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
The Leopard	1963	Luchino Visconti
Star Wars	1977	George Lucas
The Apartment	1960	Billy Wilder
Double Indemnity	1944	Billy Wilder
Sunset Blvd.	1950	Billy Wilder
Once upon a Time in the West	1968	Sergio Leone
The French Connection	1971	William Friedkin
Le Samouraï	1967	Jean-Pierre Melville
Blade Runner	1982	Ridley Scott
Hannah and Her Sisters	1986	Woody Allen

Gábor Köves

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