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Fonda and Bronson prepare to face off in Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West |
Director: Sergio Leone
Cast: Henry Fonda (Frank), Claudia Cardinale (Jill McBain),
Charles Bronson (“Harmonica”), Jason Robards (“Cheyenne”), Gabrielle Ferzetti
(Morton), Paolo Stoppa (Sam), Marco Zuanelli (Wobbles), Keenan Wynn (Sheriff),
Frank Wolff (Brett McBain), Lionel Stander (Barman), Woody Strode (First
Gunman), Jack Elam (Second Gunman), Al Mulock (Third Gunman)
Sergio Leone’s Westerns were always based, first and
foremost, on his own love for the genre – and the great filmmakers, from John
Ford onwards, who made them. Returning to the genre for the final time –
putting on hold (for what turned out to be nearly fifteen years) his plans for a
New York gangster film – Leone wanted to make his final, and ultimate, tribute
to the Hollywood western. Collaborating with Bernardo Bertoloucci and Dario
Argento (now there is an odd trio!) on the scripting, Leone’s final Western is
a sweeping, grandiose, operatic Western littered with visual quotations from
films he loved.
The story rather takes second fiddle to the general ambiance
and visuals, but it never bothered Leone to have only the sketchiest of plots
stretched across the many hours of his movies. The railroad is being built
across America – changing the face of the West as it goes. Frank (Henry Fonda),
hired gun of crippled railway tycoon Morton (Gabrielle Ferzetti), guns down
farmer Brett McBain and his children. He had been sent to threaten them to
clear off the land of Sweetwater. But why? And how will the return of McBain’s
new wife Jill (Claudia Cardinale) – now heir to all of Frank’s holdings –
affect their plans? And why does the mysterious “Harmonica” (Charles Bronson) –
a shadowy gunman with no name have such an interest in events, and in Frank in
particular? And will criminal gunman Cheyenne (Jason Robards) and his gang –
blamed for the McCain killings – be able to establish their innocence?
The answers to all these questions come slowly – and often
confusingly – in this long, slow but – as with many Leone films – engrossing
Western, which features 3-5 minutes of Morricone build-up and extreme close-up
before even the slightest action. This makes it very easy to mock, and perhaps
by this point Leone had started to believe too heavily that he was an artist
daubing in genre, rather than a purveyor of entertainments. Certainly, Once Upon a Time in the West is
consciously weighted down with its own importance, it’s ominous sense of events
heading to a pre-ordained conclusion and its half-hearted attempt to depict
itself as sitting at a crossroads in American history, as technology squeezed
out the old West.
But somehow you give Leone’s film a pass for all its many
faults because it’s assembled with such unrivalled skill and breathtaking
pizzazz. Sure the film is only half as smart as it thinks it is, but when at
its strongest it offers unrivalled entertainment. Leone also mastered here his
balance between the slow, tense, agonising build-up to violence – followed by
its sudden and brutal enactment.
Never is that more clear than in the film’s opening ten
minutes which features three gunmen (among them Ford favourite Woody Strode and
reliable minor bad-guy Jack Elam) waiting at a train station for what turns-out
to be the arrival of Charles Bronson’s “Harmonica”. The three gunmen sit,
waiting, in silence. Around them the everyday sounds of windmills, buzzing
flies and dripping water builds and relapses with all the dread of distant
thunder. Leone’s camera crashes in for long, intense close-ups, as if drilling
down into the souls of these bored men, the camera studying every detail of
their faces. After almost ten minutes – during which the credits roll –
“Harmonica” arrives. And promptly shoots all three men dead in seconds. You
know it’s coming, but the tension and expectation of this confrontation makes
the entire sequence compelling.
It’s a trick that Leone repeats time and time again.
Effectively the whole film is only prolonged extension of this sequence – the
inconsequential back-and-forth of the lacklustre plot all really about giving
us a chance to drill down into the character of Henry Fonda’s bad-to-the-bone
Frank, while we wait for the inevitable gunfight between him and “Harmonica”.
Leone’s film is a triumph of mood, filled with sweeping beautiful camera shot
and luxiously paced editing, all mixed down with some stunning scoring from
Ennio Morricone.
Once Upon a Time
echoes a fairy tale in its title, and that’s what it is. For all that Leone
attempts to throw in plotlines around progress, the influence of big money and
the new order leaving gunmen behind, really everything it knows about America is
taken from movies. Leone litters the film with visual quotes from High Noon, Shane and dozens of others, most especially Ford (he even insisted
in transplanting some of the scenes to be shot at Monument Valley, which led to
merry hell trying to get the other Spanish-shot locations to visually match).
The entire film unfolds like a dream. At about the half way mark in particular
– this might be due to cuts to be fair – the narrative suddenly becomes almost
deliberately unconnected, key events seemingly skipped over and sudden
character reversals taking place. There is a rumbling sense of everything in
the film being artificial and the characters themselves being manipulated by
something larger than them (like a film director!).
This is further heightened by “Harmonica” himself. Played
with an empty blankness by Charles Bronson – the camera zooms into his
expressionlessly craggy face endlessly as if searching for meaning –
“Harmonica” is an almost mystical presence. He’s always in the right place at
the right time, seems to be the only person in the film who knows what’s going
on and Leone even shoots him regularly sliding into frame, as if the camera has
stumbled upon him at the least expected times. Perhaps Bronson’s lack of real
character helped make him perfect for this near-mystical presence. It also fits
in with the shamanic feeling of a film where frequently not much happens at
great length, but the inconsequential moments of events are filmed with a
pregnant importance.
Compared to him the other principles are painted in earthy
tones. Robards makes his bandit – who switches allegiances and escapes from
undefined imprisonment several times in the movie – a jovial, grimy figure with
a rogueish temperament. Claudia Cardinale – in what passes for a strong female
character at the time – is a whore with a heart of gold who may, or may not be
willing to do anything to ensure her own survival (the film is unclear). Is she
a ruthless woman using sex as a weapon? Or is she the sort of radiant
Earth-mother that the new West needs? Or is she a bit of both? The film isn’t
really sure.
What it is sure about is that Fonda’s Frank is the meanest
of the mean. Looking lean and tough, Fonda revels in the chance to play a
villain – and not just any villain, this grinning sadist is so mean the first
thing he does is gun down a child on screen. Leone loved Fonda – and above all
he wanted those “baby blue” eyes to be the thing the viewers see as unspeakable
deeds take place, expecting the cry of “Jesus Christ, that’s Henry Fonda!”
Frank is a bully and tirelessly ambitious, and if we never get a real sense of
what motivates him, it’s balanced by Fonda’s charismatic viciousness in the
role.
It’s a pointer though to the fact that this is not a film
about the West – as always the strange mixture of accents, faces and locations
never makes the film feel for one moment like a real slice of America – but
rather a film that is aiming to reflect the romance of movies. It’s a piece of
Americana, that is really a love letter to other films. Perhaps it’s one of the
first post-modern films ever made? But really your appreciation of the film can
only really be complete if you have seen a lot of Westerns. Then it’s fairy
tale like logic, and Leone’s operatic style and languid pace suddenly make
sense. It’s not a film deep in meaning, other than perhaps our own love for
cinema and the story it tells.
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