Once Upon A Time In The West: Special Edition
Picture: B Sound: B Extras: B+ Film: B+
After
completing his Man With No Name/Dollars Trilogy, Sergio Leone parted ways with
Clint Eastwood and embarked on a new Western that would be a giant step forward
in the cycle. Other filmmakers were
catching up with what he had launched with A
Fistful of Dollars and wanted to try something more advanced. He succeeded brilliantly with Once Upon A Time In The West.
First,
there is the influence of one of the greatest Westerns ever made, Nicholas
Ray’s Johnny Guitar, the 1954
now-cult classic that also ranks as one of the greatest color films ever made,
a remarkably subversive film in its time and to date, and a landmark transition
for The Western. The film had thematics
unprecedented in a Western and was exceptionally clever in its approach to
subject matter of the truth about the West, witch hunts, and was the first to
address the legacy of the Western for better and worse. It also was groundbreaking in its use of
sound and music, beginning with the title character, who has replaced his
six-shooter with a six-stringer.
Then
there is the second influence less considered, that of The Beatles, especially
albums like Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and The White Album. They had
innovated music every bit as much as The French New wave affected film since
1954, and Leone himself had made landmark breakthroughs within The Western, but
Once Upon A Time In The West would
break past just The Western and become one of the most remarkable films of all
time.
Though I
have to say it still does not have some of the punch of Johnny Guitar, it comes extremely close and its approach to film
sound and its use in narrative was like nothing that had ever been seen before
and rarely matched since. Leone may not
have had The Beatles or George Martin, but he had long-time composer Ennio
Morricone and his soundtrack for this film is one of the greatest in film
history.
In Johnny Guitar, the idea of digetic and
non-digetic sound and music, or the music the characters can hear versus the
music only the audience can hear. The
film was knowingly coy in the way it played with this. A later joke after both films from Mel
Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1973) has
the music of The Count Basie Orchestra playing grandly as men ride their horses
in the middle of nowhere. When they stop
because that orchestra happens to be in the way, it is funny, because 1) they
are really not suppose dot be there and 2) why do they need to be there when
the music only needs to be on the soundtrack?
Either way it is funny. Morricone
and Leone deserve some credit for that joke too, especially for those who were
fans of their films to begin with.
As with
its 1954 predecessor, a woman (Claudia Cardinale, taking on the Joan Crawford
role) hopes to build herself a future in the burgeoning expansion of
civilization, but that is threatened by a web of dark forces. Henry Fonda is brilliant in one of the
greatest and most daring performances he ever gave as one of the greatest
screen villains of all time, the psychopathic killer Frank. Leone manages to pull a Hitchcock by
exploiting Fonda’s all-American reputation by making him an attractive killer,
then makes Frank the next step in psychosis in The West after John Wayne’s
Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s 1956 masterwork The Searchers, itself an art film cleverly disguised as a B-Movie
Western. This would not be the trivial
use of an American name Hollywood star by any means.
Leone kept disguising his art under the generic Spaghetti Western
moniker.
Jason
Robards is the half-breed scapegoat for Frank’s trail of terror, and the cast
is rounded out by greats like Charles Bronson, Gabrielle Ferzetti, Woody
Strode, Lionel Stander, Jack Elam and Keenan Wynn. The best way to explain how the sound works
in this film is that all the characters realize their situation of existential
dread and are far past the point of their debut at such realization. Being this is the past, with the industrial
revolution just taking hold, they are still not gutted out by such
over-inundation. They are affected by
their environment, as the characters would be in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which takes place
a few centuries earlier.
Unlike
the split between elites and rough types of Kubrick’s films, the majority of
everyone here is a rough type and those who are not are in the most
jeopardy. The best survivors are the
ones who are the most keenly aware of their environment. There is a heightened sense of instinct among
them and civilization has not started to cut into their sense of nature
yet. That comes with a sense of death
and dirt. Leone pioneered this with his
first trilogy, and it reaches an artistic new level with this film. That is just the beginning of what makes Once Upon A Time In The West a classic.
