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Once Upon a Time in the West

Presented by Harvard Film Archive at Harvard Film Archive

November 12, 2011

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Directed by Sergio Leone. With Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards Jr.
Italy/US 1968, 35mm, color, 165 min. In English
After declaring himself finished with the Western, Leone was nevertheless easily tempted back to the genre by his first offer from an American studio, Paramount, who promised him creative freedom and a leading role for Henry Fonda, Leone’s original first choice for the Man With No Name. Pledging this to be his last Western, Leone set out to make a final statement on the quintessential American genre, employing the rising young directors Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci to craft a “a fresco on the founding of a great nation” focused on the rise and almost simultaneous Edenic fall of the frontier and taking the train as its contradictory emblem. A new sobriety and elegiac tone enters Leone’s oeuvre with Once Upon a Time in the West – a dark fatalism that defines history as an inexorable and blindly shaping force driven by greed and primitive violence. Arguably Leone’s most influential film, Once Upon a Time in the West is among his most aesthetically complex works on many levels – from its soundtrack that places diegetic sound effects (the squeaky wheels, gunshots and insects buzzing brilliantly employed in the celebrated opening sequence, for example) at the same level as Morricone’s incredible score, to Delli Colli’s dynamic widescreen cinematography that allows the actors’ faces to speak the words suppressed by the film’s extraordinarily minimalist screenplay. The restored version screened at the HFA restores the full twenty minutes slashed by Paramount for the film’s original US release.