#62: Once Upon A Time In The West

Once Upon A Time In The West (Leone, 1968)

What attracts me to Leone westerns is the aesthetic. It's the same aesthetic that's now drawing millions of people to Red Dead Redemption. Other famous westerns try to be idyllically American. That's why they cast John Wayne. Leone presents the old West as the kind of dusty, chaotic anarchy where the strong do whatever they feel like doing.

Once Upon A Time In The West shows the beginning of the end of the Old West in pictures. The strong silent 'Real men' are being replaced by businessmen who know hundreds of angles to make more money. The story is, a woman who used to be a prostitute marries a man who owns a seemingly useless piece of land out in the west. When she arrives, she finds him and his entire family murdered. She still wants to cling to that new life that he was going to give her, so instead of heading back to New Orleans she stays and manages his land. It turns out, the land isn't as useless as everyone thinks it is. Her husband knew that the railroad would eventually extend west, and because it sat upon the only water within a hundred miles, it would be forced to come right through his property. The bad guy, the businessman who controls the railroad, had his family killed to avoid having to pay out to him to run the railroad through his land.

Her husband was visionary in that he foresaw the end of the classic 'Old West' early enough to speculate future profits from the expansion of the city into the desert. Now that development is an unstoppable tide that will put an end to the entire paradigm of the lawless West and the 'Real man'.

The 'Real men' in the picture are represented by a hitman hired by the bad guy and a drifter played by Charles Bronson. The drifter goes out of his way to frustrate the hitman and interfere with his plans to steal the land, but doesn't appear to have any personal motive. The hitman on the other hand tries to take on the tricks he learns from the businessman to make a profit, but the drifter sees through him and recognizes him as being not a businessman, but 'Just a man', which he refers to as 'A dying race'. It's those two, and it's the world changing around them, but because they're men, they don't care about anything but their pride and independence. This way the film comes off like a sendoff to the entire 'Old West' lifestyle.

Rating: **** / 5

56/101

Others:

Damnation: *** 1/2 / 5

A bleak movie about the irreversibility of life with a similar visual style to Tarkovsky. The movie is in black and white and the staging of the scenes if beautiful and hits the emotional notes perfectly.

New movies:

Winter's Bone: 9/10

The best movie of 2010 so far. A 17 year old girl whose father cooks crystal meth who takes care of her insane mother and two siblings is going to lose the house if her father doesn't show up for his trial date. She has to find her father but everyone else in the community is blocking her because they're involved in the drug trade as well. The film has themes of powerlessness and despair of poverty, but also exposes empathy and caring from the sorts of people we wouldn't consider to be empathetic. There's no other movie like it.