Once upon a time in the west = C'era una volta il West [Widescreen]

Leone took classic themes of the western revenge story and the coming to the Frontier of civilisation in the form of the railroad and reshaped them into a fresco-like narrative neither revisionist nor traditional. Western stereotypes are abstracted in a West so self-consciously relocated in fable and fantasy that it has been suggested by David Thomson that Leone at heart harboured a contempt for the genre. He and his writers certainly brought European sensibility to bear on American classicism frequently citing classic Hollywood westerns while dilating time and lingering on atmospherics at the expense of cause and effect, clarity and classical economy. Essential to the film’s affect is a symmetry between image and music (Morricone’s four basic musical themes were used to pace and construct scenes throughout the shooting) in an operatic “dance of death” in which “the arias are not sung, they are stared”. Cast includes Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson and Gabriele Ferzetti.