Dir.
Sergio Leone, Italy, 1968, 165 mins, R/I
Cast:
Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale
Review by
Mike Bartlett
In 1968, one man set out to make the ultimate western. It was both a farewell to a dying genre and a complete reworking of its conventions, a hymn to its myths but one that undermined its ideals. It took two legends from the classic years (Jack Elam, Woody Strode) and killed them off in the first scene, reintroduced a hero (Henry Fonda) and turned him into the blackest of black-hatted villains. It revelled in a primal morality of brute, masculine force and finished with the triumph of a woman. And it was popular. But many serious cinephiles rejected it – the spaghetti western, of which this was the apotheosis, was “impure”, an intellectual European riff on a world close to American cinema's heart, a tongue-in-cheek revision of a nation's founding texts.
Now, 40 years later, the film is being re-released, self-evidently a classic. What's changed? The answer lies in the dimension over which Sergio Leone was a complete master: time. In the first place, the western never went away. Instead, it fed off the new ideas injected into it by Leone and Sam Peckinpah, and the enthusiasm of new auteurs like Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, to the point where Once Upon A Time In The West feels less like a grand tombstone than a crucial milestone in a contemporary art. Furthermore, Leone's influence as a director spread across cinema, his arthouse treatment of familiar genre tropes stimulating figures as far apart as Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann and Hong Kong action directors like John Woo.
But what precisely does that “influence” consist of? Again, the treatment of time. Leone's slow, hieratic shootouts gave his films the feel of an opera or a masque, one critic christening them “a dance of death”. Action became extended, the instant hit stretched out to eternity, simultaneous acts of violence choreographed and edited so as to become discrete events. Woo's gun ballets start here. But it's not just the set-pieces that are prolonged; everything is in slow-motion. The very first sequence of Once Upon A Time... (and if films are judged by the quality of their opening and closing scenes then this film must be the best ever made) expands the familiar “hoods lying in wait for the hero at the train station” into a small playlet of its own. Except there are few words; instead an eerie symphony of everyday sounds, a kind of musique concrète, accompanies their taciturn vigil, an extraordinary precursor of Ennio Morricone's magnificent score, with its own themes – again like an opera – for each individual character.
As a child, I fell in love with Leone's first trilogy, the “Man with no name” films starring Clint Eastwood. I adored their offbeat humour and outrageous gunplay (especially those crazy ricochet sounds), all present and correct here. But I also found them extremely moving, the end of each film engendering a significant sense of loss. It's hard to pinpoint the reason, but again, it lies in the approach to time. Leone's pacing, that of a sun-drenched rider at noon in Death Valley, helps gives the impression of a West that is eternal, a world of endless desert, one-horse towns preserved in aspic. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, they've always been there. In the climax to Once Upon A Time..., we flashback to the original crime (original sin?) that kickstarted the revenge saga of the present. A giant stone arch stands in the middle of...nowhere...a vast echoing valley of burning sand. The cowboy villains are like figures from the Old Testament. For Leone, the West is a world of myth, where the heroes are roaming gods and their opponents fallen angels. The dissolution of that world, portrayed as a necessary evil, feels then like an eviction from Eden, a ruthless push into modernity.
Now, in a period when culture has turned into a mush of relative values, Leone's work seems more robust than it did before, the humour less prominent than the aura of social compromise, the much-berated violence less cynical than the tap-tap-tapping on Claudia Cardinale's back. It's a movie that's come of age. But the question is, have we aged with it? Have the intervening years of decline in genre entertainment matured or regressed our ability to appreciate it? Has time indeed been kind to us?
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