Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is the Everest of Italian westerns, featuring the greatest movie score Ennio Morricone ever composed and the most glorious CinemaScope camerawork to ever grace a western. Forty years on it’s recognised as one of the definitive big screen movies. Its hallucinatory splendour towers again in this stunning restoration. We couldn’t be more pleased with ourselves for securing these screenings for the giant screen. — BG
“Let’s celebrate… and appreciate the opportunity to see a gorgeous new restoration of a ‘classic’ that’s still one of the most enjoyable movies ever made: Bronson, Cardinale, Fonda, and Robards; Morricone’s unforgettable score; images of Monument Valley that rival John Ford’s. Right from the opening sequence—a quintet for three gunslingers, a fly, and a creaking windmill—t’s clear we’re being told a story whose familiar elements will appear in a new way…
This unusual film was born in an unusual way. After the financial success of his first three spaghetti westerns, Leone decided to try something more personal, so he invited two young filmmakers—Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci—to …‘dream together’. Agreeing that the western is the cinematographic genre par excellence, they discussed the American movies they loved, Hollywood dreams, and historical reality. The extraordinary film that resulted is a unique blending of popular fiction, the primal ‘once upon a time’ impulses common to all storytelling, and the Marxist ideas so in vogue in the late 60s. And ‘something to do with death’.” — Peter Scarlet, Tribeca Film Festival

Sergio leone's Western masterpiece finds Charles Bronson stepping into the No Name role as the vengeance-seeking Harmonica and Henry Fonda trashing his Wyatt Earp image as the dead-faced, blue-eyed killer, Frank. The opening Woody Strode, AI Mulock, and Jack Elam waiting for a train and bothered by a fly and dripping water—is masterful bravura, homing in on tiny details for a fascinating but eventless length of time before Bronson arrives for the shootout that gets the film going.
Once Upon a Time in the West is the first Leone film to place violence in a truly political context, indicting the corrupt (and crippled) railroad tycoon who "leaves two shiny, slimy tracks like a snail" as he bulldozes across the landscape, employing outlaw flunkeys to dispose of inconvenient settlers who won't unsettle easily. Rapacious civilization taints the wide open spaces as Harmonica quests to track down the sadist who hanged his brother, widow/whore/earth mother Claudia Cardinale tries to fulfill her murdered husband's dream of a real community out West, and bandido Jason Robards just wants to be left in a natural state of childish abandon. With striking widescreen compositions and epic running time, this is truly a Western that wins points for both length and width. —Kim Newman (1001)