ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

Part of Weekend Classics: Beat The Heat

In what is widely regarded as director Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, Henry Fonda is Frank, a gunslinger hired by the powerful owner of a railroad conglomerate to kill anyone who derails the project. But Frank contends with the wrong person when he murders Brett (Frank Wolff), a landowner. After his death, Brett’s wife (Claudia Cardinale) demands revenge, hiring two renegades (Charles Bronson and Jason Robards) to go after Frank — setting into motion what Leone called the “ballet of the dead.”

“Over the years, I've found something more to appreciate every time I've seen ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. But every time, it leaves me feeling like an awestruck 10-year-old. It has something to do with the scale of Leone's gloriously excessive 1968 Western. Every dusty street is a football field's width. Every grizzled face, shot in screen-filling close-up, looms like a head on Mount Rushmore. Every gunfight is a duel of the gods. A viewer becomes an HO-scale brakeman walking through a regular-sized trainyard…. Each frame has a painterly precision and clarity, as if the director had somehow eliminated anything standing between the screen and the image he had in his head. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is the kind of movie whose total intoxication with moviemaking can lead to a lifetime's love.” —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Aug 27, 2009)