Hello, I'm Lancelot Narayan. Welcome to the audio commentary track
for Sergio Leone's, Once Upon a Time in the West.
You will be hearing from Sir Christopher Frayling,
author of the book Sergio Leone, Something to Do With Death,
Film historian Dr Sheldon Hall,
directors Alex Cox, John Milius, John Carpenter, Bernardo Bertolucci,
and star of the film Claudia Cardinale.
We hear first from Sir Christopher Frayling,
who takes us through the classic opening scenes.
We're in a deserted station in the middle of nowhere,
somewhere in Arizona, but actually filmed in Spain,
near a town called Guadix, in a place called Estación de Calahorra.
Three gunfighters, in a menacing way, are moving in on the station.
They're wearing long duster coats,
canvas coats sometimes featured in American Westerns,
but were the result of research by the designers and Sergio Leone,
who thought them rather impressive.
The three gunfighters are played by
Woody Strode, John Ford's great black actor,
Jack Elam, who appeared as a baddie in countless Hollywood Westerns,
and Al Mulock, who is a rather mysterious Canadian actor,
whose last appearance this was.
The woman, the Indian squaw, is played by Mrs Woody Strode.
So they're threatening the station agent.
The design of this station is interesting,
it's just made of higgledy-piggledy pieces of wood,
railway sleepers on the floor, even a railway going through the station.
One of the gunfighters is making a cat-like face at this caged bird.
It's all very threatening macho behaviour.
There's usually a character of a crazy old man in Leone's films,
For a Few Dollars More and so on.
The station agent here plays that role.
Trying to sell a ticket, but Jack Elam isn't buying.
Now, of course, this sequence is based on the equivalent sequences
in Fred Zinnemann's film High Noon, made in the early 1950s,
where three gunfighters are waiting at Hadleyville Station,
a much brighter, cleaner, well-lit station in a Hollywood backlot.
And the three gunfighters in High Noon
are played by Lee Van Cleef, Sheb Wooley and Robert Wilke.
The station agent is banged up.
The door closes with an amplified natural sound,
and we get, as if we needed reminding, "A Sergio Leone film".
Now, the whole of this soundtrack sequence
is built around amplified natural sounds.
Creaking doors, slamming metal doors, the bird,
the "chi-chi-chi" of the cat-like face, the scrunches on the sand,
and, above all, a windmill that's in bad need of oiling,
that creaks away throughout the scene.
Originally, there was a theme composed for this by Ennio Morricone.
It didn't seem to work,
and they decided to orchestrate the soundtrack
in a very complex way for the late 1960s,
around all these natural sounds. It's like a huge piece of performance art.
A ballet performed to natural sounds.
It relates to Morricone's experiments with avant-garde music.
He went to a symphony for metal ladder where someone stood on stage,
first in absolute silence, then holding the ladder to a microphone,
and the squeaking noise of the ladder lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes.
The philosophy of it, which is based on John Cage's musical experiments,
was that all natural sounds are music, it's a question of context.
In a concert hall a squeaky ladder becomes music.
That was the basic idea that gave them the concept for this soundtrack.
It's a squeaky windmill and all sorts of other creaks, winds whistling,
knuckles about to be pulled, and so on.
But it's orchestrated around natural sounds,
whereas the rest of the film is orchestrated around music.
Instead of the smooth wooden platform of the usual Hollywood movie,
you have just discarded sleepers,
a hint that the railroad is being built around them as they sit here.
The train, we've learned from the blackboard, is two hours late.
So they've arrived, obviously for some assignation, but the train,
unlike the train in High Noon, which is dead on time, is two hours late.
And what we experience in this scene is the gunfighters passing the time,
bored out of their skulls, waiting to shoot somebody,
and how they behave under those rather stressful conditions.
So the sound of the telegraph has been irritating Jack Elam.
He pulls the wires out and instead of just the telegraph stopping,
the windmill stops as well, and all the other sounds.
So this is an artificial soundtrack.
When you pull the wires out, the entire soundtrack stops.
And then slowly they fade back the windmill.
Woody Strode meanwhile is standing under some rusty water
dropping on his fabulous bald head.
Woody Strode, ex-American footballer, had appeared in John Ford's films
Sergeant Rutledge, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and other Westerns,
and, in the way that Sergio Leone did his casting,
he brought with him all those John Ford films.
Al Mulock had appeared in various Italian Westerns,
including a Lee Van Cleef film. He's the one pulling on his knuckles.
Jack Elam is the veteran of High Noon.
He appeared as the town drunk way back in the early '50s,
and Leone remembered this astonishing Hollywood bad-guy face,
one of whose eyes doesn't quite work properly.
And instead of the water and the knuckles, he gets the fly.
I asked the production manager once how he did this.
They put jam, or marmalade all over Jack Elam's beard
and had a jar of flies off camera. They let the flies out one by one,
hoping that one would land on his chin, and this one worked very well.
More attention is paid to the fate of this fly
than to the fate of several human beings later on in the film.
And so the sound effects build up, the knuckles get more insistent,
the buzzing of the fly gets more insistent, the drip of the water,
and this piece of sonic art really comes into its own.
Leone has this extraordinary ability
to combine grungy close-ups with epic landscapes.
A lot of his films have these big faces in Techniscope close-up,
with every pore, every piece of beard, every aspect of physiognomy,
as if it's carved out of the geology of America or Spain.
You crosscut that with the landscapes. The faces get in the way.
The opening shot of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is Al Mulock,
the third gunfighter here,
blocking the landscape, and the sound of a dog howling.
So grungy close-ups and epic long shots.
The fly walks up the side of the bench and Jack Elam pulls his gun.
Is this a rerun of Buster Keaton's gag in The Paleface,
where he actually shoots it? No.
He traps it in the barrel of the gun and you get another sound,
this "neow-neow-chung-chung" sound,
as the fly, terrified, flies up and down the barrel of the gun,
and Jack Elam smiles as he listens to it. An extraordinary moment.
That eye has to feature in a rather comic way.
Incredible emphasis on physical details.
Leone was a collector of antiques.
He loved craftsmanship and finely made things.
He loved the tactile quality of materials.
Now, the train comes over the camera,
a shot first used in John Ford's film The Iron Horse, 1924,
where the train helps the white settlers during an Indian attack.
That's the second reference to a Hollywood Western.
We start with High Noon, we then go to The Iron Horse.
Woody Strode wrote in his autobiography, Gold Dust,
that in 20 years in Hollywood he'd never had close-ups like this.
Even in The Professionals, which he'd just made with Claudia Cardinale,
he only got three close-ups. But here he has lots of close-ups.
And this ten-minute appearance
was probably his most memorable appearance ever in a movie.
Note the sawn-off rifle which has a trigger guard just like John Wayne's.
A reference to John Wayne movies, particularly Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.
This elaborate trigger guard, everything about this is conscious,
references to all the Westerns that the writers and director had seen.
"Directed by Sergio Leone" coming down over the cowcatcher,
as if it's stopping the train.
And now a new sound effect, the wheezing and puffing of the train
as the boiler keeps going while they wait for someone.
Now, in High Noon, they'd be waiting for the bad guy.
Here they're waiting for the good guy.
They had two locomotives when making this film.
Production designer Carlo Simi
disguised them to look like American locomotives.
They're Spanish trains that were dressed up to look like Western ones,
and this was one of them.
They think the person hasn't turned up. All that wait for nothing.
So they're about to go.
What freezes them is the sound of a harmonica.
We get a delayed drop.
The curtain comes aside in the form of the railway carriage,
to reveal the central character, the man with the harmonica.
A real man with no name played by Charles Bronson.
And Leone said to me that Bronson's harmonica is Johnny's guitar.
Just like Sterling Hayden's entrance into the bar in Johnny Guitar,
there's a delayed drop as a glass on the bar rolls, falling into his hand,
the camera goes up and you see his face. So this is a delayed drop,
as Charles Bronson's face is revealed by the train.
Throughout the film Bronson appears behind pillars, through curtains.
He sort of drifts into frame,
as if he has a supernatural control over time and space.
His first entrance, he's simply discovered standing there.
And the first dialogue. We're well into the film,
but these are the first words spoken.
The railway line in the foreground, as that's what the movie is about.
This confrontation is basically about the building of the railroad.
"You brought two too many." Bronson wonderful, almost parody dialogue.
"Did you bring a horse for me?"
"Looks like we're shy of one horse." "You brought two too many."
It's almost an excuse for a laugh. Such extreme Western dialogue,
but it's also magnificently written.
Then, despite all that build-up, the violence happens very quickly,
unlike in a Sam Peckinpah film
where the moment of violence is stretched with slow motion.
Leone's interested in the rituals that precede the violence,
not the violence itself.
What happens is that two of the guest stars, Jack Elam and Woody Strode,
are dead before the film has even begun.
This is going to be a very strange movie.
Carlo Simi, the production designer,
said that when they were recording the windmill, an assistant said,
"Shouldn't we oil it, it sounds a bit creaky?",
Leone said, "Touch it and I'll strangle you."
He wanted this incredible squeak that grinds and gets on everyone's nerves.
And so Harmonica gets up, but the other three are dead.
The second big sequence
is the second cluster of references to Hollywood Westerns.
The opening moments of Shane by George Stevens
have a little boy with a wooden rifle pointing it at a deer.
The deer's antlers frame, famously, Shane arriving from the wilderness.
Well, this is another little boy, who's miming hunting,
birds rather than a deer, but it's a direct reference
to the very opening moments of George Stevens' 1950s film Shane.
We have the cicadas, the sound of crickets and the Spanish desert.
This was filmed further south in Spain,
whereas the station was the Estación de Calahorra, near Guadix,
this is down in Almeria about ten miles outside Tabernas.
Indeed, the set is still standing there as a tourist attraction today.
Little Timmy mimes
in exactly the same way little Joey Starrett does in Shane.
It's the McBain family. When they were preparing the script,
the writers, Bertolucci, Argento and Leone initially,
then Sergio Donati the scriptwriter, were looking at American references.
They thought, thrillers, Ed McBain, Brett Halliday,
both authors of policiers.
So let's call the man Brett McBain after Brett Halliday and Ed McBain,
let's call the boy Timmy McBain and there's Maureen McBain, the daughter,
the little boy's sister at the house.
