Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)

Editor's Note Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), the power-hungry owner of a railroad company, hires Frank (Henry Fonda, playing against type), a gunfighter without a conscience, to kill anyone who stands in the way of the completion of the railroad. After Frank murders land owner Brett McBain (Frank Wolff), McBain's widow (Claudia Cardinale) hires two killers of her own to protect her and gain revenge: a mysterious, harmonica-playing desperado (Charles Bronson) and his rogue sidekick (Jason Robards). Using techniques previously unseen in the genre, Sergio Leone utilizes close-ups, color, and Ennio Morricone's trademark score to create a tense and somber meditation on death which is widely considered to be one of the best westerns in cinematic history. Soon-to-be legendary Italian directors Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA) and Bernardo Bertolucci (THE LAST EMPEROR) collaborated with Leone on the screenplay.

	Claudia Cardinale
	Woody Strode
	Keenan Wynn
	Gabriele Ferzetti
	Paolo Stoppa
	Lionel Stander
	Henry Fonda
	Jason Robards
	Charles Bronson
	Jack Elam
	Frank Wolff
	Sergio Donati - Screenwriter
	Ennio Morricone - Composer
	Carlo Simi - Production Designer
	Sergio Leone - Story
	Sergio Leone - Screenwriter
	Bernardo Bertolucci - Story
	Bino Cicogna - Producer
	Tonino Delli Colli - Director of Photography
	Fulvio Morsella - Executive Producer
	Nino Baragli - Editor
	Dario Argento - Story
	Sergio Leone - Director

Sergio Leone's epic homage to the Hollywood western has become a cinematic classic. Leone plays with the genre's conventions primarily through evocative camerawork and music, and with a minimum of dialogue.| The film follows several stories, all centering on greed, murder and revenge. In one, gunmen slaughter an entire family who are awaiting the arrival of their father's new bride. The wife valiantly attempts to hold on to the land she has inherited. But the cold-blooded outlaws who committed the massacre want to complete the job by killing her.| There's also a mysterious "Nameless Man" who has his own reasons for hunting down these bandits... and he has murder on his mind. Los Angeles Times
"...One beautiful image follows another....Throughout, Leone is a master of the expressive gesture in celebration of an Old West that exists more in our imaginations than it ever did in reality..." 01/02/2003 p.C12

USA Today
"...Director Sergio Leone's 'spaghetti' masterpiece'..." 12/09/1994 p.3D

Total Film
"...Brilliant....Brutal, bloody and poetic, this is, without hyperbole, one of the greatest Westerns ever made..." 11/01/2003 p.122

Movieline's Hollywood Life
"...Bronson and Fonda never looked better..." 11/01/2003 p.120

Uncut
Ranked #18 in Uncut's Best DVDs Of 2005 -- "[I]t's simultaneously an elegy, a critique and a fairytale of the cowboy myth." 01/01/2006 p.84-85

Entertainment Weekly
"[A] masterpiece....Leone's epic about a trio of outlaws is set during the last death-rattle days of the Old West." -- Grade: A 06/03/2011