ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST Movie Review

Incredible, incomparable, great. Sergio Leone's amazing Once Upon a Time in the West is, on one level, an ingeniously scripted western in which a number of characters slowly reveal their purposes to each other and the audience, culminating in a grandly designed finale. But what director Sergio Leone and his co-writers Segio Donati, Dario Argento, and Bernardo Bertolucci have achieved is something considerably more; they've bred the traditional structure of the western with the sweeping, operatic expansiveness of Giuseppe Verdi, producing a visionary, thrilling dream of what the western form means to us on a subliminal level. Though the film's setting is specific, it could be taking place on another planet; this film achieves what Star Wars may have been after—to root the mythic shape of the western in our minds as a universal and timeless idea. It's a masterpiece. With Charles Branson, Jason Robards, Claudia Cardinale, Woody Strode, Lionel Stander, Keenan Wynn, Gabriele Ferzetti, Jack Elam, and Henry Fonda as Frank, the coldest damned villain you've ever seen. In its original American release the film was brutally butchered, removing 25 crucial minutes of plot. With the help and support of Martin Scorsese, the complete version was presented in the U.S. for the first time in 1980, and is now available on video. (You must see cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli's images in their widescreen, letterboxed version.) The incomparable score, which fully complements Leone's operatic vision, is by Ennio Morricone.

NEXT STOP … The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in America, Johnny Guitar, Seven Samurai

1968 (PG) 165m/C IT Henry Fonda, Jason Robards Jr., Charles Branson, Claudia Cardinale, Keenan Wynn, Lionel Stander, Woody Strode, Jack Elam; D: Sergio Leone; W: Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento; C: Tonino Delli Colli; M: Ennio Morricone. VHS, LV PAR