She comes out singing, "Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling."
That's a reference to Raoul Walsh's film Pursued,
where a similar sequence with the checked tablecloth and family meal
is actually illustrated by a musical box playing Danny Boy,
which everyone joins in, including Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright.
So this is a family gathering and the Irish song is an example of that.
But suddenly there's silence.
So all is not well in the wilderness. The cicadas have stopped chirping.
And these moments are yet another reference,
this is to John Ford's film The Searchers,
where you have the ranch at twilight in Monument Valley
and sudden moments of silence
with the buttes and mesas of Monument Valley in the distance.
In Shane, it's the Comanche Indians signalling to each other
and about to engage in a massacre of the ranch.
But in this case it isn't the Comanche Indians, as we'll see.
Brett McBain is played by Frank Wolff,
an expat actor who'd worked in America.
And who was to play the sheriff in a classic Italian Western,
The Big Silence, which also has one of the great Ennio Morricone scores,
shortly after this.
We're introduced to Patrick, another member of the family.
We've met Timmy and Maureen, we now meet Patrick, the third child,
who's got to go off and meet his new stepmother.
A feast is being laid out in the wilderness.
The checked tablecloth is the classic image of domesticity and family life.
It's being laid out for the arrival of Claudia Cardinale as Jill.
And it's a classic Hollywood Western set-up
where the family gathering or the dance or the celebration
is interrupted by something sinister,
usually Native Americans in the wilderness,
but in this case, it's the bad guys.
This juxtaposition between the rituals of family life
and the terror of living in the wilderness
is one of the staple moments in the Hollywood Western.
The house of Sweetwater is interesting. It's made of solid logs,
actually a job lot left over from Orson Welles' film Falstaff.
But it's much more substantial than it should be.
It's got a pitched roof over two floors, it's got a balcony,
it's made to last.
What Leone wanted was a house that an Irishman like McBain,
who has this dream of a lifetime,
and the well is key to that dream,
that he has this house that's built to last for generations.
You don't need a house like that for three children
when there's no land to speak of being farmed.
All you have is the water in front of it and a very substantial house.
In fact, it has lasted.
It's in almost as good condition today as it was then.
One of Carlo Simi's most interesting designs.
Again the silence, this build up of tension.
There's something out there, and they're not sure what it is.
Another moment from The Searchers as the birds fly.
Maureen thinks it's beautiful. Or is it?
Is it because someone's hunting? Is one going to fall from the sky?
No, the sounds are coming from somewhere else.
And Maureen is the first to be shot.
Brett himself is the second to be shot. And then Patrick is shot.
This is a real massacre of an entire family.
And out comes Timmy to be confronted by this mayhem
of everyone he holds dear in life just lying there
around this meal that was to be a great celebration.
The music swells up. The first use of this theme,
Like a Judgement it was called, with a trumpet and amplified guitar
to represent the Henry Fonda character
and to represent the vendetta, the vengeance theme of the movie.
In an almost operatic way, as Timmy rushes out, the music swells up,
and these characters come from behind the sage brush,
again wearing these long dusters,
like Jack Elam and friends at the station.
But you can't quite see who they are.
The leader of the gang hands his rifle to a sidekick,
but deliberately you can't quite see their faces.
The tree stump, always there outside big houses in the Wild West,
as it was in Shane. That's how the house was built, from trees.
And then a shot from behind of these very, very sinister five men
in their long coats confronting this little child,
with his toes pointed inwards, clutching a bottle.
Then the camera goes round and we see, at shoulder height,
his cheek puffed out with tobacco, the first shot of Henry Fonda.
Leone wanted everyone to say, "Jesus Christ! It's Henry Fonda!"
They can't imagine someone behind a massacre,
who smiles in this sinister way with those beautiful blue eyes,
had been the man who played young Mr Lincoln and Wyatt Earp,
who said that playing Mr Lincoln was like playing Jesus.
Those eyes are smiling...
...Iooking at this small child.
It is an incredibly sinister and nasty moment.
The whole of Fonda's cinematic image is in tatters.
This man is a psychotic bad guy. That was the point of the casting.
"Since you called me by name..."
He said, "Frank", so unfortunately the child has to bite the dust.
When this film was originally shown on American television,
this moment was always cut out.
It was when the advertisements came in,
and it cut straight to the next scene with the locomotive arriving.
It was left ambiguous. They couldn't cope with the sainted Henry Fonda
doing something so absolutely dreadful.
So here comes the locomotive arriving at Flagstone,
and a lot of detail about the sort of people coming to the Wild West
by the new technology of the railroad.
Another theme by Morricone called Bad Orchestra,
it's like a jug band in a pub, being played as the train arrives.
And the camera shows us the social life of people in the Wild West.
There's cattle being moved out into the cattle pens.
There's people arriving to visit relatives.
There's a soldier from the US Army.
And here's Claudia Cardinale, the first appearance as Jill McBain.
In the original script, the camera was underneath the carriage steps
so Jill McBain would step over it, not wearing any knickers.
They decided, perhaps sensibly, not to include that.
She steps down from the train.
Huge hustle and bustle.
Lots of bottles and baskets and barrels and agricultural equipment,
all lined up on the platform.
Jill's dressed in a city way. She's come from New Orleans.
The hat, the lace, the fashionable shawl. This is a stylish woman
from a rather different culture to the one she's arriving at now.
Native Americans coming off the train, a prospector gold-digging.
It's very rare to have a shot of Native Americans in Italian Westerns.
Usually they were concerned with urban gunfighters,
goodies and baddies and Billy-the-Kid types.
This is a rare moment of social background.
This is an epic Western where people are arriving on the frontier.
Some of them are used to travelling in the new technology, some aren't.
But there's no one to meet her.
In the first scene, three unwanted gunfighters waited for the train,
this time there's no one waiting for the train when there should be.
Deserted. It's not even a platform. It's just instant wilderness
with all the things dumped there
to be delivered to the various farms and estates in the Arizona desert.
And now a famous Leone shot.
Probably the most flamboyant shot that he'd done so far in his career.
We're on railway tracks for a tracking shot.
We follow Claudia Cardinale walking down the platform.
She goes in to see the stationmaster.
The window is a letter-box window to match the letter box of the image.
A frame within a frame. We're in the same shot, there's been no cut.
We don't quite hear what she says to the stationmaster,
but, "How do I find my way to Sweetwater?"
The track finishes, the camera starts going up on a crane,
the music swells in a crescendo, and the timing of the crane shot
was exactly matched to Morricone's crescendo, written in advance.
And the soaring voice of soprano Edda Del'Orso reaches a pitch
as we go over the roof tiles and see the town of Flagstone being built.
This is no finished, well-scrubbed Wild West town,
this is a town in the process of construction.
There's a bus, an unusual detail.
A horse-drawn omnibus goes by, a sign of the town of the future,
and the buggy with Sam, played by the Italian actor Paolo Stoppa,
who'd appeared in a lot of Visconti movies, a well-known stage actor,
sitting next to Jill McBain on the buggy.
They're going from the burgeoning town,
originally based on photographs of Abilene, Kansas,
a mixture of brick construction and wood construction and tents.
A potential town, a town that may last or may become a ghost town.
Carlo Simi based it on archive photos of Abilene.
It's not just a main street, like many film sets, it has side streets
and a relationship between town and wilderness.
In fact, the town cost $250,000 to build,
more than the budget of Leone's first Western, A Fistful of Dollars.
And it only really appears... Yes, they shoot in individual streets,
but that crane shot at the station is our only real view of Flagstone.
So the building of that huge set was for that moment.
So we go from train to wilderness platform to town in the Wild West,
and it was that moment that he was paying for.
And the buggy leaves this town and heads into the Spanish desert,
but we cut and are no longer in the Spanish desert,
we're on the Arizona/Utah border now
because Leone simply had to shoot some sequences in Monument Valley.
John Ford's location, where he made so many movies
between Stagecoach and Cheyenne Autumn
with the great Mittens in their red sandstone,
which stood for those great Ford movies from Stagecoach onwards.
He had to have a moment here.
There are only a couple of short sequences set in Monument Valley
in a recognisable way, but they were enough.
Leone shot in Monument Valley after he'd finished filming in Spain.
In fact, the opening station sequence was the last to be shot in Spain,
then the crew went to Monument Valley, which Leone had recced.
And when he recced it, Carlo Simi remembered Leone rushing round
remembering exactly where John Ford placed the camera for all his movies.
"That's where The Searchers was, that's where Stagecoach was."
He knew every inch of Monument Valley from the movies.
We're disrupting the railroad gangs.
One of the tensions in the film is between the old West,
represented by Sam and his horse, Lafayette, here with the buggy,
and the new world of the West, the technology pushing westwards,
digging up Monument Valley with its railroad tracks.
Here's the second great shot of Monument Valley,
with the swelling Jill's theme, this orchestral theme,
one of the great leitmotifs on the soundtrack.
We've had As a Judgement, Henry Fonda's theme.
This is Jill's theme,
for another wonderful, expansive shot of Monument Valley.
And this brings with it John Ford's cinema.
They had the devil's own job
matching up the sequences shot in Spain and in Monument Valley.
They imported dust from Monument Valley
to chuck through the doors in Spain, because Monument Valley's very red,
and Spain is very yellow and olive coloured.
And here's a wayside inn that's been built in Monument Valley,
a huge operation which is part livery stable, part blacksmith's shop,
part bar, part bathing establishment, a mad kind of trading post,
a reference to Anthony Mann's movies, particularly Winchester '73,
where James Stewart arrives at a trading post,
although it looks nothing like this, in the middle of the desert.
Yet another reference to a classic Hollywood Western.
This was a sequence cut from the original American-release print
of Once Upon a Time in the West when it came out in 1968.
It features Lionel Stander as the bartender,
and here's Paolo Stoppa as Sam having a drink.
Lionel Stander was blacklisted in Hollywood in the early 1950s
and became an expatriate actor in Europe.
Interestingly, the dialogue for this film was translated into English
by Mickey Knox, another blacklistee, an actor, who knew Lionel Stander.
So this was something of a reunion of expatriate Americans
in Rome and in Spain.
