revisionist western that feels like a comedy half the time and a revenger’s tragedy in operatic guise for the other half. On paper at least, this looks like the very last western worthy of admission to the pantheon of the genre’s masterworks. But there it is, routinely counted among the greatest westerns ever made. And rightly so.
Leone, together with Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, initially conceived a western almost entirely made up of references to the classics of the genre – The Iron Horse, The Searchers, Shane and High Noon are just some of the movies plundered and revered in the final three-hour epic. The film has an unabashedly leftwing tilt in its depiction of capitalism’s ruthless conquest of the west as it crushes or kills every obstacle in its path.
If that all sounds a little dry to you, then Leone knew enough to cast his movie with icons of the genre, including rising star Charles Bronson in the no-name lead role and Jason Robards as comic relief. His most daring gambit, however, was to persuade Henry Fonda to play his monstrous killer – railroad enforcer Frank.
Legend has it Fonda, preparing for his first evil role, showed up on set wearing a bandito mustache and half rolling his eyes. No, said Leone, I want Henry Fonda, clean-shaven – and then we’ll make him bad. There’s no doubting Frank’s evil core when he guns down a child moments after appearaing on screen.
And opera? Well, consider that Leone’s schoolmate Ennio Morricone wrote individual musical signatures for each of the four main characters (the fourth being Claudia Cardinale’s Jill McBain, who fares about as well as you’d expect a woman in a macho Italian western), and the music is almost as busy channelling our attention as anything in the script. The climactic gunfight, with its three minutes of intro music and flashbacks (including the big revelation) and two seconds of gunplay, achieves an almost orgasmic intensity through Morricone’s soaring, slashing score. With every set-piece artificially elongated for comedy or suspense, and every other scene almost wordless, this is a movie that takes its time, but by the final credits, you know you’re in the presence of imperishable greatness.
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