| Collector's Corner April 2004
 C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West)Starring: Henry Fonda,
Jason Robards, Claudia Cardinale, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzetti
Director: Sergio Leone
Written by: Dario Argento,
Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Leone, Sergio Donati
Music by: Ennio Morricone
Theatrical release: 1968
DVD release: 2003
Video: Widescreen (anamorphic)
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
Released by: Paramount
People like that have something inside . . .
Something to do with death.
-- Cheyenne Gutierrez
Three bad men are waiting for a train. Their target is a
man with no name referred to as Harmonica (Charles Bronson). He’s looking for someone
named Frank, but when he discovers that the men were sent to kill him, he kills all three.
Elsewhere, a family is preparing for the arrival of Jill (Claudia Cardinale), the
father’s new wife, who is trying to escape a shady background in New Orleans. While
getting everything prepared, they are attacked; all are killed but the youngest son. As
the killers move slowly toward the young survivor, the camera slowly circles the gang
until it rests on the leader, Frank (Henry Fonda). After a moment of hesitation, Frank
smiles and murders the youngster.
When no one meets her at the train station, Jill finds a
wagon driver to take her to her new husband’s ranch. At a stop, she runs into a
notorious bandit and killer, Cheyenne Gutierrez (Jason Robards), just escaped from prison.
Harmonica is at the same stop, recovering from a gunshot wound to the shoulder. After a
tense meeting, all leave. When Jill finally arrives at the family ranch, she finds her new
family dead. The townspeople, originally gathered to greet Jill, have discovered the
carnage. No one knows why the family was murdered.
Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) is a mortally ill
railroad baron who wants to finish the intercontinental railway before he dies, and has
hired Frank to clean up any problems in his way. Those problems included Jill’s new
family, whose ranch is in the railroad’s path. Now Frank has to deal with Jill.
Meanwhile, Harmonica is looking for Frank, and Cheyenne has decided to help Jill. When
they finally clash, all will learn something about death.
Played out against a desert backdrop (the film was shot in
Monument Valley and Almería, Spain), the conflicts that bind Jill, Frank, Harmonica,
Cheyenne, and Morton quickly morph into a clash of titans. Each character has a weapon:
Jill uses sex, Morton money. Frank, Harmonica, and Cheyenne have a simpler view of life:
face to face, with guns. There is no intrinsically good hero. This may be the first true
postmodern film.
Everything revolves around Jill, a whore who’s out to
get rich, no matter whom she must take to bed. Frank has no redeeming characteristics. He
kills children, rapes widows, knocks down cripples. Harmonica’s character contains
some surprises I don’t want to give away, but he ultimately takes as much pleasure in
killing as Frank does. Morton is simply pathetic -- a man willing to countenance slaughter
to achieve his goals. Cheyenne, a murdering robber, ends up being the closest thing this
film has to a conventional good guy.
Once Upon a Time in the West faced numerous problems
on its way to becoming a classic. First, Leone didn’t want to make the film. He felt
he’d said all he wanted to about the American west, and was ready to move on to his
personal love, gangster films (specifically, Once Upon a Time in America). The
studios agreed to allow him to do the gangster film only if he would give them another
western. At about the same time, Leone met Bernardo Bertolucci (later to become the famed
director of Last Tango in Paris, 1900, and The Last Emperor)
and Dario Argento (who ultimately directed such horror films as The Bird with the
Crystal Plumage and Suspiria). Leone hired both to help him invent a story.
Leone then struck on the idea of creating a second
trilogy, to follow his The Man With No Name series. He would cover three important
parts of North American history, beginning with the coming of the trains in Once Upon a
Time in the West, then the Mexican revolution in Duck, You Sucker, and ending
with the beginnings of organized crime in Once Upon a Time in America.
Now feeling better about the project, Leone began planning
the first film in the new trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West. In one of the
DVD’s extras, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling describes how Leone invited Argento
and Bertolucci to his home, where they spent many nights screening famous American
westerns for inspiration: The Searchers, Shane,
Johnny Guitar, High Noon, The Iron Horse, and The Magnificent
Seven. (Another clear reference, not mentioned, is John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).
When they’d decided on an outline, they brought in Sergio Donati. The finished script
included only 15 pages of dialogue for a film that would eventually run almost three
hours.
Leone had two other revolutionary ideas. The first of these
never happened, but what an idea -- Leone wanted to bring back Clint Eastwood, Lee Van
Cleef, and Eli Wallach from Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (aka The Good, The
Bad, and The Ugly) to play the three killers at the beginning of the new film.
Eastwood demurred -- a rather shabby way to treat the director who had made him a star.
Had Leone succeeded in re-using these characters, he would have added a whole new layer of
richness. Eastwood, apparently, couldn’t countenance his character being gunned down.
The other idea came brilliantly to life. Leone and his
house composer, Ennio Morricone, aimed to create a full film score before the first frame
of film was shot. Leone was a veteran of shooting films at the famous Cinecittà Studios
in Rome, a location in the middle of the flight path to Rome’s airport. Because of
the constant noise, all films there had the sound done in post-production. This offered a
side benefit -- it permitted beautiful framing of images, since there were no boom
microphones for the cinematographer to worry about. Leone decided to carry the issue a
step further by having Morricone’s music played on the shooting locations while the
actors were doing their scenes. This lent a sense of rhythm to the film that is nearly
impossible to create in the conventional way.