So, it's a livery stable and it's a bar, all under cover,
and clearly someone looking like Jill McBain is extremely rare
in this ramshackle trading post in the middle of nowhere.
Lionel Stander, leering with his cigar in this rather extreme way.
Offensive, perhaps, by today's standards of sexual politics,
but it's trying to say not much happens like this in the West.
Certainly, it would be unusual for someone dressed like her
to walk into a flyblown trading post in the middle of Arizona.
This is the sort of low comedy you find in a lot of Leone's films,
where having had a rather dramatic sequence, Jill, desolated
because she hasn't been met at the station by Brett McBain,
and coming after a long journey from New Orleans,
having to travel across the desert to find her destination,
then you have this sort of Shakespearean low comedy
to take the heat out of the situation.
And a wonderful delayed drop.
Gunshots, sounds, horses outside the door. We don't know what it is.
All we see is the people's reactions choreographed.
Something's going on outside,
but it's a purely visual moment with sound
for the first entrance of Jason Robards
as Cheyenne, the romantic bandit,
with just a hint of his musical theme.
So whereas Bronson arrives by the curtains revealing him
in a semi-supernatural way,
Robards constantly blusters through doors and slams doors as he comes in.
This guy breaks the door down. And he's on the run.
So we're introduced to the final main character.
To Bronson at the station at the beginning,
to Fonda during the Sweetwater massacre,
to Jill at Flagstone railway station
and now to Jason Robards in this trading post in the wilderness.
We have the four main protagonists, each with a musical theme,
each with a different mode of entry.
And now their destinies are about to intertwine.
A great Leone gag here. He walks in. We haven't seen his hands.
He's come to the bar for a drink. He wants a jug.
And only when he lifts his hands do you see
what the reason for him being on the run is.
He's wearing handcuffs.
And Leone loves those delayed drops. He called it indirect dialogue.
Never say something in an obvious way.
Let the audience do the guessing and then you deliver the punch line.
It's a very cinematic approach to telling stories,
always in slightly convoluted way. He loves trompe I'oeil,
he loves indirect dialogue, he loves what he calls cinema cinema,
which is references to other films,
and a kind of surreal approach to setting up his scenes.
Very seldom do things happen in your face,
he wants to keep the audience guessing.
And now we have the second Harmonica appearance.
We've had the first appearance at the station, and here it is again,
sitting in the corner in the darkness, licking his wounds.
Charles Bronson playing his harmonica.
A wonderful moment where the lamp on its runner along the ceiling
is thrown across the room,
and it swings and lights up Bronson as the music swells up.
But he's not saying anything. He just plays his harmonica,
rather like Silent Tongue, the little Indian boy
in Sam Fuller's Western Run Of The Arrow,
who's dumb and doesn't say anything, but he just plays a mouth organ.
And like Johnny with his guitar in Johnny Guitar,
this is how he communicates, this bluesy lament.
But he does keep his gun at his side. He's a prudent guy.
A sort of game between these two men. Playing harmonica, playing with guns,
the music swelling up, a lot of staring at each other.
Someone once called this film an opera in which the arias aren't sung,
they're stared. And in a way this is a classic moment for that.
It is very operatic.
All you're doing is looking at these people's eyes
as they stare at each other.
But Bronson wants his gun pointing in the right direction just in case.
Now just under Bronson's right eye is a little scar,
and you may wonder where that came from.
There's a sequence that was cut during the shooting of the film,
because the film's elliptical style was making it slow to make its point,
and Leone realised he'd have a three-and-a-half hour movie.
There was a scene where Bronson was beaten up by some deputies
in town after having arrived at the station,
and he bears the scars for this scene and the next scene at Sweetwater.
It was a scene for which stills have survived
with Keenan Wynn as the sheriff, who makes an appearance later on.
But Leone cut it and distributed the story points from that sequence
to later on in the movie. This was cut on the run.
He wanted this slow, reactive, balletic quality in the film.
A new pace, much less frenetic than his earlier Italian Westerns,
but he found that if he kept up that pace for a sustained period of time,
it really would turn into a very long film.
It's a pace he got from the Japanese masters Kurosawa and Ozu
rather than from Hollywood.
He said people talked too fast, the cutting was too fast,
dialogue overlapped, you couldn't see faces, things happened too quickly.
Why not stretch it out? Why not distend it?
Why not make it much more rhetorical?
This is a classic example of Sergio Leone's rhetoric, Tarantino-style.
Two people point guns at each other, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
where three people point guns. What's going to happen?
Who's going to shoot who, and who's going to do it first?
Like the last moment of Reservoir Dogs and the end of Pulp Fiction.
It was just Robards wanting someone to shoot through his manacles.
So the whole of that build-up was about a very simple thing
that could've taken seconds, but that's not Leone's project.
That's not his way of doing it.
So back we go to the bartender
as if nothing's happened.
But Cheyenne's men come in. The red dust comes through the door,
as if from Monument Valley.
Actually, this is a set at Cinecittà in Rome.
So Cheyenne's men wear dusters,
and Frank's men, played by Henry Fonda, wear dusters,
and Jack Elam wears one. Everyone seems to wear dusters.
It's confusing, but it's part of the plot.
Classic entrance by Bronson. Sliding in from left of frame,
as if he's been there all the time.
And this dialogue, about "Can you play or do you shoot, too?",
"You play harmonica, but can you shoot?",
is very similar to the dialogue in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar,
a key reference point in making Once Upon a Time in the West.
Bernardo Bertolucci had written a famous review of Johnny Guitar
and the whole theme of the woman in the wilderness, with the saloon,
with the water, with the railroad about to arrive,
with the various men that revolve around her life,
including the man with the guitar, is a key reference for this film.
And this dialogue "Can you shoot? Can you play?"
Is like the dialogue between Sterling Hayden and the dancing kid
in Johnny Guitar.
On the left is Aldo Sambrell, a Spanish actor
who'd appeared in a lot of Italian Westerns, usually as a baddie,
and very often had his dialogue track dubbed into English.
He was quite a big star in the Spanish side of things
and tended to appear further up the credits,
but in America wouldn't have been so well known, except as a face,
the second baddie from the left in an Italian Western.
The sound of the gun. Every gun makes its own tune.
Very like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
where Eli Wallach gets hold of a Colt revolver and makes the sound.
Holds it up against his ear. Every gun makes its own tune.
Another sound effect. Back to the harmonica.
There's a bum note.
It's so operatic, that moment.
A bum note on a harmonica, what does it matter?
But in the setting of this extraordinary tense rhetorical ballet
a moment like that takes on a huge significance.
It's very theatrical and artificial.
Suddenly, Stander starts talking as if nothing's happened.
Continuing with his jabbering on about people he's known in the West
and what a wonderful person Jill is, and does she want a bath?
Dr Sheldon Hall is an author, lecturer and film historian.
Here he guides us through Jill's shocking discovery at Sweetwater.
Jill's arrival at Sweetwater is the first and only sequence
which she shares with the McBains.
All we know of her relationship with Brett McBain
is information given to us in dialogue and in this sequence,
where Claudia Cardinale's reaction shots carry most of the weight
of her emotional relationship with her late husband.
Like so much of the film,
this is played through a series of extended reaction shots
in which the performers facial reaction says all we need to know
about how they feel, what they're thinking,
how we're meant to feel about their relationship.
This is an instance of Leone's command of the widescreen format,
the full width of the Techniscope frame being used.
Fritz Lang, in Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris,
said CinemaScope was only good for snakes and funerals.
This is a good case in point.
It's useful for other things, too, as Leone shows throughout this movie.
The bodies are laid out on the gingham tablecloths,
which will form one of the many visual motifs of the film.
We later see Jill laying out those cloths on tables, where they belong.
Here they serve as a macabre funeral shroud for the bodies of her family.
The gingham tablecloth is one of those emblems of domesticity,
of homeliness, a symbol of pioneer America,
which is here, of course, undermined.
Leone's very fond of profile shots which turn into full-face shots
with the aid of a camera movement which brings the camera round
into the actor's face.
Recall also Henry Fonda's first appearance in the movie.
And the funeral sequence proper.
The wood of the coffin,
the same crude lumber which forms the log cabin,
the typical building of the pioneering Western town.
A crude form of burial.
Funerals, one of the most common rituals in Western movies.
John Ford was very famous for his lyrical funeral sequences.
And this one evokes The Searchers
in the way that it's broken up before the funeral has properly finished.
There, John Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards,
walks away during the service,
breaking up the funeral crowd around the burial site.
In this case, Claudia Cardinale turns away from the burial
to receive some information about the suspected murderer of her family,
which we know to be false,
having seen the deaths of the McBains earlier in the picture.
The burial virtually forgotten,
as the crowd moves away to pursue the outlaw band.
Leone here using the width of the Techniscope format
to keep in shot simultaneously Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa.
We have two close-ups in one,
and the ease of the scope format for allowing that
is displayed to full advantage here.
Jill looks through what remains of her husband's belongings.
What she finds is a series of gifts that would have been meant for her,
her wedding corsage, various forms of jewellery, clothing.
She's looking for the money which she believes her husband has left,
which we later discover has been spent on lumber
for the building of Sweetwater Station.
It's a typically oblique way of Leone giving us information piecemeal.
Obliquely, so that we have to form our own conclusions.
We have to draw from the visual evidence before our eyes
the sense of what's going on.
This is one of a number of shots in the film
of Cardinale looking at her own image in the mirror.
There's a more sustained example of this later on.
Not feminine narcissism, but self-examination.
This, you might say, is the bedroom scene with the absent husband,
which has its echo in the later bedroom sequence
with Henry Fonda's Frank.
Again, the weight of the relationship with McBain
carried only through a studied look at the face of the widow.
And this famous shot anticipates the later shot in Leone's career
at the end of Once Upon a Time in America,
the last shot in a Leone film
of Robert De Niro's drug-induced reverie.
Wobbles, the proprietor of the local laundry,
is one of those figures in Western movies
who seems fated to be humiliated, tortured, beaten up.
His function really is to be expendable.
He serves only to relay information between characters
and eventually to be shot by Frank.
With Gothic appropriateness,
the machinery, the equipment of his laundry,
is used as the main torture device.
