Once Upon a Time in the West

I've been wanting to write about this movie for a while. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the very few westerns that I've seen, but it is without a doubt one of my favorite movies.

The movie takes place in the American West in the railroad expansion days. Much of the movie is centered around the railroad and its expansion to the pacific.

The stylized nature of this movie is what I find most enjoyable. Many of the shots seem to be painstakingly composed. We also get plenty of time to observe the view because everyone stands still for so long in the shot.

The other enjoyable part of this movie has to be the score by Ennio Morricone. This is one of the scores that we looked at in my film music class at MIT. There are parts that have a clearly have an old west type of feel. L'orchestraccia for example, plays when when Jill first arrives in the western town. Most of the score doesn't sound terrible westerny if you were just to hear it alone. One of the things I like most about the score is that there is an instrument for each of the main characters. Harmonica is represented by the harmonica. Jill has the harp. Cheyenne has the banjo. Frank has the electric guitar. It makes for a good clash at the end when Harmonica and Frank duel and you can hear the echoing harmonica playing as well as the electric guitar.

This is a very easy movie to like. I can understand why it's so high on the IMDB list. #23 is a very respectable spot in the list. It's preceded by Psycho and succeeded by Silence of the Lambs just to give some perspective. I like the IMDB list quite a lot because it seems to be a decent fusion of all time best movies according to critics and movie fans. I think that a lot of people haven't really heard of Once Upon a Time in the West. I know I hadn't really heard much about it a year ago. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that it was in the top 25 movies on IMDB.

I think part of what people like so much about it is that the movie is so stylized and it really lets you take everything in. Below I have some of my favorite shots of the movie.

Here we have three men against one. I like this shot a lot. It has charters at all levels of the screen. We can see the bad guys in the foreground, the rail road is right in the middle of the shot both vertically and horizontally. Then we have Harmonica out in the distance standing his ground. The three henchmen form a V shape, which makes them seem like a unit.

This is the scene where Frank and his henchmen have just killed the MacBain Family. They realized that the little boy is still alive and the walk up to him. The shot is actually very similar to the one above. The henchmen form a V shape while walking up to their enemy in the distance. It's definitely illustrative of a team going against one.

Throughout the movie there are a lot of shots that focus on the face. My film music professor and my grandpa who has seen more westerns than anyone both mentioned that. This is probably the most well known shot. Frank is sort of smiling at the little boy before he kills him. When I saw this shot for the first time (it occurs early in the movie), I knew I was going to love this movie.

This is another shot similar to the first two. Here we have Jill and Harmonica in the background and Frank is standing in the doorway in the background. This is sort of the inverse of the first two shots. This is indoors, the bad guy is in the distance, and here the good people out number the bad ones. I indicates a changing tide in the movie I think. At this point, the good guys stand a chance of winning.

Well, if you are reading this and you haven't seen this movie, I really think that you should. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. The only reservation I have is that it's a very slow paced movie. If you can't sit still for a long movie this one might not be for you. Overall, I think any movie lover would definitely like this one.