Sightlines · reception
How Once Upon a Time in the West was received
1968 · Sergio Leone · Once Upon a Time in the West on Sightlines
The arc
Cut by Paramount and shrugged off in America in 1969, it was a phenomenon in France — running for years in Paris — and has since been fully canonized as Leone's masterpiece and one of the greatest westerns ever made.
What’s debated
The eternal Leone-head debate: is this or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly his peak — with a side quarrel over whether its glacial pacing is hypnotic or a test of endurance.
Its footprint
Morricone's wailing harmonica theme and the near-wordless opening — three gunmen, a fly, dripping water — are among the most imitated stretches of film ever shot; Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tips its hat right in the title.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' pillar of the western canon and a perennial Letterboxd favorite, routinely ranked at or near the top of the genre.
Did you know? Henry Fonda showed up with brown contact lenses and a mustache to look the villain — Leone made him ditch both, because he wanted audiences to stare into those famous baby-blue eyes and realize the hero of Hollywood westerns was playing a child-killer.
Named by the director
- John Ford — Leone shot in Monument Valley as an explicit homage to Ford, the director whose westerns the whole film is in dialogue with.
- High Noon (1952) — The opening — gunmen killing time waiting for a train — was conceived as a riff on High Noon's clock-watching setup.
- Johnny Guitar (1954) — Leone and his co-writers drew on Nicholas Ray's film for the idea of a strong woman at the story's center.
- The Searchers (1956) — Ford's film was among the classic westerns Leone, Bertolucci and Argento deliberately quoted when building the story.
- The Iron Horse (1924) — Ford's railroad epic was a declared touchstone for the film's coming-of-the-railroad theme.