Men of Action: Once Upon a Time in the West (Dir. Sergio Leone, 2h 45m, 1968)

 

The western film, like the era that it takes such influence from, is a thing of the past. Doubtless, the genre itself clings to life-the success of the colossal, appropriately elagic videogame, Red Dead Redemption and its prequel/sequel is undeniable, its narrative traces, either in its American heartland, or transposed to China, Australia, or any manner of frontier, burn on round the campfire into the night, whilst country music continues-as it will likely do till new frontiers open in the race for space, and everafter-to riff on the cowboy, and his lifestyle. This is without going into the wholesale frontier justice of the wildly popular The Mandalorian, Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name cast out into the stars, helmeted and warrior-casted. But as a cinematic beast, but for occasional death spasms, largely invoked by the last great star of its golden age, the now nonogenarian Eastwood, or by taking the building blocks of the medium in new, often meditative, brutally violent, or otherworldly directions in films such as Dead Man, The Revenant, or The Prepostion, the western is dead.

Its death is that of changing taste, the genre giving way to increasingly complex and violent tales, its audience drifting away as cinema in the wake of the blockbuster turned towards popularism, or towards the macho power fantasies of action stars like Swarznegger and Stallone, or indeed Eastwood's turn as Dirty Harry. The genre began, in a world, to slow down and stagnate. As to what killed it, that becomes altogether a more complex question. Certainly, the arrival of the colossal, flawed, (and butchered for wide release) Heaven's Gate in 1980 is the final bullet through the medium's head, a film that killed the New Hollywood of the 60s to 80s stone dead, lost an astonishing amount of money, and only in recent years, with the release of Michael Cimino's Directors Cut (2012), has the film begun to get its just desserts as a magnificently baroque take on the violence and revenge cycles that practically powered the genre. To call Heaven's Gate the film that called the western is, perhaps, unfair. It may have taken the final shot, but it wasn't the fatal one. So let's go back a little further.

Western production slows to a crawl by the mid 1970s-most of the best 70s westerns date from before 1974-whether it was down to an increasingly self-reflective America looking for escapism away from its increasingly uncomfortable past. Certainly, the rise of Native American activism during the 1970s cast a light on the medium's often, in blunt terms, horrifically racist portrayal of peoples that west-wood expansions essentially committed genocide against. More than this, the Western began to mutate, to twist, via films like El Topo (1972), and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), into a far more brutal, weird, or truthful depiction of the lone gunman, or, via Han Solo, into the intergalactic gunslinger in 1977's Star Wars. The lines of white hatted hero and black-garbed villains no longer cut it, and bluntly, probably hadn't for decades, kept in place by nostalgic audiences and a still bouyant American public.

Thus, enter our second suspect, The Wild Bunch (1969). Whilst Tarantino might be keeping the corpse of the western warm with the excellent Django Unchained and the overly stagey but neatly taut Hateful Eight, but for the Morricone score, his westerns owe almost everything to Sam Peckinpah. Like Red Dead Redemption, a game that it otherwise only shares its almost insatiable lust for violence with, The Wild Bunch  comes at the very end of the Old West, and its tale of violent, aging outlaws, no longer really having any place in a world they barely recognise, is as elagic as it is bloody, the closing of an entire period recreated on film, as one by one, the gang are picked off, until, in one of the greatest finales of cinema, our heroes are mown down in typical Peckinparish fashion.

The one fly in the ointment in calling The Wild Bunch the film that killed the Western is just how many of the genres' classics come after, including True Grit (featuring the last truly great John Wayne performance, and released less than a week before The Wild Bunch), Peckinpah's own Bring me the Head of Afredo Garcia, and the merciless riff on the genre, Blazing Saddles, (both 1972), and Peckinpah's improvement on the themes of The Wild Bunch in 1973's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Elagic, yes? A film that would leave its impact on the medoum going forward? Undoubtedly. But, undeniably, the film that killed the Western, is arguably its greatest moment. The man who killed it, more than any other director, save for Peckinpah, is the man who innovated it into a bold new form. The murderer of the western is the first man you think of when you hear the world.

