Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)

Name: Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
Genre: Western
Released: September 30, 2005
Duration: 175 min
Rating: 82
Cast: Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda

2005

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Universal acclaim based on 9 Critic Reviews

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Universal acclaim based on 260 Ratings

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8.3

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8.3	User Score Universal acclaim based on 260 Ratings

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Once Upon A Time In The West

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Movie Details & Credits

Paramount Pictures | Release Date: September 30, 2005 | M

Starring: Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda

Summary: Sergio Leone's monumental epic is as big as its Monument Valley locations, as grand as its fine, distinguished cast, as tough and bawdy as every kid imagines the Old West. (Paramount)

Director: Sergio Leone

Genre(s): Western

Rating: M

Runtime: 175 min

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Critic Reviews

100

TV Guide Magazine Staff (Not credited)

Sergio Leone's masterpiece. In Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone pulls together all the themes, characterizations, visuals, humor, and musical experiments of the three "Dollars" films and comes up with a true epic western. It is a stunning, operatic film of breadth, detail, and stature that deserves to be considered among the greatest westerns ever made. (Review of Original Release) Read full review

100

Dave Kehr

Leone brought back a masterpiece, a film that expands his baroque, cartoonish style into genuine grandeur, weaving dozens of thematic variations and narrative arabesques around a classical western foundation myth.(Review of Original Release) Read full review

100

Marjorie Baumgarten

An additional treat is seeing Hollywood good guy Henry Fonda playing one of the nastiest curs in the West. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the great films in cinema history. (8/30/2000 Review) Read full review

Josh Larsen

It’s probably unwise to come to Leone looking for too much in the way of feminism. Instead, Once Upon a Time in the West offers quintessential examples of the things he was better known for, including another blustery Ennio Morricone score. Visually, he mostly vacillates between extreme close-ups of intense faces and vast widescreen compositions, a technique that is lurching but also luridly beautiful. Read full review

Staff (Not credited)

Henry Fonda and Jason Robards relish each screen minute as the heavies, and Charles Bronson plays Clint Eastwood's 'man with no name' role. (Review of Original Release) Read full review

Roger Ebert

Good fun, especially if you like Leone's way of savoring the last morsel of every scene. (Review of Original Release) Read full review

Phil Hall

Alas, the big screen also magnifies the problems with Once Upon a Time in the West. Specifically, Leone’s insistence on style trumped the need for substance. The film is basically a B-Western stretched an agonizing 165 minutes. Read full review

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User Reviews

RonanC.

Mar 3, 2009

A poignant masterpiece, everything about this film is amazing. From the uncompromisingly rich musical score, the fine cast, and it's grand cinematography. Stands neck-to-neck with it's predecessor The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.

4 of 6 users found this helpful

biggbadd66

Dec 15, 2019

The best western ever made. Henry Fonda's turn as a villain for the first time in his career , makes one wonder why he hasn't played the heavy before. His steely blue-eyed stare will tell you everything you need to know without saying a word. Tremendous, epic aand beautiful.

0 of 0 users found this helpful00

[Anonymous]

Feb 24, 2007

As good as movies -- of any genre -- get.

1 of 2 users found this helpful

Swati

Dec 30, 2013

An epic about the expansion and construction as the frontier pushed toward the pacific, interlined with one man's journey to make someone pay for what he did in the past.

From the outset, Leone makes it clear that his focus on portraying the life and environment of the West wouldAn epic about the expansion and construction as the frontier pushed toward the pacific, interlined with one man's journey to make someone pay for what he did in the past.

From the outset, Leone makes it clear that his focus on portraying the life and environment of the West would supersede any need to tell the story. His self appointed task of showing all the mundane happenings and goings on of this world is well achieved. A train station is shown where the typical protagonist of a Western, who never has a name, engages himself in a shoot-out while in search for a man named Frank.

Focus shifts to McBain and his family who owns a land in the middle of nowhere. He is clearly suspicious about something that is going to happen and we are rewarded with what it is almost immediately. During this conflict we are introduced to this Frank that the first man was searching for.