This again picks up the theme of water,
used as a linking motif throughout the film in many different forms.
Sustained beatings offer quite a common feature of Leone movies,
particularly suffered by Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy.
There may be something peculiarly Italian about this.
Sustained brutality was only just becoming a common feature
of American Westerns, and that, I think, was partly,
in the later '60s and '70s,
under the influence of the Italian Western.
The more baroque and excessive varieties of violence
which we find in Leone's work gradually became a common feature,
almost a cliché, of American Westerns of the 1970s.
And it was arguably Leone's film which established Charles Bronson
as the cold-eyed mean avenger, the righteous seeker-after-justice,
who's not averse to a bit of strong-arm tactics.
And of course you see that throughout his thriller films of the 1970s.
Jill's discovery in this sequence of the models of the Sweetwater Station
which Brett McBain had planned to build,
is another evocation of Johnny Guitar.
In one of Joan Crawford's early sequences in that film,
she is shown with a representative of a railway line
whose station she is going to build in her own town.
She will become the powerful figure of authority in her own community
by having a station built on her property.
And in the sequence which establishes that,
we see on the desk in front of Joan Crawford's character a model train.
And this sequence appears to be one of many echoes
of Nicholas Ray's film by Leone.
This sequence, the shot of the two photographs on the dresser,
is a reminder not just of the absent husband
but also of the original McBain family,
with the mother in the group portrait,
whose role Jill was to take up.
And this part of the sequence is yet another reference to The Searchers.
In an early sequence of John Ford's film,
a pioneer family out West hears sinister noises outside...
...see signs of surrounding Indians,
Native Americans, as we should now say...
...and prepare to batten down and withstand a siege if need be.
Here the role of the Indians is taken by Harmonica.
And we later discover that he is indeed a Native American.
Although, far from as threatening as the Indians in Ford's film.
Here Jill seems about to take her leave of the cabin.
Perhaps in premature recognition that there's no place for her here.
And again, this use of the mirror to reinforce Jill's contemplation
of herself, of her future...
...of her current, seemingly desperate situation.
It's tempting just to wallow in this wonderful close-up
of Claudia Cardinale's face.
Feel free to freeze frame at this particular point.
And now we're introduced, or rather Jill is introduced, to Cheyenne.
And again, that favoured curving camera movement of Leone's,
to introduce us to a new element of the scene.
Jill, at this point, thinks Cheyenne to be the murderer of her family.
We know better.
The defining motif of the scenes between Cheyenne and Jill is coffee.
A variation on the water motif.
It's linked, as we later hear in Cheyenne's dialogue,
to his memory of his own mother.
He recalls his mother as both a great whore and a great mother,
and Jill herself is both, or represents both.
Her former life as a prostitute being left behind
to assume, she had thought, the role of mother to the McBain family.
In fact, a symbolic mother we later discover to the railroad workers,
to the pioneers who come to build the new community of Sweetwater.
Jason Robards is perhaps not an actor immediately associated with Westerns.
In fact, he'd just completed two very significant Western roles.
In 1966, he'd been among the cast of A Big Hand for the Little Lady,...
...whose leading man had been Henry Fonda, the villain of this picture.
And in 1967, he played Doc Holliday
for John Sturges in Hour Of The Gun,
a kind of sequel to and revision of
Sturges' earlier Gunfight At The OK Corral.
Later, two years after this,
he was to appear for Sam Peckinpah in The Ballad Of Cable Hogue,
which is itself a commentary on the pioneering West.
The small-scale capitalist who builds for himself
a station in the wilderness to provide water to passing travellers,
passing stagecoaches and riders,
who forms his own small-scale empire beneath the sun.
Which picks up the significance of the theme of water from this film.
A lot of eating in Leone movies.
Mostly stews from earthenware pots like this.
John Milius has been affectionately described
as the General George Patton of Hollywood
for his red-blooded, action-packed, and somewhat right-wing movies.
Already a prolific writer, he turned his talents to direction
in 1973 with a biopic of the infamous gangster John Dillinger.
His directorial credits
include The Wind And The Lion and Conan The Barbarian.
Here John Milius talks about his friendship with Sergio Leone.
Well, I was really lucky to know Sergio Leone very, very well,
because for years he would come over
and try and convince me to write one of his films.
And it was a great honour that he felt that way,
except he wanted me to write Once Upon A Time In America,
and it came from a book called The Hoods,
and he would constantly tell me about this book,
but he would never let me have the book, because he didn't own the book.
He was constantly coming over and saying, "When can you write this?"
And I'd say, "Whoa...
I can write it as soon as I'm done with what I'm doing."
"I can write it in two or three months."
And he'd say, "I let you know. I let you know."
And, of course, he never owned the book.
And this would go on every year for three or four years, maybe five.
And he finally did get the... I'm trying to think when he got the book.
But, by that time,
I think I was already directing and stuff and couldn't do it.
I was directing The Wind and the Lion, or something like that,
and didn't have the time and so somebody else wrote it.
It was too bad. I would've enjoyed writing it.
But I would've really much preferred to write a Western for him.
But I got to see him over there when I was making Conan.
He took me to a restaurant once, took me out to lunch once,
and he insisted that we had to have
about five or six different types of pasta that he knew.
And we had to go to two restaurants to get it all.
And he knew how to eat. Here was a man who enjoyed food.
He enjoyed, you know, certain kinds of physical vices.
He enjoyed his lusts, he enjoyed food.
He enjoyed all those kind of things.
It's really too bad. He passed away much, much too soon.
But he certainly left a wonderful legacy.
I remember one time I was arguing with a critic in New York.
This was a woman who thought she was something special
and very hip and everything, and she was running down Sergio.
She just didn't consider Sergio Leone very important.
And I said, "You know, when you're an old woman,
the name Sergio Leone will be whispered by young girls."
We return to Dr Sheldon Hall.
The painting here which represents the Pacific Ocean,
the ultimate destiny of Morton's railway line,
is his equivalent of the water motif,
which has been running throughout the picture.
And through the window we see a covered wagon
which is also known as a Prairie Schooner...
...which may be a pun on the water motif.
This is one of the more baroque inventions of Leone's film.
The figure of Morton, whose name of course itself evokes death,
is possibly derived from two characters in earlier Westerns.
In King Vidor's 1946 film Duel In The Sun,
Lionel Barrymore plays a ranching patriarch, an empire builder,
confined to a wheelchair after an accident.
And in the 1955 film The Violent Men directed by Rudolph Maté,
Edward G Robinson plays a rancher who walks on crutches.
In all three cases, there is a contrast
between the physical frailty of the men themselves
and the power which, notionally at least, they wield.
Throughout this sequence there's a very strong contrast
between the displays of power provided by Fonda's body language,
his movement around the carriage in a commanding fashion,
his lighting of the cigar, his taking up a commanding position
in Morton's own chair behind his desk,
signalling his future aspirations to take Morton's place.
He represents a kind of charismatic authority...
...as compared with the hollow authority represented by Morton.
And Morton's disability is not, as some people might have it,
any comment on disability itself, but a metaphor,
a metaphor for his internal corruption, his weakness as a man.
All his power resides in his position, in his social class,
in his money and in his business.
The man himself is an empty shell rotting from the feet up.
And he's given this encasing of metal struts to hold him up,
and the crisscross network of rails
to enable his movement in his own carriage.
The whole train is a kind of elaborate wheelchair for him.
One might be tempted to think of Morton
as virtually a figure out of the same sort of fantasy
that the James Bond films represent.
He's not a million miles away from the Ernst Stavro Blofeld
or similarly disabled or disfigured super villains in the Bond series.
And, of course, Gabriele Ferzetti whose most distinguished work
was in such European films as Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura,
was also a featured player in On Her Majesty's Secret Service,
the Bond film of 1969 which immediately followed this film.
The very temporary father-in-law of James Bond himself,
the head of a Mafia organisation.
Here again we see the checked gingham motif
which is associated with the pioneer woman.
And in this sequence,
the maternal aspirations of Jill are very much to the fore...
...which links her with Cheyenne, who is almost a child figure.
The only character who speaks fondly of his past.
The character of Cheyenne was apparently initially written
to be a Mexican bandit.
There are versions of the film, versions of the script,
which suggest that Cheyenne's surname is Ramirez
or some such Mexican-sounding name.
And there is an occasional line of dialogue which suggests
that it might have been designed to be spoken with a Mexican accent.
Wisely, I think, Jason Robards
chose not to exercise the opportunity to essay a foreign accent.
Perhaps that was Leone's idea, perhaps it was Robards's own.
But his character here is very much the equivalent
of Eli Wallach's Tuco, the bandit of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
and also of Rod Steiger's character Juan
in Leone's next Western, A Fistful of Dynamite.
They're all childlike figures
characterised by a kind of boyish naïve quality,
despite, obviously, their being desperate criminals.
They seem not to be tainted by the villainy
which marks a truly monstrous figure such as Frank in this film,
or Lee Van Cleef's killer in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Jill hears once again...
...the harmonica sound, which seems to be calling her back,
keeping her in Sweetwater.
And this sequence begins with a suggestion
that Jill may be the victim of an attempted rape.
That may be a thought that goes through her mind or ours
the first time she sees Cheyenne in the sequence immediately before this,
or the first part of this sequence.
We're not, at this stage, at all clear about Harmonica's intent,
about what motivates him.
As far as we know, he may be as villainous,
as cold-blooded as Frank is.
The tearing of the lace from Jill's dress suggests an overture to rape,
which, of course, never transpires.
One of the remarkable things about Jill's character,
which is so rarely true of female characters in American Westerns,
is that she is allowed to be both the whore and the mother.
She is allowed to have had a shady past,
she is allowed to have a very sexual presence,
which is quite unusual for women in Westerns.
Typically the whore and the mother are opposed characters,
sexuality and maternity separated into separate roles.
And Jill, remarkably, brings both roles together.
And here again, of course, we have the water motif.
Harmonica likes his water fresh.
This sequence, of course, is a parallel
with the earlier sequence of the McBain family's massacre.
A very different outcome with the presence of Harmonica.
Leone is very fond
of that sort of gnomic, enigmatic dialogue. Very quotable.
