ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

(1968, Sergio Leone) Charles Bronson stalks kidblasting villain Henry Fonda (!) with the aid of good-bad-man Jason Robards, as the railroad marches relentlessly westward. Restored 35mm print courtesy Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation.
♫ Music by Ennio Morricone

REVIEWS

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“An opera in which the arias are not sung, they are stared.”
– Richard Schickel

“Leone is here at the peak of his epic powers.”
– Andrew Sarris

“The characters’ compelling dance of death is made all the more riveting by Leone’s stylish bravura: the final confrontation between Fonda and Bronson is all eyes and ritual; the astonishing opening; and perhaps most telling of all Leone’s co-option of the American Western through quotation and even the annexation of John Ford’s Monument Valley.”
– Phil Hardy

“A masterpiece that expands Leone’s baroque, cartoonish style into genuine grandeur, weaving dozens of thematic variations and narrative arabesques around a classical western foundation myth. It's very much a foreigner's film, drawing its elements not from historical reality but from the mythic base made universal by the movies. Moments of intense realism flow into passages of operatic extravagance; lowbrow burlesque exists side by side with the expression of the most refined shades of feeling.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“If only the first 10 minutes of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West still existed, this most hyperbolic of oat operas would still be acknowledged as one of the genre's greatest exhumations.”
– Chuck Stephens, Village Voice

“The movie is as mysterious and mesmeric as ever, with its grandiloquent panoramas and mad, melodramatic closeups on sweaty and malevolent faces… A landmark.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Trailers From Hell: John Landis on ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST