The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), directed by Sergio Leone

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Once Upon a Time in the West" by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Tuva Semmingsen

       Cultural intermingling is about as common as the tides, and it’s about as obvious as the tides when it comes to film. Hollywood’s film noir craze in the 40s and 50’s were inspired by the German expressionist films of the 20’s, the films of directors like Martin Scorsese and Monte Hellman have their roots in the French New Wave, and then of course you have the spaghetti westerns. While originally used as a derogatory term by critics, these were films directed, crewed and produced in Italy and Italians obviously love spaghetti, the spaghetti western has gone on to subsume the concept of westerns in the public consciousness. I mean picture the quintessential Wild West gunslinger in your head and chances are he’s gonna be a lot closer to Clint ‘Chair Talker’ Eastwood than ol’ John ‘The Indians deserved it’ Wayne, and when westerns tropes are referenced in modern works it is more likely going to be from something like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly than it is Angel & the Badman. Whether spaghetti westerns are out and out better than the old American western isn’t really a question worth answering, there are plenty of classic American westerns just as there are plenty of shoddily made Italian westerns, but there is a distinct difference between the two and that is in their tone. The Italian’s depiction of the American West is gritty; It’s a morally gray world where good people die for nothing and the only common language is the one that comes out of the barrel of a gun. Compared to the squeaky clean, white hat versus black hat, occasionally jingoistic image of the old western the spaghetti western seemed more visceral, more relatable, especially to an American audience that was hurtling towards the Vietnam War and everything that followed. Westerns still faded away in the end sure, but it can’t be denied that those films and those directors gave that genre a level of critical and commercial acclaim that it hadn’t experienced in years, and arguably is the main reason that the genre hasn’t just faded into complete irrelevancy.

       The man credited with the creation of spaghetti western is also the most famous director of spaghetti westerns: Sergio Leone. Entering the world of show business back in 1941 with a small role in Roberto Roberti’s The Man on the Street, Leone worked for several years as an assistant director and second unit director before finally making his debut in 1961 with The Colossus of Rhodes. Three years later he would turn in his sword and sandals for leather chaps and revolvers in A Fistful of Dollars, and the rest is history. It’s a bit sad that a director as influential as Leone wasn’t more prolific, he only directed 7 films before his death in 1989 with over a decade long gap between Duck, You Sucker! in 1971 and his final film, Once Upon a Time in America in 1984, but if you’ve got to choose between quality and quantity then Leone chose quality. Years ago I wrote about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a film which many consider one of the greatest westerns of all time, and so to kick off Long Dark Marathon of the Soul ‘21’s international top 10, why not return to Leone and cover the other greatest western of all time? I mean 80 percent of the Marathon this year is already returning names, what’s one more on the pile right??

       Released in 1968, Once Upon a Time in the West was written by Sergio Leone and Sergio Donati with story by Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, directed by Sergio Leone and produced by Fulvio Morsella through Rafran Cinematografica. Once upon a time in the West, a man carrying a harmonica, known only as Harmonica (Charles Bronson) arrived at a little town named Flagstone, looking for another man named Frank (Henry Fonda). Frank wasn’t there to meet him however, as he and his friends were busy murdering a family named the McBains and framing a local outlaw named Cheyenne (Jason Robards) for the crime . He and his outlaw gang were working for a railroad tycoon by the name of Morton you see, and that delicious McBain land is right in the middle of some prime locomotive territory. Later that same day, a woman arrived in town and revealed herself to be Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), the secret wife of patriarch Brett McBain who had arrived just in time to find her new family massacred. Thus we see a tangled web is weaved; Harmonica wants Frank, Morton wants the land, Frank wants power, Cheyenne wants money (and a little bit of Jill), and Jill is the center of it all. All it takes is one good shake and everything will come loose, with explosive results.