With Sergio Leone and Dario Argento,
Bernardo Bertolucci is the author of the screen story
of Once Upon a Time in the West.
His 1987 film The Last Emperor won an Academy Award for best picture,
with Bertolucci himself winning best director.
Here he talks about his love of the Western.
My father was the critic of a newspaper
called La Gazzetta di Parma, The Parma Gazette.
We were living in the countryside
and he was taking me to town very often
to see the movie he was going to review.
And it was after the Second World War.
It was like 1949, '50, '51.
The Westerns were my food,
in the sense that I was going back home after I'd seen the movies
and there was a huge group of kids,
they were all coming to play in our place,
and I remember that I was starting telling them
the story of the Western I'd just seen.
Of course, I was keeping for me the role of John Wayne.
I was sure I was looking like John Wayne,
and I was sure I was walking like John Wayne,
I was smiling like John Wayne. It was a complete identification.
Anyway, it was a moment
where John Ford was doing his movies still in black and white,
and then The Searchers came.
Anyway, I was very young. I was eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
And I was thinking, when I saw Stagecoach,
which in Italy has a beautiful title, Ombre Rosse,
which I now re-translate in English as Red Shadows,...
...because of the Indians.
I remember that I thought this is really the epic,
the essence of the epic,
like I'm studying at school when I read The Odyssey.
And I never found any other epic
as extraordinary, as synthetic,
as powerful as Stagecoach.
We were, of course, playing a lot
from the Westerns I had seen in town.
And then Sergio came.
John Carpenter has been filling movie theatres since 1974.
His cinematic cannon includes seminal slasher film Halloween,
The Fog, Escape From New York and Star Man.
John Carpenter gives us his take on Cheyenne's rescue of Harmonica.
So here we have Charles Bronson on top of the train,
then an immediate cut as he comes down the other side.
Both the background and he are in focus. The sunlight is blistering.
They've got shiny boards and lights just lighting him up.
And the same with Fonda here.
He's just lit up like a Christmas tree.
They're all burning up because of this light.
That's because of focus and because they're out in the desert.
A little flashback action here.
I believe this is the Devil himself walking out of the desert.
He begins to come into focus later,
when Henry Fonda's about to kill Bronson's older brother.
And harmonica music is roaring away.
Look at those eyes. Boy, he had blue eyes.
Fonda was startling in this movie because he looked so young in it.
Now we're inside the train and this...
At least, that part is shot right there on location.
There you see the outside. That's really tough to light.
They're kinda going into darkness here
because you've got so much light from the outside.
A very slow-moving camera tracking Fonda over to this position.
There's no rush in anything. Everything's very staid. Evenly done.
Again, these big old close-ups of people who are in the scene.
They're back to the master now.
His point of view as he comes back through.
He makes such a great bad guy.
I know he showed up on the set with a moustache and a beard,
I believe it was a moustache only.
Leone made him shave it off. This poor guy's going flying.
Something about a belt and suspenders, I believe.
Both. You can't trust a man, or something along those lines.
It's been a long time since I've seen this.
And we reveal who's under the train. A comic...
There we go.
Totally unbelievable that he blows both suspenders off,
but, hey, it's a Leone Western.
And then his belt. There we go.
Looks like Spain to me.
Bronson is interestingly passive throughout this entire sequence.
He is passive throughout a lot of the film, kind of a glacial presence,
but you get the idea he's waiting around for his chance.
The way he delivers his lines, he appears to have
some sort of almost mystical wisdom about everything that's going on.
I never get the idea Bronson's scared in this film. I guess he never is.
He's one of these tough guys.
He shows no fear.
Look at that shot of Fonda, it's ridiculous.
Very cool. Right in their faces.
This strange character, this rich guy who can't move any more,
he's like the snail, like the train, he leaves tracks behind him.
A bizarre idea in a Western. It's interesting.
I think this is where people get the idea that it may be a political film.
That he represents, I don't know, capitalism,
or he represents the raping, the taming, the destruction of the West.
I'm not quite sure, I've never figured it out.
And so Fonda leaves and we get the sense
that now is maybe Robards' opportunity to free Bronson.
That's a beautiful tracking shot. It starts with the horses
and keeps moving until both the train and the horses
get to a certain distance and pans with them. That's a really nice shot.
I don't recall how much of this particular sequence
was shot in a sound stage or on location actually moving along.
I believe that's a process shot, but I couldn't be certain.
Yeah, that's process. They're back in the sound stage now.
They shot part of it sitting there,
now they're shooting the rest of it, the moving sequences,
inside a sound stage. You can see the difference in lighting.
It's not quite as bright on some of the actors.
Now you have the kind of invention that Leone's famous for,
taking a Western cliché and turning it on its head
by inventing new ways of action.
This kind of playful way that Robards gets the attention of the bad guys
and takes care of them is a kind of fascinating situation.
And then he shoots him and he goes back up on top of the train.
It's a unique invention.
Leone started it, and his writers.
I'm sure their task was to come up with gags in each of these scenes
as a homage, or a send up of Hollywood action scenes.
A whole lot of big close-ups of actors looking at each other.
They always had an annoying gunshot that the Italian movies dubbed in.
It really used to bother me a lot, horses hooves and the gunshots.
I think the boot gag is coming up here in a minute.
Notice how Bronson is the visual pivot for everything that happens,
which way he looks is where the action's going.
Before, he looked over and Robards came out of the bathroom,
now he's looking up and our attention is drawn upwards.
So the prisoner, Bronson, is kind of us,
in that he's leading us the audience
in terms of our interest, as to where to look.
There's a tracking shot, a subjective shot looking up.
Poor guy's straddling the tracks as the camera's right beneath him.
They don't cut these reaction shots quickly,
they just let them hang, but that's part of the movie
There you've got Bronson checking things out.
He's telling the audience, in a sense, what's happening.
He's our clue to how we should feel about all this.
It also includes him in on his own rescue.
There his eyes go. And he's the first to see it.
So now we see it.
And there's a nice little invention here.
This nice little zoom in on the boot. Bang. Ouch!
Yeah. That was a bad day for that guy.
Bernardo Bertolucci here remembers the first time he saw
Once Upon a Time in the West.
I was very transported by the way he shot it.
And I was intimately and secretly...
...very happy to find in the film...
...all the quotations
that I sneaked into the treatment without Sergio knowing it.
It was extraordinary, because I was coming from this...
...French nouvelle vague kind of ideology.
In our movies, quotations were there just to prove our love for cinema,
and also what kind of love we had for cinema.
Now things were becoming much more complicated.
Now, here we are, you have a great director of commercial cinema...
...who does a beautiful film.
And he's filming quotations,
which means sequences similar to sequences of other movies,
without knowing he is doing it,
without the perversion that we young experimental directors used to have.
So, again, Sergio's innocence, which I hope everybody has understood,
was the innocence of the great ones,
not the innocence of somebody who was just innocent.
He was an extraordinary brain, mind,
but with this childish part.
Now, I was seeing in the film a moment of The Searchers,
a moment of Johnny Guitar, without Sergio knowing.
Of course, when I told him, Sergio denied this.
He said, "I knew exactly what I was doing".
Anyway, I remain with my doubt.
That was one of the great moments of the '60s for me.
Writer and director Alex Cox made his first film,
the science fiction satire Repo Man, in 1984.
Here Alex Cox talks us through a scene
cut from the initial US release.
This is a scene which was cut out of the shorter American version.
Obviously shot in the United States,
I think in a place called Mesa Verde in Colorado.
Old Native American dwellings in the side of a mountain.
There's Gabriele Ferzetti on his crutches,
which, indeed, could be another reference to Duel In The Sun
or The Violent Men with their crippled ranchers.
But there's something odd about this scene in its placement.
Even though we are watching the official version of the film,
in so far as we are aware it exists,
we've cut out of what's about to become the love scene
between Claudia Cardinale and Henry Fonda,
into this interaction between Frank and his boss,
where essentially the tables are turned
and Frank really becomes the leader of the villains.
But why do we cut from the McBain ranch,
where Jill and Frank are together,
to Mesa Verde to see Morton and Frank,
only to cut back a few minutes later to the ranch again?
Is it a flashback? It can't be, that would offend
the tripartite flashback structure of the film which is so sound
and is so like the tripartite flashback structure
of For A Few Dollars More.
Mesa Verde, they didn't build that in Almeria.
And now a daytime scene, back in Almeria...
...where Robards and his lot are trying to figure out what's going on.
But it's daytime here.
Are Frank and Jill still in the house?
How did the structure of the film get like this?
I can't explain it, but it does seem like at a certain point
everybody lost track of where the characters were
and what time of day it was.
It doesn't matter really.
Sir Christopher Frayling.
This idea of a town being made up of a kit of parts
is actually a reference to the Glenn Ford film Cimarron,
where you get an entire set of frontages laid out,
which is the town in the making.
And here comes an explicit reference to John Ford.
So, an Irishman who has a dream
to build this town in the middle of nowhere.
And Cheyenne thinks he's going to make millions out of it,
to which Bronson replies, "You don't sell the dream of a lifetime".
In a way, that summarises this movie.
Leone's making the film he's wanted to make since he was a kid,
and it never really sold, but it was the dream of a lifetime.
It's the most explicit reference to John Ford's movies in any Leone film.
It takes a lot to believe the McBain family is Irish,
but it doesn't matter, this is John Ford's utopian dream of the West,
which in more cynical hands means something completely different.
And, at last, the basic lever of the entire plot is revealed.
There's water. That well which Claudia Cardinale got the water from,
that's the point, because the locomotives have to come this way
because of the geology. The trains won't run without water.
So Sweetwater will turn into a booming rail town
and the West will move on, Once Upon a Time in the West.
So in a way it was a corny story,
the story of many Westerns in the past,
but this is where the secret is revealed.
We've been looking at the water without realising what it is.
It's why Brett McBain built here.
Cheyenne's still convinced that money is the point,
rather than Irish idealism.
"You could earn thousands and thousands of dollars."
So Harmonica replies, "They call them millions".
Brett McBain could be a multimillionaire if he'd lived.
A native of Tunisia,
Claudia Cardinale's breakthrough role was in Senilità in 1961.
