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

Film	Year	Director
La ROUE	1920	Abel Gance
Vertigo	1958	Alfred Hitchcock
Blade Runner	1982	Ridley Scott
REVOLVER	1973	Sergio Sollima
Laura	1944	Otto Preminger
J'ai perdu mon corps	2019	Jérémy Claplin
Lost Highway	1996	David Lynch
CURE	1998	Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Once upon a Time in the West	1968	Sergio Leone
Solaris	1972	Andrei Tarkovsky

Alexandre O. Philippe

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