       With a name like that you’d think the movie would be more fantastical, but at the same time I can’t think of a better name for this film. Leone’s westerns prior to this had a storybook element to them; The gunslinger with no name who arrives in town and saves it from outlaws in Fistful of Dollars or the odyssey the Tuco and Blondie embark on to find the hidden treasure in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We see it here as well with the character of Harmonica and his role in the story, but where those previous films used the western as more of an aesthetic choice (literally in the case of Fistful of Dollars, as it was based on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo), Once Upon a Time in the West is intimately connected with its setting. The entire film is built around the expansion of the United States through the railroad after all, its populated by a veritable melting pot of people, black, white, Chinese, Mexican, Native American, which runs parallel to Harmonica’s quest to kill Frank. The inevitable march of time and progress, represented by the railroad, which sweeps away the remnants of the past, represented by the outlaws and gunslingers like Cheyenne and Frank. Once Upon a Time in the West has a storybook style name because like storybooks it has a definitive ending, for the film and in a grander sense for the ‘Wild West’. Leone would go on to direct, write and produce other movies in the genre in the years following the release of this film, but Once Upon a Time in the West does have this air of finality to it that you could easily see it as the end of the western movie.

       It’s almost not worth mentioning the cinematography in this case, because we all know the Sergio Leone style by now: wide angle shots of the landscape paired with close focus shots on people’s faces, and hold for a couple glacial seconds. Which of course works because the scenery is fucking beautiful and the close-ups are connected to some of the most intense scenes in the film. Sergio jumps out of the gate with it too, with Frank’s men waiting at the train station to kill the man who turns out to be Harmonica. Three men just sitting at this train station in the middle of nowhere, ill intent marked clear on their faces, and the tension builds and builds until the train and Harmonica is introduced. Even though they break that atmosphere somewhat with some silliness, it’s a textbook example of the visual power the director wields. I also liked the scene with Cheyenne taking out Frank’s men from on top of a moving train; While not as dynamic as modern action set pieces it is a change of pace from the normal western gunfights, and does aid in the presentation of this film as an epic.

       As far the cast goes, it’s solid. While Charles Bronson doesn’t cut the same figure as Clint Eastwood (although ironically Bronson was offered the lead role in all the Leone westerns that Eastwood would later star in), like Eastwood he does have this quiet machismo about him that conveys the idea of Harmonica as this enigmatic, deadly figure. Henry Fonda is great as the villainous outlaw Frank; A man who puts on airs of power and class but at heart is just a killer, and one who loves doing it. Jason Robards does a fine job as Cheyenne, a foil to Harmonica who eventually grows to be the secondary protagonist almost, although much like Bronson compared to Eastwood I don’t think he leaves as strong an impression as Eli Wallach did a few years earlier. Neither does Claudia Cardinale if I’m being honest; One look at her and you can tell why she was the most popular actress in Italy at the time, but I could never get a feel for her character. For a while I thought there was going to be a twist where she turned out to be a con artist looking to scam the McBains, because there were a couple scenes that seemed to suggest as much, but then nothing came of it and she just becomes a character that reacts to other characters doing things, which is never an ideal position.

         Next we arrive at the music, composed by Ennio Morricone, king of the spaghetti western scores, and I’m surprised to say that it’s a mixed bag. When it hits like in the final duel it’s overwhelming, an explosion of raw emotion in the form of noise that elevates that scene to high art, and when it doesn’t it stumbles off a cliff. There’s this one little bit of music that has a bit of a cantering cadence, I don’t know if you’d call it a leitmotif or not, that keeps appearing in the film. From the sound of it you’d think it’s for the background of the sillier moments, but then it shows up for scenes that are dead serious and it’s tonally dissonant. Not to mention the soft and sensual music for what is, in essence, a rape scene, I don’t really get the logic there. Ennio Morricone is a legend in the world of film and rightfully so, but if you’re coming into this expecting the Moricone that everyone knows from pop culture then you’ll probably be out of luck.

       I guess that’s the biggest takeaway from watching Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s a great film to watch, with deep characters and a story that it is both personal and grandiose, but as I’m writing about it I keep coming back to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It’s impossible not to, as Good, Bad, and the Ugly is the quintessential western. It’s got the iconic scenes, iconic characters, iconic music, it’s a successful film on all levels. Once Upon a Time in the West falls short not because it’s necessarily a worse film, but because it doesn’t compel you to revisit it the same way that GBU does. You see it, you feel it and you move on. Whereas with GBU just writing about it has given me the urge to rewatch it. 