Once Upon a Time in the West may not have killed the western, but it's the film that made almost every entry, but the handful listed above, obsolete, and even those, with the possible exception of Jodorowsky's fever dream psycho-western, El Topo, feel like they're either in part, or full-scale, eyeballing Once Upon a Time... From The Wild Bunch's uneasy see-sawing between the dying embers of the cowboy lifestyle, the daily ritual broken by bursts of incredible violence, to the entire structure of Heaven's Gate, in which the fragile structures of power are burst open by rivalry, inequality, and the struggles for land. It feels like the last great addition to the Westerns canon, its concepts and features taken in this direction or the other by subsequent decades of the genre, but never truly expanded upon since. It is the film that killed the Western because rarely has anyone tried to ressurect it in any meaningful way, or to innovate past it and its peers.

More than this, though, Once Upon a Time In the West is the Western, a sweeping epic of a murdered family and the widowed heroine who inherits invaluable land that the coming railway must come through, into which a revenge-seeking harmonica-playing gunman, and a former bandit enter, to defend her from a icy-eyed, and utterly merciless gunman who, on the orders of the railway baron, Morton, seeks to see her either driven from her home, or killed for it. What follows, on colossal scale, is a tale of revenge, power, and the dying days of the Old West of gunslingers and outlaws, with Leone, the great master of the genre, never to make a western on this scale again (in fact, he would only make one other in his life, the underrated Duck, You Sucker). It is the end of the Old West, not in the grand elegy of The Wild Bunch or Heaven's Gate, but in the quiet rasp of a harmonica, drifting off into the distance.

It is the stillness of Once Upon a Time in the West that first comes to the fore. Leone places us, after all, in tension for the first ten minutes of the film in perhaps the single greatest opening of the Western; gone is the explosive start of all three of the Dollars Trilogy, and in its place is the wait, the mundanity of the quiet station. We see the three gunmen simply waiting; there's almost something of a film-within-a-film here, of the verite, of, rather than Kurosawa's grand drama, the small gestures of the films of Ozu, or the French New Wave, as these three men wait, keeping themselves busy with little moments. They wait, with barely a line of dialogue between their shaking down of the station master, and the arrival of their target. In perhaps the most stunning decision, Morricone's score held back and an atmosphere of diagetic sounds-the creaking of the weather vane, the wind, and the train slowly bringing the three gunmen's quarry-until the chatter of a telegraph breaks the silence.

A train pulls into the station, and finally, the tension seems to be broken.The three men get up to meet it, but where they expect their quarry to finally appear, all that arrives on the platform is a single mailbag. Hands retreat from guns, the hissing of the train's boiler almost breathlike, before, thwarted, as the train begins to pull away, they retreat, and turn to go. Into this anticlimax, this release of tension, comes...a harmonica. The men stop dead, the train pulling away in the background, to reveal a figure. A closeup, on the face of Charles Bronson. as he continues to play. It is a perfect piece of nigh-instantenous character introduction-the gunmen see him as an instant threat, he is confident enough to announce his introduction through the instrument round his neck.

In quick, brutal brush-strokes, the film fleshes out Harmonical he is searching for a man called Frank, and his quick wit and quick draw make quick work of three tough hired guns sent by the mysterious Frank. Where he differs from Eastwood's Man with No Name, though, is in his ruthlessness, the sharp quip of Blondie giving way to deadpan, almost icy disapproval of the gunmen's jokes, his dispatch brutal, and matter of fact, in the first of many explosions of violence, Morricone's score finally striking up as he guns them down. Injured, but alive, Harmonica makes his way to the nearby town of Flagstone in search of Frank.

It's here, in the film's next scene, that Leone begins to pick apart the legend of the Western. The massacre of the McBain family is a brutal ratcheting of tension, essentially a carbon copy of the previous scene, a slow, beautifully observed depiction of frontier life, into which steps brutal violence in the shape of Frank's gunmen who gun down the innocent family. This, by itself, is a step further than most westerns ever go; restricting their deaths and shootouts to either cowboys and bandits, rather than the innocents on the edge of these tales, with the knife in the back of the classic Western strucure coming at the end of this sequence, with the introduction of Frank. For, beneath the hat, and with his icy gaze falling across the last surviving McBain child, is the star of more than a dozen of the best of the heyday of the western, Henry Fonda, now turned from heroic pioneer to violent harbinger of progress, the hired gun for the crippled, trainbound rail baron, Mr. Morton, who seeks, at any means possible, to complete his railway to the Pacific, even if it means murder.