Her subsequent busy career included appearances
in Fellini's 8½ and Visconti's The Leopard.
Her English language roles included The Pink Panther, The Professionals,
Circus World, and, of course, Once Upon a Time in the West.
Here she remembers her first day of shooting with Henry Fonda.
Well, what I can say?
He did something terrible to me the first day of shooting.
The first day of shooting,
we start with a love scene in Cinecittà.
And for Henry Fonda it was the first time he was doing a love scene.
And all the press was there around us for this scene.
From everywhere, England, America, Italian, French,
and the wife of Henry Fonda was sitting next to the camera,
and that was really terrible.
But, anyway, he said to me, "You have to take off..."
I said, "I'm not going to do that".
I never did it. But the scene was very sexy, I think.
The love scene, it was very beautiful.
But for Henry and for me it was a lot of tension,
because we were surrounded
by all of the journalists looking at us during the scene.
Not only the technicians, but also all the journalists.
And this was the first day of shooting.
But it's a good scene. And maybe the tension was good for that.
Well, with Fellini, when I was working with Fellini,
we had no script, it was all improvisation.
When I was acting with Marcello Mastroianni, he wasn't there.
Federico Fellini was there sitting next to me.
And it was improvisation all the time, no script.
It wasn't the way Sergio Leone was shooting.
With Sergio Leone you had a script and you had to be very clear.
Everything was precise.
With Luchino Visconti it was totally different, it was like theatre.
Usually, the technicians weren't there.
We were reading the script around the table, like in theatre,
and everything was precise.
Even if I was taking a glass of wine, it has to be very precise.
Here, here. But everything was decided with the director.
With Sergio Leone also,
the cut was very important on the close-ups, etc.
But it was another way of shooting. Which I like, of course.
I mean, Federico Fellini was... 8½, it's magnificent.
And Luchino Visconti was the one who gave me the success
because I start with him when I arrived from Tunisia.
I wasn't speaking any Italian at the time of Rocco And His Brothers.
Then I did The Leopard.
I did four movies with Luchino Visconti.
And we had a marvellous relationship.
He loved me very much and I had lots of presents from him.
And we had... It was fantastic. We'd been to London many times.
I remember, I was with Visconti in London to see Marlene Dietrich,
the last concert she did in London.
It was magnificent. I remember that day.
But I have been with Luchino many, many times to London.
Also to see theatre. Lots of times.
We return
to Sir Christopher Frayling.
So Bronson looks through the net curtains
as though he's looking at Fonda and Cardinale like a voyeur,
but, in fact...
...he's looking at an auction scene with the sheriff and Claudia,
who's now in the town of Flagstone selling the property.
This is our introduction to the sheriff of Flagstone,
played by Keenan Wynn,
a part that was originally to be played by Robert Ryan.
And he's one of the few not-corrupt sheriffs in Leone's films.
Usually, the sheriff is on the take
or in some way in the pay of the baddies.
Well, here he's not a very strong man, but he's not a corrupt man,
and he's trying to chair an auction scene.
The scene itself is a reference to Leone's favourite John Ford movie,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In that film,
which had been made in the early 1960s,
there's a town-meeting scene where the various political parties
are jockeying for position in the town of Shinbone.
There's all sorts of corrupt goings-on in the audience,
hands being held up for artificial votes and rigging of the votes,
but it's a sort of comedy scene, in a way,
of how a town meeting can go wrong, but in the end, it goes right
and Shinbone becomes a town and so progress happens.
This auction scene is his reference to the town-meeting scenes
in Liberty Valance. And, in fact, Leone once told me that it was,
"The Ford film I like most of all, as we're nearer to shared values."
It's the least sentimental of Ford's films. It's about the conflict
between political and economic forces and the hero of the West.
That behind the hero of the West is capitalism,
the buying and selling of property, all these things.
He's making a similar point to the one Ford made in Liberty Valance.
Leone said that in the town meetings of Liberty Valance,
Ford, finally, at the age of almost 65,
finally understood what pessimism is all about.
This also resembles The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
where Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, is bargaining with the arms salesman.
You think that he's deciding how much to pay for a gun.
In fact, he's holding up the shop
and asking how much money is in the till.
It has that kind of ambiguity.
And then we cut back to the train with Mr Morton,
where there's another version
of the business in relation to the individual Western hero story.
Because Morton is beginning to realise, as he's shown earlier,
that the only thing more powerful than a gun is the dollar.
And he's about to prove this by buying off Frank's men.
They may have a residual loyalty to Frank, they've ridden with him,
but the most important thing is for the railroad to get to the Pacific.
Hence this painting. Hence the Pacific theme by Morricone.
And that's the sole obsession in Mr Morton's life.
So what he's got to do is turn Frank's men against him.
And how he does that is the almighty dollar.
Frank's henchmen are in the railway carriage
playing cards, in time-honoured fashion.
And there's a very interesting moment here. Morton is very powerful,
he ultimately employs them all, but for a moment they ignore him.
They continue playing.
You think they're not going to pay any attention to him.
And he's not sure.
So, "Let's complete the hand. Yeah, come and sit down."
And we think he's about to play cards with them,
and they presumably think that as well, but he's got another plan.
And this sound effect in the background
of the locomotive wheezing and puffing,
like a kind of wheezing person in the desert.
You constantly get that huffing and puffing sound,
which is very distinctive in Leone's films.
Like some asthmatic person in the desert.
And they're not quite sure what's going on.
Why is Mr Morton wanting to play cards? He doesn't usually play cards.
But they'll humour him as they count their money.
Now they're getting interested because he's not dealing cards...
...he's dealing banknotes.
Several hundred dollars each.
Again, the amplified locomotive wheezing away to create the tension.
$500 each.
"As long as you use your head." Be logical about it.
Watch which side your bread's buttered on and don't go with Frank.
Then back to the other version of capitalism at work, the auction.
The sale of Sweetwater should be wonderful.
We've heard it's worth millions, the crucible of a new railroad town,
but it isn't like that.
Frank's people stop the auction from getting going,
because they don't want to spend very much on it.
The same amount of money Morton's given the people at the railroad.
It's being sold for $500,
the same as the blood money that he's just given Frank's men.
And just at that moment, Harmonica comes in with a real bid, $5,000.
But he's not paying cash, he's paying with something else.
The music tells us who it is, the music and the footwear.
We don't even need to know the man's face, it's Cheyenne.
Now, has Bronson captured Cheyenne? Is Cheyenne coming unwillingly?
Or is this a scam? Just like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
where Eastwood and Eli Wallach turn each other in for the reward money,
and then rescue each other. It isn't clear.
"There were no dollars in them days. But sons-of-bitches, yeah."
One of the great exchanges of almost parody Leone dialogue,
translated into American by Mickey Knox.
It's one of the great lines in the movie.
Meanwhile, what's happened back at the train?
Someone's riding with news of the card game.
And here's yet another reference to a classic American Western,
3: 10 To Yuma, all about a prisoner being taken to Yuma Jail,
the new jail built in the West for really hard cases.
It's a Glenn Ford movie. A classic movie by Delmer Daves,
with Van Heflin and reference to this new modern jail in Yuma.
Cheyenne's taking the journey to Yuma,
just as the characters do in that film.
One of the rare cattle drives in an Italian Western in the background.
You don't get many cows in Italian Westerns, or many Native Americans.
But there's a cattle drive just as background.
And here's one of Cheyenne's men.
This is a Spanish actor called Aldo Sambrell,
who had a supporting role in a lot of Italian Westerns,
usually as a Mexican baddie, who had a wonderful time making the movie.
I interviewed him about it and he said that they all had a ball.
Now we're in the bar, a huge piece of architecture designed by Carlo Simi,
just as the saloon is the centre of the town of Flagstone.
It's brick built, probably the most solid structure in the entire town.
So this vast Victorian interior is much larger than we're used to,
much more solid and substantial than we're used to for a Western saloon,
which is usually wood built and much more temporary looking.
And then we hear the footsteps and the music to connote Frank,
played by Henry Fonda.
His hair is well-groomed and he's had a shave,
that's because a scene in a tonsorial parlour,
originally shot in between the auction scene and this,
is, in fact, missing. You'll notice Frank is particularly well-groomed.
The parlour being a reference to My Darling Clementine by John Ford.
John Carpenter.
This was shot on location, the depth of background there.
I'm sure this was an uncomfortable set with the light in it,
because that's a white-hot day out there,
at least in this master shot.
He cuts in from a wide shot of the room to these two big head close-ups.
And then reverse.
Everything's very deliberate in this film
and in a lot of Leone's early Westerns.
The actor walks all the way over, pauses, gives a line,
walks on, camera keeps moving, dollies around. Nothing is rushed.
We're watching, in a sense, this mythical history being made.
Trying to focus on Bronson and the background at the same time.
A little tricky there.
See the light change. They've opened up on the inside
to try to match. They didn't have to in the other close-up.
Cut around, zoom in.
And then we're back to our flashback sequence
of the evil walking across the desert on his way.
We eventually find out what this is all about.
Once again, in this sequence, Bronson is the audience.
What he's seeing outside defies what he's saying to Henry Fonda. He is us.
He's observing things going on.
And it's through him our feelings about the scene are crystallised.
There's obviously something happening outside Fonda doesn't know about.
Bronson's taking it in. He is the observer.
Typical Leone, an empty frame, then an actor turns into it very quickly,
like Fonda just did.
That's a technique that Leone used in the spaghetti Westerns,
in the Eastwood films. It's a lot of fun.
You can't use it all the time, it becomes too humorous,
but it's a nice punctuation.
Everything very slow and deliberate.
What kind of money is that? Phoney money.
I don't think we ever had blue money in this country.
So now Fonda goes out and confronts what Bronson has already seen.
That's his trap for... It's kinda gone now.
Now he may be the hunted.
Once again Bronson is us.
Almost like in Hitchcock films, where he looks our attention goes.
This is one of my favourite sequences here.
We got... Claudia in the bathtub. There we go.
Shooting through the steam.
There's almost surrealistic images coming up in this sequence.
One doesn't know quite why it's there, but it sure is fun.
A lot of point of views here.
Without the entire film to go by, the audience may be totally confused.
And even if you have seen it, you also may be totally confused.
