Once Upon A Time In The West(1968)[DVDRip][big_dad_e]

Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

Director: Sergio Leone

"There were three men in her life. One to take her... one to love her - and one to kill her."

She is Jill McBain, an ex-New Orleans prostitute who has secretly married Brett McBain in a bid to become a respectable woman. They are the mysterious stranger Harmonica, the notorious yet sympathetic outlaw Cheyenne and the ruthless killer Frank, who has just murdered Brett McBain and his brood for standing in the way of Morton's trans-American railroad.

Not just the best Spaghetti western nor one of the greatest westerns but also one of the greatest films period, Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West is a complex, multi-faceted film that remains as enjoyable on the tenth viewing as the first one.

The script, co-written by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Leone, can be appreciated as a deconstruction of the mythology of the west and the western in which Manifest Destiny, the coming of the railroad and the transformation of the desert into a garden mean the götterdämmerunggotterdammerung for superhuman figures like Frank, Cheyenne and Harmonica and the emergence of a new tamed, civilised and above all feminised world, as represented by Jill.

The direction can be taken as an essay in film form, Leone combining his earlier Dollars experiments in time and space with the idea of a composed film, developing his mise-en-scene around Ennio Morricone's pre-existing scratch score.

Just as remarkable as Leone's success in this regard is that of Morricone. While he always seems to find a way to make the music fit the action, it's rare that a score can stand in its own regard as well as this one does. A near literal horse opera, it presents each character with their own distinctive leitmotif - the lush strings and soaring vocals of Edda Dell'Orso for Jill, Allessando Allessandroni's whining electric guitar for Frank and so on - to be combined and counterpointed with one another as the epic tale moves towards its denouement.

Add in perfectly pitched performances from the leads - Henry Fonda chillingly cast against type, Charles Bronson seemingly born to incarnate Harmonica - a fine ensemble cast of reliable supporting players like Woody Strode and Lionel Stander, John Ford's beloved Monument Valley locations, and the only thing one can really say is missing is the presence of Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach as Frank's gunmen at the start (Leone had wanted them to say goodbye to the Dollars films but, alas, Eastwood was unwilling to participate.)

Unlike Frank, you don't have to wait "until the moment of dying" to know: Once Upon a Time in the West is a vital, must-see film.

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