Once Upon a Time in the West Review

Leone made this immediately after the Dollars films and used the freedom to slow everything down until pace itself became the subject. The credit sequence is three men waiting at a railroad halt for nine minutes, a windmill, a fly, water dripping on a hat brim, and it teaches you how to watch the rest. Tonino Delli Colli shoots faces in extreme close up against horizons in extreme distance, so the frame keeps arguing that these people are both enormous and about to be erased by the railroad behind them.

Morricone wrote the themes first and Leone shot to playback, which is why Jill's arrival in Flagstone swells like an aria rather than a cue. Casting Henry Fonda as Frank is the film's cruellest and best decision, those blue eyes doing something they had never been allowed to do. Claudia Cardinale carries more of the picture than the marketing ever admitted. The middle hour sags when the plot has to explain the land deal, and Jason Robards is stranded in comic relief the film does not need. Everything else is the western at its most self aware and most beautiful.