Sergio Leone is most definitely the face of the modern western. Leone revolutionized the genre with his raw, brutal, and visceral films that matured and revitalized the spaghetti western and made it into something so much more grand.
The crucial moment of the film is Henry Fonda saying "make your loving brother happy", which was translated for the Germans to "Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod". This sentence means "play me the song of death", and this was also made the title of the whole film in German language.
Once Upon A Time In The West is a quite simply a masterpiece. No film has ever had the same effect on me.
If you have 3 hours to spare watch this film.even if you don't like westerns.
Sergio Leone's follow up to his superlative "Man With No Name" trilogy is highly acclaimed in some circles, a bit too much so to be honest, but is still a well acted story of a woman(beautiful Claudia Cardinale) who comes to the west as a mail-order-bride, only to find that her would-be family was wiped out by a cold-hearted gunfighter(Henry Fonda, cast effectively against type). She nonetheless vows to carry on, and is later helped by a man known as Harmonica(Charles Bronson) who has also vowed to kill the same man that killed her family.
The camera work of Mr. Leone, the amazing music of Mr.
There are some films that simply leave you stunned the first time you watch them - that is EXACTLY how I felt when I first viewed Leone's 'Once Upon a Time in the West'. I had seen his 'Dollars Trilogy' with Eastwood - and loved his 'style' languid story-telling, massive close-ups and (of course) Morricone's timeless music.
I see that this is number 19 on the top 250, but I do not think that this does it justice and in general I don't think that people give this film enough credit as it deserves. Everything is perfectly combined to make for an amazing film that you cannot take your eyes off, even through some of the slower moments early on.
This movie is art and arguably one of if not not the greatest western ever made. I would rank it #2 behind The Good The Bad and The Ugly only because of Eli Wallach and his acting as Tuco.