You have
a group of top rate artists making a film, all in exceptional form, with
exceptional materials. That Leone had
much more to say about American culture and The Western after his Dollars films
is remarkable, but that culture has a wealth of aspects to address. The Professional Western (groups of guys out
to do the dirty work for the money) crossed with a more complex take on the
Revenge Western and all involved took it to a new level.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is the best transfer of Techniscope
materials I have seen yet and is a giant step forward in the treatment of such
material. We have seen good Techniscope
transfers before, especially from Anchor Bay (The Ipcress File, Cat O’ Nine
Tails, Once Upon A Time In Italy
boxed set; the latter two reviewed elsewhere on this site) and even Hen’s Tooth
(Deadlier Than The Male, also
reviewed elsewhere on this site). With
its tiny 35mm scope frames, pone on top of each other at only two perforation
holes a piece; the only way to avoid grainier images was through the
dye-transfer printing process. The only
problem is that the colors are not thoroughly of the dye-transfer type; its
richness, its fullness, but this still looks exceptional on every level. DVDs of THX-1138
(Warner, 1971), a restored The Good, The
Bad & The Ugly (MGM), and some unreleased Jean-Luc Godard films will be
the next major Techniscope films on DVD coming soon. This will be very hard to top.
The
stunning scope cinematography is by the great Torino Delli Colli, A.I.C., is in
a class by itself. Colli did not shoot
all of Leone’s films, but some key ones (Once
Upon A Time In America, for example) and prior to this had a fine track
record that included key films by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Some of those works are available in the
Water Bearer DVD boxed sets on Pasolini, reviewed elsewhere on this site.
The Dolby
Digital 5.1 AC-3 remix is a stunning reworking of the original theatrical mono
sound of the film, still available here for purists in both English and Italian
Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono. The great thing
about the 5.1 mix is how it employs Leone’s bold score, which owes more to the
Rock genre than anything he and just about any other composer had done to that
time, Rock music films notwithstanding. This
film helped set the tone for the Rocumentaries of the early 1970s, beginning
with Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock
(1970), whose montages of 16mm footage across the Panavision scope frame were
done by no less that a then-unknown Martin Scorsese.
The
actual RCA soundtrack of Morricone’s music is never in print, nor has it been
issued in one of the new higher-definition audio formats like DVD-Audio or
Super Audio CD, so those who love the score will not be disappointed. It is too bad Paramount did not have the score as an
isolated and chapterized soundtrack, but maybe the success of this set will
finally cause RCA to reissue the music at last.
This is one of the very best scores ever by a composer with literally hundreds
of them to his credit, many most memorable.
We can even say its use of electric guitar is more, important and
groundbreaking than anything recorded in the 1980s, but that’s a separate
essay. With that said, it is too bad
none of this is in DTS either.
Extras
that are here include an excellent audio commentary on DVD 1 with Cardinale,
Ferzetti, Bernardo Bertolucci, Colli, John Carpenter, John Milius, Alex Cox and
many others. DVD 2 has the programs An Opera of Violence (28:48), The Wages of Sin (19:36) and Something to Do with Death (18:16) in a
featurettes section, Railroad:
Revolutionizing the West (6:21) is a film-related featurette that is also
historical, profiles of Cardinale, Fonda, Robards, Bronson, and Ferzetti are
brief-but-interesting, a long theatrical trailer, and a location gallery that
compares the locations form shots in the film to still shots taken of the same
spaces today. The newer pictures may be
cleaner and clearer, but note how they lack the character and form of the
film’s version, age of the shots notwithstanding. These rarely overlap information and are all
worth their four-hours-long running time.
For a
studio that still fails to issue simple trailers on many of their latest, basic
DVDs and are not known for their Special Editions, Paramount shows what they
are capable of with Once Upon A Time In
The West. For a change, a film never
before issued on DVD was not just thrown out there in a lame basic version for
people to waste their money on while waiting for the better edition. This is the better edition and a must see for
anyone serious about film.
- Nicholas Sheffo
