"Once Upon a Time in the West" is like a dream, it exists as a western, yet you never feel like you're in the west. The west was a real place long ago, but watching this film, you're not in a historical place, it's more like a mythical one. The characters don't seem real, some seem like ghosts, they're images, they walk majestically through the iconic valleys, and towns. There are the heroes, and the villains, all play a part, all are larger than life. When the film ends, it's the end of a dream, you swear you just had.
I felt this way watching "Once Upon a Time in the West" just recently, it never worked on me as a realistic western, when I think of those, I think mostly of films like "Unforgiven", this is something else entirely. This isn't the old west taught in history books, this is the one taught by movies, it's a mythical landscape, it brings out legends of what the west stood for, not what it was. It's a romantic ideal, but it's done with operatic poetry.
The story is a rather simple one if you actually analyse it. A landowner and his family is killed by a ruthless killer named Frank (Henry Fonda). Frank works for a warped, crippled entrepreneur who found out the man's land was worth money because the railroad would come through it. But Frank finds out the landowner had a wife, her name is Jill (Claudia Cardinale), a former prostitute newly arrived only to find her husband dead. Jill finds out her husbands plan was to build a station on the land for the railroad to come through, yet Frank plans to take it for himself.
A stranger comes into town only known as Harmonica (Charles Bronson), he is the man with no name, staying mostly silent playing his harmonica. He has come to see Frank, he has a personal vendetta with him that is only explained at the very climax. Another person involved is Cheyenne (Jason Robards) an outlaw who may or may not be all that bad. Cheyenne and Harmonica form a partnership and together they decide to help Jill create the railroad.
"Once Upon a Time in the West" is a long film, but like all the greats, it never feels long, you could swear the story doesn't take this much time. Yet it's in the arrangement and execution of director Sergio Leone, that makes this such an epic experience. Leone was a man known for long drawn out sequences, he goes from long establishing shots, to extreme close-ups and uses them to full effect to create a certain mood, or to enhance the action. Very little is said in a Leone film, he likes to show it instead, it probably worked to his advantage since he always worked with such an international cast and only spoke Italian.
Leone is one of the most strategic filmmakers when it comes to composition, some of the shots are ingenious, yet it never feels like he's showing off. Leone seemed to have found a new found confidence with story telling when it came to this film, he takes his time even topping his last masterpiece "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly". Leone chooses to open the film with practically ten minutes of silence. We watch three bad guys at a train station, it's obvious why they are there, they are waiting for someone to get off the train. That someone turns out to be Harmonica who quickly does away with the three men as soon as he gets off, yet before all that happens, we watch these three men as they wait at the station. The way Leone composes it, it's both funny, and suspenseful. We hear the creaking of a windmill, the dripping of water on one of the gunmen's head, and the buzzing of a fly inside the barrel of a gun. This is all made to create a mood, it keeps us interested because we know what is to come will be memorable.
You can't mention a Leone film without mentioning the music by Ennio Morricone. The score for this film is probably Morricone's masterpiece. The themes he works with is in a operatic scale, it brings out the vastness of the west and the larger than life drama unfolding perhaps better than any other film. The music along with the images of in the film become quite emotional, particularly near the end with the showdown between Frank and Harmonica. The sequence here is quite astonishing, almost a little movie of its own, as we see the story behind these two men unfold right before the guns are drawn. It's shot differently than the final showdown in the "Good, the Bad, and The Ugly", Leone built up the suspense in that film using quick cuts of close-ups, here it's a slow burn as Harmonica's story unfolds, with a quick release, there also seems to be more at stake emotionally than with the earlier film.
With "Once Upon a Time in the West", it seems Leone reached a new maturity, he created a more assured western, one that didn't seem to rely on style. The characters are complex, the situation is at a grand scale, it's as if this was the film he had always wanted to make. Unlike his past films, Leone was given money to shoot some location shots in America, where he pays tribute to John Ford with some amazing compositions of Monument Valley. Leone probably didn't have to shoot there, but he probably did because John Ford did.
Yet "Once Upon a Time in the West" doesn't have to worry about being thought of as an homage, it's one of the greatest westerns of all time, it's about what we think of the west when we see a western, not what the west really was. Leone used the west as a canvas to bring out his own legend, he created a west for the ages, a west we could only dream of.
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