Once Upon a Time in the West - Appreciating Great Trash


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	ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (AKA C’era una volta il West) Grade: A Moral: “People scare better when they’re dying.” Hovering in a reverence between the pulp insanity of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and the rapturous protraction of Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West isn’t quite as inescapably brilliant as either of those movies, but what it is is a glorious recapitulation of the western, tweaked and refocused as only could be done by outsiders looking in. The ultimate glory of the spaghetti western (and the particular success of this one, given that it’s the most serious-minded and purposeful of them all) was that, in essence, it was a mythologizing of a mythos, a collection of significations and referents freed from their original cultural baggage and set to flight by madmen Italians viewing them through a looking-glass filtered by cinema. Instead of ‘proud,’ pseudo-historical folktales, these movies are the core archetypes of the western exploded into dizzying swaths of sound, fury, and genre joy. What makes Once Upon a Time in the West especially piquing is that it’s said explosion within an implosion, in that the crazed aggrandizement of the genre proper (again, best exemplified by its predecessor The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) has been caught within the exacting pace of a genius director beginning to toy with just how loooooong he can draw cinema out. In GBU, Leone’s direction-as-anticipation style surfaced in fits and starts, but witness here the genesis of his particular brand of momentous cinema, wherein the epicality of the West can be evoked by a fly buzzing around a leathery visage, where a shootout is 95% establishing shots and 5% actual gunfire. It’s the ‘bomb under the table’ dictum of Hitchcock taken to its logical conclusion. The first ten-minutes solid are nothing but tension and ambiance, and the revelation behind the central vengeance is literally withheld until the last... possible... second. Consider it the opposite of Peckinpah’s deconstruction of the genre: his was all action, all slow-motion orgasms, whereas Leone’s is all build up, a fanatical adherence to the belief that the getting-there is better than the destination. Again, all this was taken to its omega in Once Upon a Time in America, one of the grand strokes of all movie-making (who else would devote five minutes to someone stirring their coffee, yet render it unbelievably intense all the same?), but here it’s in a more presentable form; less imminently artful, perhaps, but infinitely more digestible. Coupled to another masterful score from Ennio Morricone, this time so integral to the film’s fabric that it literally Mickey-Mouses the action, it’s an undeniable masterpiece tempered only by the supra-masterpieces delivered by its creator before and afterwards.
© 2008 C. L. Coleman

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
(AKA C’era una volta il West)

Grade: A

Moral: “People scare better when they’re dying.”

Hovering in a reverence between the pulp insanity of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and the rapturous protraction of Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West isn’t quite as inescapably brilliant as either of those movies, but what it is is a glorious recapitulation of the western, tweaked and refocused as only could be done by outsiders looking in. The ultimate glory of the spaghetti western (and the particular success of this one, given that it’s the most serious-minded and purposeful of them all) was that, in essence, it was a mythologizing of a mythos, a collection of significations and referents freed from their original cultural baggage and set to flight by madmen Italians viewing them through a looking-glass filtered by cinema. Instead of ‘proud,’ pseudo-historical folktales, these movies are the core archetypes of the western exploded into dizzying swaths of sound, fury, and genre joy.

What makes Once Upon a Time in the West especially piquing is that it’s said explosion within an implosion, in that the crazed aggrandizement of the genre proper (again, best exemplified by its predecessor The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) has been caught within the exacting pace of a genius director beginning to toy with just how loooooong he can draw cinema out. In GBU, Leone’s direction-as-anticipation style surfaced in fits and starts, but witness here the genesis of his particular brand of momentous cinema, wherein the epicality of the West can be evoked by a fly buzzing around a leathery visage, where a shootout is 95% establishing shots and 5% actual gunfire.

It’s the ‘bomb under the table’ dictum of Hitchcock taken to its logical conclusion. The first ten-minutes solid are nothing but tension and ambiance, and the revelation behind the central vengeance is literally withheld until the last... possible... second. Consider it the opposite of Peckinpah’s deconstruction of the genre: his was all action, all slow-motion orgasms, whereas Leone’s is all build up, a fanatical adherence to the belief that the getting-there is better than the destination. Again, all this was taken to its omega in Once Upon a Time in America, one of the grand strokes of all movie-making (who else would devote five minutes to someone stirring their coffee, yet render it unbelievably intense all the same?), but here it’s in a more presentable form; less imminently artful, perhaps, but infinitely more digestible. Coupled to another masterful score from Ennio Morricone, this time so integral to the film’s fabric that it literally Mickey-Mouses the action, it’s an undeniable masterpiece tempered only by the supra-masterpieces delivered by its creator before and afterwards.