       The operative words here are ‘you see it’. Once Upon a Time in the West is 100 percent recommended, but not quite a ‘turn off this computer and go see it now!’ kind of film. If you’ve slept on Leone and/or spaghetti westerns prior to this, then watch Fistful of Dollars, watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, watch The Wild Bunch and The Magnificent Seven and all those Django and Sartana movies, and when you feel up to it pop in Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s the last western, thematically at least, and that’s how it deserves to be seen.

Reelin' In The Years -- The Grapes of Wrath (1940), directed by John Ford

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Dust Bowl Blues", by Woody Guthrie

       Man, quite the eventful couple of months, huh? A lot of bad stuff going on, so bad that something like sitting down to write shitty little movie reviews seemed silly. Wasteful, even. Still I suppose we all need a distraction from time to time, a little levity to break one out of that depressive spiral, even if you have to force yourself a little. Our stop today is 1940; The world has been plunged back into war, it’s biggest yet in fact, and the U.S. has yet to officially throw its hat in the ring, perhaps because they were so flattered that Hitler named one of Germany’s then-biggest trains after it. Nazis were super into that whole Manifest Destiny thing you see, and Jim Crow? Don’t even get them started, they’d probably name their kids Crow if it didn’t remind them of something that wasn’t white. That being said, when it came time to pick the representative for 1940 the competition turned out to be pretty damn fierce. Charlie Chaplin’s antifascist masterpiece The Great Dictator immediately came to mind, but since I had already seen it years ago I ended up going with Modern Times. Hitchcock made his annual appearance with Rebecca, which earned him first Best Director nomination, but it’s still not his time yet. Disney dropped two movies that year, Pinocchio and the audio-visual spectacle Fantasia, but at the time I already had an animated film set up for a later year. The Thief of Baghdad was actually the representative for a while, but because I decided to take a break from genre film in this series it eventually got wiped away in one of the many list revisions. The Proud Valley, starring the great Paul Robeson was also in there for a hot minute, and His Girl Friday might have had a chance if It Happened One Night hadn’t fucked up the romcom for everybody. No, at a time like this, when there are people angry and suffering and miserable, it only makes sense to do a movie about people who are angry and suffering and miserable. Escapism? Never heard of it.

Released in 1940, screenplay by associate producer Nunnally Johnson, The Grapes of Wrath was directed by John Ford, pillar of the Western genre, and of course was based on the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck, oft-considered one of the great American novels. Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, a sharecropper’s son that has finally returned to the family farm in Oklahoma after a stint in jail for homicide (in self-defense), only to find out there isn’t a family farm anymore. The Dust Bowl has run through the Midwest, devastating thousands of acres of farmland, which has led to government-enforced mass evictions of folk from their homes. With the local economy dead in the gutter and little other options, the Joad family (along with the disillusioned ex-preacher Casy) is forced to pack up and head west for California and the promise of work. It’s a long way from Oklahoma to California for just a promise though, and unfortunately the Joad’s are going to learn the hard way that hopes and dreams  don’t often translate to reality.

John Ford is a director that I known of for years, and yet up until watching this film I was reticent about checking out his work, because he was so often connected with those old-school Westerns (which always looked stodgy and uninteresting to me compared to the Italian stuff) and John ‘The Native Americans Deserved to Die’ Wayne. Did not appeal to me whatsoever. Yet for as much criticism as I could give Ford for his reputation as ‘America’s Filmmaker’ I have to give him credit for adapting a story that so thoroughly strips away the illusions of America. The myth of the American Dream? The myth of America being this land of opportunity, of moral uprightness, where good things happen to those who put their noses to the grindstone and work for it. Bunk. The reality is that if you’re poor then you have no opportunities. The reality is that if the people who control the jobs decide to not give you a job, then tough luck, I guess your children get to starve. The reality is if the pittance they give you isn’t enough to live on and you speak up about it, they have no problem bringing in a couple thugs with badges to cave your skull in under the pretense of you being an ‘agitator’. The reality is when you’re poor, when you can’t work or can’t find work, you cease being a human being; You’re an ‘Okie’, a ‘transient’, a ‘migrant’, an eyesore that the ‘normal’ god-fearing public would rather just disappear altogether. Steinbeck’s story is about the endurance of the human spirit in the face of hopelessness, of the righteous fury of the just when faced with injustice, and I think Ford captures those feelings in his adaptation. Pretty damn good for a first impression.