It's a shocking moment, the very dramatis personae of the western, the polarities of good and evil switched, and, following the introduction of Claudia Cardinale (dubbed by Joyce Gordon in the English release) as Jill McBain, the wife of the murdered McBain patriach in a spectacular oner, that eventually carries itself over the roof of the tation to show Flagstone, the film begins to gather its major character. We see Jill travel, still unaware of the tangled web she is about to enter, to the McBain homestead, stopping at an inn. Here, Leone skillfully adds the film's other major figure, of Cheyenne (Jason Robards), as the bandit accused of the McBain family's murder. Another rasp of Harmonica, and Bronson is - almost supernaturally - suddenly in a tense sequence where the film's two anti-heroes essentially butt heads whilst its actual heroine watches on.

It's here that Morricone comes into his own, giving, in comparison to his previous scores for the Dollars trilogy, each of the major figures in the film their own theme, from Jill's quiet, almost romantic theme, to the banjo-picked, almost comic theme that the dusty Cheyenne posesses, whilst Harmonica's diagetic instrument plays not only in his theme, accompanied with the reverbed Fender that also echoes through The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's iconic theme, but turned spiky and menacing, but in Frank's; even before the film fully reveals their connection, something the film spends much of its time slowly unspooling until the final duel. We know Harmonica is about to appear because Morricone tells us, before the camera pans to reveal the gunman in the shadows.

Or, to put it another way, as the film develops into its cat-and-mouse chase between Harmomica and Frank, and the struggle between the two threatens to envelop the land dispute that Frank has been brought in in to strongarm in favour of Morton, so that harmonica echoes out of the silence, in the back of auction houses, across desert plazas, and aboard trains. But even in this aspect, Once Upon a Time... feels like it breaks the rules of the Western, its soundtrack sparse, at points harsh, or indeed atonal, or used to punch home a point with maximum force. Often, Morricone and Leone simply let the sounds of nature, or the world around the characters-or indeed their absence, in several sequences that smartly rack up tension-stand in. The score, intertwined with the violence of the film, often arrives suddenly, and without warning.

And compared to the other would-be murderers of the Western, it is the way that Once Upon a Time...is structured that makes it the true death of the Western. It is, after all, a film that's practically the antithesis of the action-packed western-it, is, as Leone himself noted, a film of rituals. These jags of violence, these sudden explosions of fury and gunfire, seem to erupt out of the silence-compared to Peckinpah, where the suggestion, the threat of violence is practically a background hum, omnipresent, Leone's world is that into which violent men like Frank upend the fragility of this world of rituals, of honour, in the name of progress. Frank is that drive onwards, that pioneer spirits that powered so many of the key western's heroes, from How the West Was Won and High Noon to Wagon Master and Stagecoach, turned violent and dangerous, stalking the frontier; it is a film about the rapatious push of capital, of the threat of unchecked power ranged against the innocent.

But moreover, there's something very...final about Once Upon a Time In the West-it is a film that feels like the dying days of the entire cowboy era, despite its setting in the pioneer era-the romantism of the medium disappears into the dust-the film offs its traditional antihero, Cheyenne, whose growing raport with Jill grows over several scenes that return, almost cyclical, to coffee, to the fragility of the home that she protects, to this roguish figure, that the film wounds off-screen and has die, falling from his horse. It's a far cry from the noble deaths of the classic Western heroes, or the bullets and carnage of Peckinpah. It's the death of a man, in a fight we never see, for a woman that does not even see him topple off the horse, that last shred of machismo carrying him out of sight, as she, triumphant, the station that her life was staked upon, being built in the background, as the trainline finally reaches it.

Once Upon a Time in the West does not so much kill the Western as it watches over the last rattling breaths of the medium's heyday, reducing the colossal figures of Eastwood, of Wayne, of the heroic cowboy to mere men, and turnning Henry Fonda into a villain. Gone is the hero. Gone is the clear delineation between heroes and villains, gone is the epic tension of the grand final duel, West's, is, whilst catharic, perfunctory, as though the film kills Frank almost as an afterthought. The cowboy, the gunslinger, the West itself, all seem to fall at the end of West, to be replaced with a curious new world the end of the film only hints at, What Once Upon a Time in the West is, above all, is a western on a human scale, its great tale of revenge and power given verité grit, rather than Hollywood shine, in the last truly great classic Western. In Leone's last great Western, what else could he depict but the end of the West itself?

Rating: Must See: (Personal Recommendation)

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