Each of the film’s main roles has a musical leitmotif
that helps define and clarify that character. Jill’s is angelic and beautiful, to
contrast with her actual history; Harmonica’s theme begins as subtle and grows into
danger; Frank’s theme is purely mean; Cheyenne has a loping, old-timey theme that
doesn’t seem to fit his murderous ways, but eventually turns out to match this
character perfectly.
Morricone and Leone came to a roadblock about how to score
the opening scene. The problem was how to contrive music with enough tension, but that
wouldn’t detract from the visuals. Leone had just become aware of musique
concrète, in which "found" sounds from the environment are used to make a
music devoid of beat or intonation. He and Morricone decided to use amplified natural
sounds in a sort of concerto for windmill and creaking door. The result helped make the
opening one of the most tense ten minutes in film.
Leone’s choice of actors was similarly inspired. His
choice of Henry Fonda for Frank was an ironist’s dream, and Leone purposefully played
on the juxtaposition: An actor who had played only good guys was playing a bad guy. As if
that weren’t clear enough, he had Frank ride in on a white horse while dressed
entirely in black. Claudia Cardinale, already every film buff’s fantasy from her role
as the muse in Fellini’s 8½, looks gorgeous. More important, she makes you
believe that she’s a complex character who can somehow screw her way out of trouble
and still have enough heart to be loving and caring. Watch at the end of chapter 8 as we
see the canopy over Jill’s bed become a sacred baldachin over the Madonna/whore.
For years, Leone had wanted to work with Charles Bronson,
in whose work in The Magnificent Seven (1960) he had seen something of the
quintessential strong, silent type. Bronson was never a great actor, but he gave his best
performance for Leone -- stoic, strong, and with a face that seems carved from the Rock of
Gibraltar. Leone, like his hero John Ford, believed in injecting some humor to outline the
tension, and Jason Robards gets laughs without ever losing his sense of menace. He nearly
steals the show.
Once Upon a Time in the West is a pure visual treat.
The slow and intimate look at the characters (Bertolucci calls it "faces as
landscapes"), coupled with the almost total lack of dialogue, makes it look
ultramodern even 36 years after its release. But this is not mannered modernism, grabbing
for your attention in the self-conscious method of Fellini or Bergman. Instead, like David
Bowie’s Berlin albums or T.S. Eliot’s poetry, Leone’s modernism is so
entrenched that you notice nothing but the effect.
A good deal of the credit for this modernism goes to the
cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, whose work is as good as you’ll ever see in
film. You have only to watch the opening credits -- all ten minutes of them -- to confirm
this, but check chapter 6 for Delli Colli’s use of chiaroscuro. And watch his
deep-focus techniques, which allow both intimacy and vastness. The cinematographer’s
single greatest scene in Once Upon a Time in the West occurs in chapter 5, 27
minutes 30 seconds into the film. As Jill has given up on her husband picking her up, she
walks into the train station. Against the beautiful rendering of her theme (sung
gorgeously by Edda dell'Orso), the camera watches through a window like a voyeur. As she
walks out the opposite door, the camera slowly rises in the exact rhythm of the music,
until it peeks over the station’s roof at the bustling town beyond. It’s a magic
film moment.
After all of Leone’s work, Paramount Pictures took one
look at the film and told him to cut it back to a little over two hours. That final
version was a mess -- no one sang its praises, it died ignominiously in American theaters,
and neither Leone, Morricone, Delli Colli, nor Once Upon a Time in the West were
nominated for an Academy Award. Apart from a few showings in New York and Los Angeles in
the 1980s, the full version was available only on laserdisc in a mastering that was, to
put it kindly, blurry.
Seven years into the DVD era, Paramount has finally gotten
it right. In fact, in terms of mastering and extras, this DVD ranks with the best
we’ve seen, such as the DVD editions of Citizen Kane
and American Graffiti. The first thing you’ll
notice is the picture -- the film looks clearer than in any other version I’ve seen
(and I’ve seen them all, beginning with the original theatrical run). Standing within
inches of my 100" screen, I could see no obvious edge enhancement. Paramount has also
included the most complete version of the film yet. (Note to serious fans: We still
don’t get to see Keenan Wynn and his deputies beating up on Harmonica.)
The extras include a trilogy (how appropriate) of
outstanding documentaries: An Opera of Violence, The Wages of Sin, and Something
To Do With Death. Another featurette tells the story of the railroad. There are
galleries galore, as well as the usual cast profiles. Paramount also spent some money on
the moving title designs. The commentary track -- the best I’ve heard since Citizen
Kane -- includes author and Leone scholar Sir Christopher Frayling, film historian Dr.
Sheldon Hall, actress Claudia Cardinale, and directors Alex Cox, John Milius, John
Carpenter, and Bernardo Bertolucci. Rather than use the standard "three pals sitting
around chatting" format, Paramount gives each a few scenes to discuss as they are
happening. This yields a far more intelligent and useful commentary track than the norm.
Once Upon a Time in the West ranks not only as one
of the best westerns ever made, but as one of the top 50 films of any genre (this
according to the definitive once-per-decade poll of feature film directors published by Sight
and Sound, the prestigious journal of the British Film Institute). To me, the
film is about the power of cinema to engage the mind, the heart, and the soul.
John Ford made great films until he was 68, Alfred
Hitchcock until he was 73, and Akira Kurosawa until he was 80. Would that Sergio Leone
could have had that type of longevity. When he died of a heart attack 15 years ago this
month, he was only 60 years old. Had the years been kinder, who knows what he might have
accomplished?
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