A woman enters the story right around here who becomes more involved in the plot as the movie progresses, so is another character by the name of Cheyenne. She suddenly finds herself the centre of attention among outlaws and rail-road companies. The treatment of women is summed up quite clearly the way men behave with her. She is initially a woman who is well dressed and of a noble birth by all accounts and if even that could not gain her even the lowest level of respect, nothing could. The latter is the more engaging of any characters in the script, and thank God for his presence.

As the plot thickens, the mysterious man looks for Frank, Cheyenne seeks to clear his name in an incident involving multiple killings, and Frank helps his partner acquire land in the path of the envisioned rail-road to the pacific. The first two decide to stick around and help Jill with something that would honour the memory of the man who was killed, while Frank does all he can to take the land he needs to build the rail-road.

Frank asks the man twice who he is, to which he lists the names of some of the men he has killed. It is not enough that Frank should die. He needs to suffer while thinking about why this man wants to kill him. To this purpose he is even saved by this man. And surely enough, when Frank cannot take it any more, he himself goes after the man to find out the reason. At this point we finally learn the secret.

I felt like the movie lost steam an hour and a half into it and after that it felt like a task just to finish watching it. It was a narrative mess. The Man has every intention to come across as mysterious and awe-inspiring, but I found it frustrating after a while. He seemed to be content with wasting other people's (including the audience) time. I found Cheyenne much more interesting.

The dialogue was sparse. Only Cheyenne knew how to say things that would make people laugh and keep humoured, which was essential given the length of the movie. The plot develops linearly but Leone decided that it wasn't doing it for him and jumbled up everything. Some plot jumps took place, one of which infuriated me the most. The cinematography captured the bleak landscape of the West. The score was slow paced and introduced tension during the key moments. The set design depicted the life at the frontier with the wooden towns, horse-drawn carriages, sweaty people, all that.

Considered the greatest of Leone's work, I could not agree in good conscience. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was a hell of a lot more fun and had engaging characters, even though it had a fraction of the budget for this movie, proving once again that great movies need not be created through extravagance. Here, the characters seemed bland for the most part. They seemed not to know where they had to move in service to the story and wandered around aimlessly. There was not a single scene that cut it out for me. The only thing that Once did better was portray the daily life and toil of ordinary people in the west.

The movie failed to make a major impact on my emotions and senses right until the last shoot-out, which speaks for Leone's idea of greatness_ bore people so much that they have to see the timer several times to make sure the movie is headed forward. While it can be argued that the movie depicted the general life in the west quite effectively, I for one feel that story always trumps the need for grand style and an urge to make some kind of a statement. There's no doubt that the setting needs to be strong, but the characters need to be much stronger, which in turn should give way to the plot.… Expand

0 of 1 users found this helpful01

MarkTakayama

Oct 3, 2019

This is an old movie in 1968.This movie is also long 165 minutes.It is worth watching.The plot is complicated for me.You can't go to a bathroom while you are watching.You may miss an important scene.I loved the actors and actress.This is a great classic film.

0 of 0 users found this helpful00

lasttimeisaw

Oct 5, 2014

Sergio Leone's first saga of his ONCE UPON A TIME trilogy after competing THE DOLLARS trilogy. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is as good as his classic Spagetti Western predecessors if it is not better. Mustering three Hollywood toughies Bronson, Fonda and Robards, the film evidently echoesSergio Leone's first saga of his ONCE UPON A TIME trilogy after competing THE DOLLARS trilogy. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is as good as his classic Spagetti Western predecessors if it is not better. Mustering three Hollywood toughies Bronson, Fonda and Robards, the film evidently echoes the pattern of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966, 8/10), although Bronson is a perfect specimen embodies both the Ugly and the Good, and for the first time Sergio deploys a woman, the Mediterranean beauty Cardinale to be a pivot among these three, contrives an interwoven plot with vengeance, duel, murder, vice as well as the righteous side of the Western ideology: masculinity, integrity, fraternity and chivalry.
continue reading my review on my blog: google cinema omnivore, thanks… Expand

1 of 2 users found this helpful11

GregePorter

Aug 31, 2015

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Bottom line: I've always thought I hated westerns and its because of movies like Once Upon A Time in the West.
.5/4

Once Upon A Time in the West opens to a quiet dusty train station. An old, wiry, prospector type man (really, he is a caricature) is held up by three intimidating, quiet men. The three men are waiting for the next train to arrive. After several minutes of standing and waiting and sitting and waiting, the train arrives. Charles Bronson (we come to know him as Harmonica) stands alone with a bag in one hand. He drops it, pulls out a gun and kills the three men. Now before I get much further, let me start with my first gripe about this movie: the art direction.

