Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

"Did you bring a horse for me?" "Looks like we're one short." "No... you've brought two too many."

Three words: cold as ice. That exchange, right there in the opening minutes, tells you everything you need to know about what kind of film you're in for. No fuss, no long speeches, just the quiet, deadly confidence of a man who knows exactly how this is going to go. It's one of the greatest opening sequences in cinema history, and Leone earns every second of it.

Once Upon a Time in the West is, put simply, a masterpiece. I don't throw that word around lightly, but there's no other word for it. This is filmmaking operating at the absolute peak of what the genre can do, and in many ways what any film can do. The landscapes are vast and gorgeous. The pacing is slow and deliberate in a way that would feel indulgent in lesser hands, but here it just builds and builds until the tension is almost unbearable. Leone understood that silence, and the anticipation of violence, can be more powerful than the violence itself.

And then there's Ennio Morricone. I've loved his scores across a whole run of Spaghetti Westerns, including on A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), but this might be the crowning achievement. Every character has their own musical motif, and Morricone weaves them together in a way that feels almost operatic. The harmonica theme especially, I can hear it right now as I'm writing this. It's haunting and mournful and absolutely wonderful. It's the kind of score that makes a great scene transcendent.

Now, my one genuine gripe, and it's a relatively minor one given everything else on offer. I'm not entirely sure Charles Bronson commands the screen the way Clint Eastwood does. Eastwood has this effortless, magnetic cool that I always find utterly compelling, and Bronson, while undeniably good here, doesn't quite hit those same heights for me personally. It's not that he's bad, far from it. It's just that when I watch the Man with No Name films, I feel that presence completely. Here, there are moments where I'm aware I'm watching a performance rather than believing in the person. A small thing, and your mileage may vary, but it kept this just a fraction below a perfect score for me.

Everything else, though? Fantastic. Henry Fonda playing against type as a genuinely chilling villain is a revelation. The cinematography is stunning. The story, a tale of revenge and the dying of the Old West, is told with real weight and elegance. Leone was building on his earlier work and reaching for something grander, something more elegiac, and he got there. I'd also point you towards Once Upon a Time in America (1984) if this lights a fire in you, because Leone brought the same epic, melancholic ambition to that one, just transplanted to the gangster genre with equally stunning results.

If you've never seen Once Upon a Time in the West, fix that. Put it on a big screen if you can, turn the sound up for the Morricone, and give it the attention it deserves. This is one of those rare films that reminds you why you fell in love with cinema in the first place.

Four and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★★★  | Year: 1968  | Watched: 2025-04-13

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Sergio Leone: Duck, You Sucker (1971) · Once Upon a Time in America (1984) · A Fistful of Dollars (1964) · For a Few Dollars More (1965)
More with Claude Cardinale: Fitzcarraldo (1982)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)