But it doesn't seem to matter.
We get the sense that now Fonda's... being stalked.
We don't quite know yet why Bronson wants him alive.
We get a little bit of surrealism here. It's a really strange business.
There's the clock, the empty clock that hasn't been painted in yet,
because the town is under construction.
Is this a timeless quality? Is that it?
We're kind of in a West that never existed, only in our own minds.
I'm not quite sure what that meant. I'm sure he didn't know either.
There is tension in the scene, but everything is played so slowly.
At the moment, we don't know why he's done that.
Uh-oh. Stunt man. Bang!
We return to Sir Christopher Frayling.
So you've got Bronson on the balcony like some supernatural presence,
pulling the strings, a puppeteer while all this is going on below him,
contemplating the difference between being a businessman and a gunman.
And a muddled Frank, who's seen all his own men turned against him,
because Morton pays better than he does.
A wonderful worried expression on Fonda's face.
And crosscut with Bronson sliding into the frame as usual,
with this supernatural control of time and space.
But Fonda doesn't shoot him,
he knows this is a curtain-raiser to the big event,
the two of them meeting when all this noise is out of the way,
when all these subplots have gone, they'll be face to face.
All the paraphernalia of the burgeoning town,
with these props and shop fronts lying around, and an unpainted clock,
and there's a wonderful High Noon gag here. Look.
The clock is striking noon, only it's the shadow of the rifle.
The film begins with High Noon, and here's a gag about it.
"Time sure flies."
It makes him look at the clock. It's after high noon.
Just in time, he realises,
and another stuntman bites the dust. That one looked as though it hurt.
Constantly, these stares between them.
Fonda's trying to puzzle out what's on Bronson's mind.
Why is he setting up all these situations
and watching without actually doing anything about it?
And he won't really discover that until he dies at the end of the duel.
But that's going to come later.
She begins to realise what it's about.
She begins to understand the rules of how these Western heroes work.
And then Fonda riding back to the train.
The horse is trotting in time with Morricone's music. A funeral dirge.
And the cords of this music are based on Mozart's Don Giovanni.
The Commandatore, the rider, the statue of the rider.
So this great monument rides back to the train
in time to Morricone's prewritten score.
We hear once more from Alex Cox.
And now a scene which is partially in and partially out.
The exterior, which we're looking at now,
where Frank rides through the desert in Almeria and comes to the train.
This is all in the long and the short version of the film,
but as he gets closer to the train, the two versions diverge.
This part of the scene is in the abbreviated version.
As far as we know, they never shot the battle.
It's like Yojimbo, you just see the aftermath, not the fight itself.
This, too, I think, was kept in the shortened version.
What we didn't see in the shortened version was an interior.
And so this was missing.
You can see the point of view of the studio people,
who were trying to cut the film because it was so long.
"Why do we need to see these henchmen dead?"
But part of the fun of a Leone film is identifying the henchmen,
seeing the dead body of Aldo Sambrell,
or seeing the dead body of Benito Stefanelli, and recognising them.
And of course, this, the death of Morton,
was in the abbreviated version, although it was a little shorter.
Sir Christopher now guides us through the climactic showdown
between Harmonica and Frank.
And so we're back at Sweetwater.
And a series of sequences based on the end-of-track segment
of John Ford's The Iron Horse in 1924,
and equivalent scenes from Union Pacific or How the West Was Won,
or any of the epics of the laying of the railroad.
A classic series of shots done in exactly the John Ford way.
And Bronson's waiting for the protagonists
to come to him for the final climax.
And the first to arrive is Cheyenne, with Cheyenne's theme as he arrives,
hunched in the saddle, looking not very well,
for reasons which we will discover shortly.
He's managed to escape. We thought he was on his was to Yuma Jail,
but he's escaped and come back to Sweetwater to settle things up.
Jill now is dressed in a domestic way
to suit her role as the water bearer to the tired railroad gang.
So instead of her New Orleans finery, she's dressed in her ranch outfit.
She's stripped for action.
The actual change of costume was based on the film Man Of The West,
the Gary Cooper Western where Julie London is prepared in the same way.
Robards has developed this strange relationship with Claudia Cardinale,
where he treats her as a potential lover, as his mother. He says,
"My mother used to make coffee this way, hot and strong and good."
He's the romantic bandit who wants to settle down, but can't admit it.
And, again, that was a theme from one of the movies that they talked about,
the film Warlock by Edward Dmytryk, where there's a lot of reference
to that sort of psychosexual relationship
between the baddie and the mother figure played by Dorothy Malone,
and, indeed, Henry Fonda as the gunfighter.
That was picked up on by Bertolucci and Leone at an early stage.
Warlock was a favourite movie, much neglected in critical writing.
"What's going on out there? He's whittling on a piece of wood."
"And when he stops whittling, I have the feeling something will happen."
That was dialogue that originally came earlier in the script,
but was transposed during some of the cuts that happened during shooting.
Robards introduces the final scenes, looking at us like a chorus.
"Something's gonna happen"
Fonda and Bronson have got to settle this score.
The next to arrive at this place for the final settling of accounts,
like the third act of a play with all the actors gathering, is Frank.
And we get his theme played like a trumpet dirge,
like a Mexican mariachi band playing his entry.
There'd been a similar theme in all Leone's films up to now,
the funeral dirge which signals that there's going to be a duel.
So Frank arrives and Bronson sits still,
waiting for the second great protagonist to introduce himself.
While the railroad gangs reach Sweetwater
and the Transcontinental Railroad, which started in the East
and ends up in the West, reaches Arizona.
Note Bronson's gun, always at the ready in case something happens.
In this case, resting on a tree stump. You never know.
A very important piece of dialogue now between Fonda and Bronson
about the ancient race of heroes
that'll be squeezed out of the West by new technology, by the railroad.
A deep nostalgia for the heroes of the old West, for the old Western,
a nostalgia for the films of Leone's childhood comes out in this exchange.
And, in fact, it's indirectly based on a piece of dialogue
from Lampedusa's novel The Leopard,
where the great Prince of Sicily, Don Fabrizio talks about,
"We were the lions, jackals, leopards, the great heroic figures,
and there's no room for us in this modern world of smaller people,
and the technology and capitalism. There's no room for heroes."
And this is precisely the dialogue in different terms
that's going on between Harmonica and Frank here.
But they realise that all the other stuff has been noise.
What matters is that they settle their account.
That flashback that keeps trying to break through in the movie
has got to be resolved in la resa dei conti, the settling of accounts.
So we're going to have a Leone-style duel.
Frank has wanted to become a businessman throughout the movie,
just as his boss behaved sometimes like a gunfighter.
But Frank realises now, he can't become a businessman.
He's a gunfighter, he's a guy that settles things by shooting people.
There's no point pretending he has a place in the modern world.
This is one of the key pieces of dialogue in the entire movie,
and is unusually wordy in a film
which consists of acres of stage directions
with the odd one line of dialogue.
This is sustained dialogue and we're supposed to concentrate on it.
He puts his gun back in the holster by the barrel
just in case Frank thinks,
because they're very sensitive men these,
in case he thinks he's going to shoot him.
But no, they must wait for the proper ritual way to do it.
It's almost like a proscenium arch in a theatre.
They walk through the arch,
the curtain comes across for this last act.
Robards, meanwhile, is shaving to make himself look respectable.
Jill, as ever, is pouring the water. She's always associated
with the well, the water, the bath, the bringing of water to the West.
The role she played in Fellini's 8½ as the water bearer is writ large.
She's the future, she nourishes the West for future generations.
The future is Jill. Everyone else is doomed in this dance of death.
People like that have something inside, something to do with death.
I called my biography of Leone Something to Do With Death.
That seems to me to be the line that sums up his entire career.
The death of the movies, of the characters.
But they go out in style. It's a real celebration
of once upon a time there was a certain kind of cinema,
and it meant a lot to a lot of people,
and they don't make movies like that any more.
So Something to Do With Death.
And now the final duel. A reprise of the music Like a Judgement,
the Henry Fonda theme.
And it's cut very like the duel at the end of Robert Aldrich's film
The Last Sunset, a favourite film with Bertolucci.
In fact, he had a reference to it in his film The Spider's Stratagem,
where in a cinema there's a placard outside for The Last Sunset.
It's cut like the duel between Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson
in The Last Sunset. So we've had matching shots.
Bronson, Fonda, different hats, different physiognomies,
and now the crane goes up to show both of them.
They're positioning themselves behind the Sweetwater ranch
for this final settling of accounts
with the geology of Spain just behind them,
a completely different colour and texture to Monument Valley.
An almost fetishistic emphasis on the details of this.
The boots, the way they walk, the costumes they wear.
It's like a military two-step, it's like a dance.
Or like a chessboard with the pieces being put in place
as the myth plays itself out.
So now Fonda's view as he walks around Bronson in the middle,
and positions himself so the light is right,
and he hasn't got the sun in his eyes for this final duel.
Bronson's face has never been better filmed.
He'd appeared in The Magnificent Seven and as Native Americans,
but he had never registered in the way that he did in this film
with these astonishing close-ups of that physiognomy.
So Fonda finds his position, looks up to make sure the sun's alright.
He stands there.
It's Bronson's turn to move.
No dialogue, just music again.
Just as the film begins with natural sounds amplified for the action,
it ends with a sequence that's entirely musical and gestural.
And so they stand facing each other and the music stops
and you get silence.
This is the moment that everyone's been waiting for.
This is the Cup Final. This is the two football teams facing each other.
By Hollywood standards, incredibly slow and dragged out and distended.
Nothing to do with real time,
this is the time of rhetoric, the time of opera.
This is a very artificial kind of time.
The camera slowly goes in because behind Bronson's eyes
is the memory of why he wants to meet Frank in the first place.
Buried deep in his unconscious as the music swells up,
what we're supposed to think is this is what Bronson is thinking.
The young Henry Fonda in Monument Valley is walking towards him.
At last it comes into focus. We haven't seen it as Fonda before,
he's just been a stickman out of focus, now we can actually see him.
And Fonda takes from his pocket a harmonica.
The harmonica that Bronson's been playing throughout the film.
So the secret of where that came from is about to be revealed.
He pushes it towards the camera.
