Source: Some information on this page may have been sourced as part of the 2023 Wikimedia Australia Partnership Projects grant, with the purpose of improving and expanding the use of Wikidata on our website. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Read more about this project here.
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.
Content notification
Our collection comprises over 40,000 moving image works, acquired and catalogued between the 1940s and early 2000s. As a result, some items may reflect outdated, offensive and possibly harmful views and opinions. ACMI is working to identify and redress such usages.
Learn more about our collection and our collection policy here. If you come across harmful content on our website that you would like to report, let us know.
How to watch
Stream, rent or buy via
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
311539
Language
English
Audience classification
MA
Subject categories
Feature films → Feature films - Italy
Food, Health, Lifestyle, Medicine, Psychology & Safety → Revenge
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Colour
Holdings
VHS; Access Print (Section 1)