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"To Hell with a rope around his neck and a price on his head," everyone's story. Dalí wields gun to canvas, Sergio Leone favors oils and bullets for the credits while Ennio Morricone orchestrates guitars and trumpets and whistles and shrieks, a proper overture for the post-apocalyptic frontier. Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) shoots the farmer he was paid to track down and then shoots the employer himself because his victim also paid him, a matter of "always seeing the job through." (The meticulous framing is momentarily jangled by a handheld POV insert as the campesina comes upon her decimated family.) Blondie and Tuco have their own scavenging scheme, a catch-and-release ploy of bounties and nooses that doubles as a comedic duo contrasting Clint Eastwood's tight-lipped cool and Eli Wallach's ripe hysteria. All around them is the Civil War, merely something to get in the way of the search for buried gold. "All right, friends, come along and enjoy the spectacle." Fierce as Verdi and brutal as Hobbes, Leone's acid West writ large, the genre's magnificent cracked mirror. The mirage of Confederate corpses and secrets aboard a runaway coach amid "a hundred miles of beautiful sun-baked sand," the cutthroat's hint of Catholic shame before his noble brother: "Where we came from, if one did not want to die of poverty, one became a priest or a bandit!" The prisoner camp is a Union Andersonville overseen by Bluto, the battlefield is a sprawl of monumental waste winnowed down to a dying soldier's final cheroot. The erudite line of references (The Birth of a Nation, Greed, Beau Geste, The Bridge on the River Kwai) leads to the bullring at the center of the graveyard, with the characters in colossal close-ups like planets moving into place for a shuddering collision. "If there's any justice, that money will go to the undertakers!" Once Upon a Time in the West dilates the comic-strip into a fresco. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. With Aldo Giuffrè, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Aldo Sambrell, Antonio Molino Rojo, Mario Brega, Enzo Petito, Livio Lorenzon, Al Mulock, and Antonio Casas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |