“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968)

The ultimate spaghetti western, Sergio Leone’s 1968 epic enjoys an embarrassment of riches.  The script is based on an unusual collaboration between Leone and two fellow Italians known more for their later achievements in horror and art films: respectively Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci.  The trio fashion a story that’s equal parts send up and deconstruction, the coming-of-the-railroad backdrop playing like a Marxist variation on John Ford’s The Iron Horse while the tense three way contest between gunslingers Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda and Jason Robards takes Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly formula to new and sublimely baroque heights of expression.

Ennio Morricone’s score may very well be the best of his over 200 film career, the soaring harmonicas and over the top orchestrations providing each of the main characters with their own musical motif.  The widescreen cinematography of Tonino Delli Colli not only makes the most of location shooting in Monument Valley (another reference to Ford) but provides delicious close-ups of extremely interesting faces.  Fonda’s baby blue eyes are chillingly cold, his villainy the equal of any of his famous heroic roles.  Top billed Claudia Cardinale’s beauty goes beyond the merely astonishing, her whore-turned-businesswoman an ironic symbol of the encroachment of civilisation as well as a sincere ode to the maternal virtues appropriate to Leone’s not entirely sarcastic, fairy tale approach to the genre.