others find the film agonizingly pretentious, with all the ritualized choreography and artsy camera shots of all things western, from the mano-a-mano gun fight to the ordering of a whisky at a saloon.

I agree with both opinions.

So, why did I subject myself to this?

One reason: Henry Fonda playing a bad man.

Sergio Leone is the spaghetti western guy. The man responsible for those mid-60s dubbed Italian flicks that made Clint Eastwood a star. The Man With No Name trilogy (of which I can only recall two movies: A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; I’m only a mild fan of the genre). The haunting whistling scores. The taciturn, morally ambiguous gunslingers. Sweat, dirt, and grime. Cackling barkeeps. Feisty prostitutes. That sort of thing.

While most of his movies were immediate superhits on the European continent, they took a while to become established here in the US. Eventually they gained recognition as the critical masterpieces they undoubtedly are. However, the intensity level of existential angst surpasses my Schwarzchild radius of tolerability, so I can only watch one Sergio Leone movie a year.

2010 was the year of Once Upon a Time in the West.

And Once Upon a Time in the West is, as I’ve read it put, Sergio Leone on steroids.

In one sentence the plot could be summarized thus: a railroad baron hires a cold-blooded killer to obtain a parcel of land at any cost while a mysterious stranger hunts down said killer to right a long-ago wrong. But that hardly does the movie justice. Not until two hours pass do you figure everything out, though I just might’ve been slow on the uptake.

I’m a pretty big fan of TCM. When we were dating, the wife and I would rent and watch all sorts of classic flicks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Cary Grants were her favorites; mine tended to be Hitchcock’s stuff. But we sampled everything. Henry Fonda always had a reputation of playing good, grounded men. Men of honor, men of a different age, the Greatest Generation men. Men like my grandfather, for instance.

Over the years, in clips I watched in documentaries and such, I would see quick scenes of Fonda as “Frank,” the icy psychotic gunslinger who – allegedly – shoots down a young boy with a half-smile on his lips. Henry Fonda? Psycho killer? This is Jack Palance territory. So when I saw that it would be playing on TCM, I DVR’d it just so I could check out and judge the authenticity of this apparent discrepancy.

You know what? It works. Give that man another Oscar. He’s so convincing it’s scary. He’s scary. Intimidating, dangerous, intelligent (someone writes somewhere he’s the only character to be seen with a book in the entire movie), ambitious, a deadly accurate shot, and completely devoid of a soul, let alone a conscience. There’s a flashback of Frank thirty or so years ago and he looks positively like a cross between Johnny Ringo from Tombstone and Norman Bates from Psycho.




The Man With No Name here is played by Charles Bronson. You can get very philosophic about the flick, too. Bronson’s character is hunting Frank for something terrible – even for Frank – that the latter did years ago. So is this character death? Excuse me, Death-with-a-capital-D? Several hints are dropped. Normally lethal wounds do not kill him. He has a weird habit of silently appearing, startling the most well-worn prescient gunmen. He knows the names of numerous men Frank has killed over the years. He, too, is a deadly accurate shot. Or maybe he’s just a dude obsessed with killing Frank. Twenty or thirty years of single-minded brooding can make a man do such aforementioned things, I suppose. At least in a Sergio Leone western.

So, though the movie is an ordeal, it’s well-worth a watch. Think of it as a self-test over one’s ability to overcome snail-paced pretension. And if you get through a watch, you’ll probably want to view it again. It’s the type of movie that would have a lot of revelatory information bubble to the surface with subsequent viewings.

I grade it an A-minus.


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