And back to Bronson as he remembers that moment,
because he's pushing it towards Bronson when he was a child.
And the camera goes even closer into those eyes.
An astonishing close-up
across the bridge of his nose with his eyes.
The closest close-up that Leone had ever filmed yet.
"Keep your loving brother happy."
So, something to do with Bronson's brother.
Into the mouth of the young Bronson,
who, it transpires, is a Native American boy.
He has to blow the harmonica while his brother stands on his shoulders.
There's Monument Valley in the background.
And as the camera goes back, he's not just standing on his shoulders,
he has a rope around his neck.
The brother is played by the production manager Claudio Mancini.
The rope is attached to a bell, attached to a very Roman arch
made of red brick in the middle of Monument Valley.
An astonishing piece of design by Carlo Simi.
Yes, it could be Mexican or Mediterranean.
A Roman arch in the middle of Monument Valley
is how this guy's gonna die.
So, the young Bronson plays the harmonica,
and, of course, when Bronson runs out of breath, when Bronson gets tired,
his brother is going to die.
An unbelievably sadistic and elaborate way to kill somebody.
Rather like the elaborate Machiavellian tortures
you find in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
A Renaissance, Roman approach to killing an enemy.
Lots of smiling faces cut like an Eisenstein movie.
Big physiognomies coming at you. The apple being ate.
The music swelling up. Bronson's eyes.
How long will he keep going?
"Son of a bitch," says the brother, and kicks Bronson away.
So Bronson doesn't fall over, he's kicked away deliberately
and falls to the ground. The harmonica falls out of his mouth.
You get the dust.
And then just at that moment, the moment of the duel.
That's the reason Bronson has to kill Henry Fonda.
A reaction shot of Claudia Cardinale and of Robards,
who's cut himself because of the gunshot
and the tension of who's won.
They're indoors. They don't go out to see.
They want someone to walk in and tell them what's happened.
But Fonda hasn't fallen over, he's turned his back on Bronson.
He tries to put his gun back in the holster, it falls.
He staggers away.
You can only just see the wound through his dark shirt.
He looks shocked, surprised, amazed. Someone's beaten him to the draw.
And he's thinking hard.
"Who the hell is this guy? Why has he been trying to shoot me?"
"Why has he been postponing this moment
to reach this settling of accounts? Who is this guy?"
So Bronson, again hardly any dialogue, comes over to him.
"Who are you?" says Fonda.
He must know before he dies. What has this all been about?
Bronson simply takes the harmonica from around his neck,
he's got no further purpose for it, no further need for it,
and puts it in Fonda's mouth,
just as Fonda had put it in his mouth when he was a child.
That's all he needs to show him.
And Fonda nods his head. "So that's who you are."
"After all these years."
And Fonda plays his death rattle on the harmonica.
At this moment, they share the flashback.
You're looking at Fonda's eyes. He's thinking that as well. He nods.
These men share the same memory at that moment.
It's expressed visually. That's all the explanation you need.
And Fonda bites the dust.
Cardinale inspects the new-model Jason Robards,
now he's shaved and washed and made himself more respectable.
But he's not the right man for her.
The man with the harmonica is, but he's not likely to settle down.
They don't know what's happened yet, who's going to walk through the door?
Amazingly, they haven't looked out of the window.
It's what will be will be. Fate takes care of these things.
And now we get the line.
"People like that have something inside. Something to do with death."
The checked tablecloth again, this symbol of domesticity.
She's settling down, making this place her own, at home in the West.
She's adjusted to her role as the water bearer.
Just as Maureen laid the table at the beginning with the red tablecloth,
only then it ended in massacre.
Bronson may seem to be the right guy, she may think he'll settle down,
but if he has won the duel, he ain't going to settle,
he's got something gnawing away at him.
But we still don't know who's won, so Cheyenne gets his gun ready
in case it's the wrong guy.
And we get a classic Bronson entrance again. The light as the door opens.
The creak of the door. Jill smiles. The right guy is home.
And he sees her smile and just slides into the frame from the right
from behind the piece of wood.
And Robards realises at that moment he doesn't stand a chance.
And rather a complex set of reactions from Jill as she looks at him.
Smiling, pleased that he's won,
but she can tell from his face that he ain't gonna stay.
This isn't gonna work out. He's gonna move on.
He's the sort of guy with something still on his mind.
And all that is expressed without her saying a thing.
Ah, well, she's going to have to go it alone.
She's going to have to take up Brett McBain's legacy
and operate Sweetwater herself.
"Someday." Great line.
It's from Shane, it's from so many Westerns.
"Are you going to stay and settle down?"
"I'll be back someday." But you know that he won't be.
This guy's riding off and he's never gonna come back.
The relationship between these three is subtle in Leone's cinema.
It revolves around the woman as the central character,
the only movie he made where the action revolves around the woman.
All the characters are circulating round this central hub.
"Gonna be a beautiful town, Sweetwater".
"So take on your responsibilities."
"You are responsible for looking after it now. It's on your patch."
"It's your back garden. McBain's dream has come true,
but I won't to be around because I don't like towns
and I don't like civilisation, and I don't like progress."
"So I'm afraid I've got to move on."
"Someday."
And Robards reluctantly says, "Yeah, I've gotta move on, too".
He wants to hang around. Maybe it's time to settle down,
but for all sorts of reasons, he's got to go, too.
Not least because he's dying.
There's been a running gag about the workmen patting Jill on the bottom.
"Make believe it's nothing". That's what happens in life.
Just try and cope. Don't get too sensitive about it.
"Make believe it's nothing."
And in a way that could be the subtitle of the whole film.
It's a huge fantasy, a huge piece of ritual, a huge piece of opera,
but it amounts to this fairy tale about the Western.
"Make believe it's nothing."
So out she goes to take on her responsibilities
as the water bearer to the rail gangs as they lay the track at Sweetwater.
And the two men ride away.
And, in effect, that was the last we saw of them
in the original American-release print of the movie.
But this sequence, a key sequence, was put back
when the film was re-released in the 1970s. They've ridden away.
They go over the hill and down into the valley by Sweetwater.
The one time we see Harmonica on a horse in the entire film.
Usually, he's just walking into frame as if he's been standing waiting,
but now he's gonna ride off.
And Cheyenne falls off his horse behind him.
And Bronson sort of realises that that's happened without being told.
He intuits it. Because it transpires that Robards has been shot
by Mr Morton of the railroad when he made his last escape.
Leone says that each character, except Jill, knows they're dying.
And the whole film is like a sort of last gasp of the Western as cinema
and the last gasp of the heroes of the West.
There won't be room for them in the modern world.
Frank died in the duel with honour, he realised why he was dying.
Now Robards dies.
He's killed actually and symbolically by the head of the railroad.
There's no place for people like Cheyenne in the modern world.
He's been messily killed as well.
He's been gut shot, so it's gonna take a little while.
This is why he's been looking so pale and so hunched
in the final sequences. And in the original American-release print,
you just thought, "Why does Robards look so strange?"
There was no explanation at all of why he was so languid and pale
and behaving as if it was his last gasp.
We had no idea this was happening.
It's a key piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
The culmination of one of the themes
of the implications of the railroad as it arrives.
A deep vein of nostalgia here,
just as there is in The Leopard, both Visconti's film and the novel,
for the world we have lost.
For the old world which can't adjust to the new world, or try to adjust.
Some people are good at adjusting.
Jill is good at adjusting, these people aren't.
Unfortunately, they'll be the victims of the coming economic boom.
It's a deeply pessimistic vision of the West,
but, at the same time, a deeply nostalgic one.
And just as Cheyenne has had his theme on a banjo and electric piano,
a theme written by Morricone,
and, in fact, when it was written, Leone said to Morricone,
"Think about Disney's Lady and the Tramp. Think about the Tramp."
This charming, but ruffianish dog, the sort of antihero of the cartoon.
"Think of a piece of music that would be suitable for the Tramp."
It's sort of up-tempo, and jokey, and jolly, and Wild Westy,
and the theme is about to stop and there will be silence.
As Cheyenne breathes his last breath.
And then a chord and that leitmotif has finished.
He didn't want Harmonica to watch him die, so Harmonica turns his back.
Very ritualised, Japanesey approach to death.
It's like a samurai moment, not a Wild West moment.
The great warrior dies and you turn your back and pay homage to him.
Harmonica looks up to the sky, the camera goes up
and we get the end of track again.
And the train arrives. The train arrives at Sweetwater.
This is the moment the entire film has been building up to.
It needs the water. It's going to be a stop on the main railroad line,
so it had to come to Sweetwater, and at last it's arrived,
with the rail gangs all over the locomotive.
Leone had to alter the geology of Spain to do this sequence.
He moved part of a sand mountain, with permission, to lay the tracks,
so that the train could come round the corner
and end up in front of Sweetwater. And the authorities gave permission.
It's wilderness now, but the train was brought on a flat-bed truck
from Guadix and was craned onto the railway lines just for this sequence
as the train arrives at Sweetwater for the climax.
Once upon a time in the West, the railroad arrived
and brought all sorts of mayhem in its wake.
And it made modern America possible, but ancient America died as a result.
So the rail gangs jump off, it's the new shift arriving,
and they're going to take over the building of Sweetwater Station
and the railroad.
No place for Bronson in this world. So he rides off with Cheyenne's body
slumped over the saddle of the horse following him.
So we don't see him die, we simply see him ride off into the wilderness.
And, finally, Cardinale takes on her responsibility
as running the McBain spread. She has finally become Jill McBain.
She has finally become a frontiers woman.
And the final shot of the film is her distributing the water
to the thirsty railroad men.
And they all surround her and she can hold her own.
She is the grandmother of a great politician of the 20th century,
she's the origins of modern America.
And the camera pulls back. All the workmen crowded around her,
the train letting off steam, the wilderness, Sweetwater.
Once Upon a Time in the West.
This audio commentary track was recorded in Los Angeles,
Paris and London.
And I would like to thank Sir Christopher Frayling, Alex Cox,
John Milius, John Carpenter, Dr Sheldon Hall, Bernardo Bertolucci,
and Claudia Cardinale for their contributions.
I'm Lancelot Narayan. Thanks for listening.