First impressions also tell me that Ford isn’t that adventurous of a filmmaker. There’s not much in the way of cinematography or shot composition, he’s not trying to impress, he’s telling the tale about as straightforward as you can get. That’s not necessarily a good thing, I think he glosses over some scenes that should be treated more dramatically for the sake of pushing the story forward, but at the same time I appreciate Ford’s simple approach. When you’ve got dozens of people, men, women and children, marching in order off to the fields to pick peaches for 7 cents a crate you don’t need much to convey what the audience should be feeling. About the only thing I’ll really dig him for in this regard is a scene near the beginning with Tom and Casy where it’s you can clearly tell it’s a soundstage, like you can hear John Carradine’s voice bouncing off the walls, but you can’t really fault a film for being made in a film studio, especially in the 40s. I do think the scene near the end with Tom and Ma Joad is framed rather well, and you do get some wide open scenery which I understand is a Ford staple, so don’t let it be said Ford is doing rote filmmaking stuff, but it’s definitely not a flashy film. .

The cast is quite good, not as star-laden as is Hollywood’s tendency, but effective all the same. Henry Fonda might be a little too Hollywood to pull off being the son of a destitute farmer, a bit too handsome to be really rugged and I don’t believe he has much of a vocal range, but it does look like he could beat your ass and work a field after so you could do worse for leading. John Carradine is great as the ex-preacher Jim Casy, cast adrift both physically and spiritually, and I wish we got to see more of him. Jane Darwell isn’t just Ma Joad, the emotional pillar upon which the Joad family rests, I think everyone can see a bit of their mom. The rest of the Joad family don’t get quite as much attention, arguably even underdeveloped (Rosie I’d say gets the worst of it) but Ford does devote enough time so that you know who these people are and by the end you’re invested in their pursuit of happiness. Or at least their pursuit of not starving to death.

One thing that I definitely wasn’t a fan of was in regards to the score. While I agree with the use of folksy, jug-band music, the type you’d expect poor Oklahoman sharecroppers to listen to, it’s too upbeat for the movie it’s in. I’d go as far to say that it’s tone-deaf to what Ford is trying to portray on screen. It’s not like folk music is devoid of morose songs, where the hell do you think the blues came from after all, and so one would think that if you’re making a movie dealing with such heavy topics you’d want music that matches the emotional context of the film, rather than something you’d hear in the background of your local hootenanny. Luckily the most powerful moments of the film are done without music at all, but I still don’t agree with the decision.

Also, while Ford captures the essence of the novel in his adaptation, it does feel like a lot of the novel was trimmed down for that adaptation. As I wrote earlier it looks like the movie is building up to something with Rosie, but abruptly ends before it can pay it off. Hell, from watching this movie you’d never know why the story is called The Grapes of Wrath, because I don’t think you ever see a single fruit at all, despite the driving force of the film revolving around it. Unfortunately I haven’t read the novel, but I do know that there are some things there that were not present in the film, for reasons of brevity or because they were risque for the movie audiences of the 40’s. Best to stick with travel montages instead.

The Grapes of Wrath is not a movie without flaws, but it’s still a good movie, with a message that is just as relevant now as it was back then, perhaps even more. Easily, and strongly, recommended. Don’t start packing up your bags yet though, because we’re going to be knee deep in the 1940’s for the time being. Coming up next time, a bonafide bucket list movie that you’ve probably seen referenced dozens of times, but perhaps have never actually seen.