Has anyone seen this movie? I saw it recently (relatively) and I found it to be a very good yet uneven movie. The story is about one of the most complicated non-thriller plots I ever encountered in a movie: a vicious killer murders (Henry Fonda as the most vicious badguy ever to horrify a audience) a family for no apparent reason (you only find out why 90 minutes into the movie which is more or less 150 minutes) only to discover that there still is an heir who is the lovely Claudia Cardinale, beautiful women with a seedy past. At the same time Charles Bronson arrives in the district as a nameless drifter with a harmonica, looking for someone named Frank. At the same time the murder of the farmer is blamed on Cheyanne, a bandit who roams the area and is played by Jason Robards channeling Humphrey Bogart who falls in love with Claudia Cardinale. Got that?
The movie was directed by Sergio Leone who made Clint Eastwood a household name with the "Dollars Trilogy". "Once upon a time in the West" is both very different from the preceding westerns yet essentially the same: creepy, oddball music by Ennio Morricone, Spain standing in (mostly) for the old west, large barren desert landscapes and a hero with no name. And the flashback to the traumatic event in Charles Bronson's past is one of the most haunting pay-offs I've ever encountered in a movie.
What made the movie uneven is that the characters are neither fully evil nor totally good (with the exception of Fonda's character who has no redeeming feature). There's nothing wrong with that, usually, because a lot of people tend to be like that but in "Once upon a time in the West" this is not pulled off quite as well as you'd hope; it does not feel (at least for me) as realistic and more like a bad attempt at so-called "realism". I found this (as well as some "adult"-themed scenes which comes off as ill-conceived) rather off putting.
Still the brilliance of Leone lies in his epic, operatic, visual story-telling style that inspired several film-makers for years to come. "OUATITWest" is a good movie and I'd watch it for several years more to come, but I prefer "Fistful of Dollars" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".
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