It's like Leone said," Alright, we are going to make this a Western Epic!" The movie is overflowing with landscape shots of "The West": covered wagons going into the distance flanked by mesas, stagecoaches, bustling "wild west towns". It is like the art director pulled out the Wild West Catalog and said," I want two of everything! We need children’s toys? Wooden railroad stations and widdled horses. Oh, and don't forget dusters which can be the gang uniform." It's like walking into a Cracker Barrel. There is something to be said about creating a fully fleshed out world but let's not get carried away.

The thing that troubles me the most about this movie is the treatment of women. It has a general, gross, misogynistic vibe that makes me uncomfortable. Then again when is misogyny not gross? I mean just about every line directed towards or about women has a rape-y vibe. This isn't something shockingly new; I was playing the video game Red Dead Redemption and just about every single line, I kid you not, is suggestive of rape. Let me give you some examples from Once Upon A Time in the West:

Jill McBain comes from New Orleans to live with her new husband and his three children. Before she arrives at the homestead the outlaw, Cheyenne, supposedly murders the family. Cheyenne comes to the widow to explain that he isn’t guilty. At one point she says, "Why don't you throw me over the table and have your way with me and, better yet, why don't you call your men in too! All I'll need to do it jump in a pot of boiling water and I'll be exactly the same as I was..." Now, when she said that she would need to jump in a pot of boiling water, I thought she was saying that she could just quickly commit suicide, but no! She was just saying that she would use the water to clean herself. Germs are really the only damage of rape, right? Mental and emotional damage? Meh, that doesn't happen so we can just ignore that.

At one point Frank, the man who murdered Jill’s husband, kidnaps her. The camera cuts to them lying in bed together. She helps him take off her pink corset while he says," You're the type of woman that needs to feel a man's hands...all over you...even if they are the hands that murdered your husband. Is there anything you won't do to save your own skin?" "No, Frank." She kisses him and turns onto her stomach, taking off her blouse in the process. The camera pans away and fades. So how are we supposed to feel about this? The dialog has a weird, problematic, rape-y, sadistic vibe to it.

We aren't supposed to sympathize with Frank but the camera is, for the most part, positioned from above the bed looking down on her. The dialog and camerawork force us to gaze at Jill. How I am supposed to sympathize with her if she is able to sleep with this guy without hesitation? But wait, there’s more!

Jill is living alone and the railroad is being built through her land. Before leaving, Cheyenne looks at the railroad workers and says," You should go give [the railroad workers] some water. They are tired hardworking men and there's nothing like seeing a beautiful young woman. And if one of them should pat you on the behind, act like nothing happened, they've earned it." He pats her on the butt, winks at her, says," Just act like nothing happened," and leaves. The movie closes with her giving the crowd of men water. Yeah, just go, little lady; let those men objective and grope you because they've earned it! That's how this 175 minute movie ends and it makes me sick. It's as if sexual harassment is endearing with a "Boys will be boys" type of attitude.

I think it goes without saying that I was really disappointed by Once Upon A Time in the West. The extended cut of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is over three hours long but it doesn't feel like it. The film has the patience to slow down. It is a wonderful way of building tension by contrasting the speed of a gunfight with the desolation of the empty, western landscape. In Once Upon A Time in the West, the extended silence feels like little more than an imitation. If you want to see a good Western, or even a reasonable Western go see one of Leone’s other films.… Expand

1 of 7 users found this helpful16

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25	#25 Best Movie of 2005
97	#97 Most Discussed Movie of 2005
50	#50 Most Shared Movie of 2005