“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” - Sergio Leone (1966)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo, 1966) was the third installment of Sergio Leone’s famous Man with No Name Trilogy (aka Dollars Trilogy), whose earlier offerings were A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). Although at the outset Leone did not have the intention of fashioning a trilogy and the plots of the three films were not serially connected, they all featured the same iconic lead – the laconic gunslinger, “The Man With No Name”, played by Clint Eastwood.  Also, because they were Italian productions and were all released in the US in a single year, 1967, American critics began referring to them (and their subsequent Italian progeny) collectively as “Spaghetti Westerns”.

Each successive film in the series was more grandiose and had more than double the budget of its predecessor.  But each one still had Leone’s distinctive cinematic stylistics:

• wide-view long shots tightly intercut with sequences of extreme closeups.  These are used to orchestrate the numerous and deadly man-to-man confrontations in the story.
• an episodic plot structure operating in the context of some predominant issue (usually money), with each episode culminating in a confrontation.
• scenic landscapes and settings that immerse and isolate the viewer in an atmospheric context.
• moody, evocative soundtrack music by Leone’s longtime friend and former classmate Ennio Morricone.
• And always there is the Man with No Name, whose gunshot marksmanship (along with that of other key principals in the stories) is impossibly accurate at long distances, while there thuggish adversaries always miss.

All of these effects combine to establish a highly expressionistic interior landscape for the viewer, who becomes completely immersed in all the tense psychological confrontations that arise. In some respects we might refer to the whole collection of these effects as “operatic” and somehow appropriately Italianate, considering their source. In any case Leone was a master of this expression, and to see one of his films is to enjoy plunging deep into the emotion-laden waters he fashioned. And with each successive output of the Dollars series, Leone went deeper and more emphatically into his form of orgiastic expressionism; so that with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly it was almost reaching self-parody. 

The film’s story concerns the efforts of three ruthless gunslingers who are independently seeking a cache of stolen money.  It was scripted by Leone and Luciano Vincenzoni, with assistance from Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli. The three desperados are

• “Blondie” (The Man with No Name, played again by Cline Eastwood).  He is calm, calculating, and merciless.  Since among the three main characters he is the least evil, he represents “The Good” in this story.
   
• “Angel Eyes” (Lee Van Cleef) is a cold-blooded and sadistic psychopath who, unlike Blondie, seems to take pleasure in carrying out his hired assassinations.  His nickname is a cynical reference, because his eyes are not so much angelic as they are demonic.  So he is “The Bad” in this story.
   
• Tuco (Eli Wallach) is the stereotypical Mexican scoundrel. Although he is also a vicious criminal, he is not so cool and cold-blooded as Blondie and Angel Eyes.  He likes to ingratiate himself with others, but he is clearly a phony who will double-cross at the least opportunity.  He is also obsessed with his own low-standing dignity and is eager to take revenge when he feels insulted.  When he does take his revenge, he goes overboard in mocking and insulting his adversary.  At the same time he will try to take advantage of anything that could be of use, no matter what.  Thus whenever he is around death, he is reminded to make the Christian Sign of the Cross, just in case that gesture might gain him some protection from God. Thus he represents “The Ugly”.

Since Eastwood and Van Cleef appeared together in the preceding For a Few Dollars More, one is tempted to link the two stories, especially since both characters wear pretty much the same outfits in the two films (Van Cleef is always the “man in black”). However, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is set during the US Civil War (1861-1865), almost a decade earlier than the time setting of For a Few Dollars More, so at best it would have to be considered a prequel.  But even this linkage is weak, because the two characters played by Van Cleef are very different in the two films.  In For a Few Dollars More Van Cleef plays Colonel Douglas Mortimer, a former Confederate Army officer and a more principled individual; whereas in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as Angel Eyes, he is a sometime officer in the opposing Union army and a cruel sadist.

In any case what distinguished The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from the earlier films is the utterly uncool character of Tuco.  He occupies a considerable amount of the narrative, and his psychological vulnerability becomes a focus of the viewer’s attention as the story moves along.  Some people might be put off by the stock characterization of Tuco and see it as an example of ethnic bigotry.  It is interesting that the actor in this part, Eli Wallach, was Jewish and famous for playing stock characters of a number of different types.  On the whole I would say that Wallach’s performance here is very good, and even in spite of the oftentimes over-the-top characterization, his Tuco essentially energizes the entire story.  This turns out to be both a strength and a weakness of the film.

If there is an overriding theme to Leone’s tale, it might be about death, itself.  Throughout the story there are people being killed in a matter-of-fact fashion, and the total body count is very high.  This suggests a cavalier, even flippant, attitude towards death.  On the other hand, maybe that is the film’s sardonic and self-mocking point.  The artificial notion of the Western Hero is held up to ridicule in Leone’s films as merely a hollow justification for mindlessly lethal violence.  And this point is further hammered home by the film’s showing how still more absurd is the notion of war heroism and even the very idea that war has any justification at all. The film is set in the midst of the US Civil War and provides a sample illustration of how a country with a population of less than 35 million could engage itself in the senseless process of self-mutilation that led to 750,000 war deaths.

The story of the film passes through roughly six episodic stages.

1.  Introducing the Three Principals
The film begins with a classic Leone opening scene showing a murderous confrontation without dialogue.  Three bounty hunters have come to kill the wanted criminal Tuco, but Tuco shoots them and manages to escape. 

Then in a separate episode, the deadly contract killer Angel Eyes confronts a man named Stevens.  Only via a lengthy process of slow disclosure will the viewer eventually learn that three men – Stevens, Baker, and Jackson, the latter of whom has changed his name to Bill Carson – stole a large sum of money from the Confederate Army. This money will be the target prize for the three principals of this story.  Angel Eyes has been contracted by Baker to kill Stevens and then coerces Stevens to contract him to kill Baker, after which he kills both of them and gets doubly paid.

The third episode of this act introduces Blondie.  The wanted man Tuco has at this point been captured by three more bounty hunters, but Blondie intervenes and kills them.  Then he captures Tuco and turns him in to the local sheriff to get his $2,000 reward.  But when Tuco is about to be publicly hanged in the center of town, the precision marksman Blondie shoots from a distance through the hangman’s rope, enabling Tuco to escape.  Blondie’s intention is to repeatedly run a scam operation, turning Tuco into the authorities to collect his reward and then freeing him at the hanging site so that they can split the reward and do it all over again.  However, Tuco proves to be too cantankerous for Blondie to tolerate, so he cold-bloodedly takes the still hand-cuffed Tuco out into the desert some 70 miles from town and leaves him there to die.

So at this point we know how vicious and cold-hearted each of the three protagonists is.

2.  Tuco’s Vengeful Pursuit
Tuco somehow manages to make it back to town alive, and he is determined to take out his revenge on Blondie.  This is the subject of the second act, with a considerable focus on Tuco.  Although Blondie kills the henchmen assassins Tuco hired, Tuco does capture Blondie in another confrontation, but his repeated attempts to execute Blondie are interrupted by extraneous war-related events.  Through one of these events, Tuco learns from the dying Bill Carson that there is a treasure buried under a grave at the Sad Hill Cemetery.  However, only Blondie, still Tuco’s  captive, manages to serendipitously find out under which of the many graves in the vast cemetery is the treasure buried.  Blondie, of course, refuses to tell Tuco what he knows, so the two of them have to work together from now on. Being unprincipled opportunists, these two once-sworn enemies have no problems now becoming allies.

3.  War Interruption 1
Tuco and Blondie, now wearing stolen Confederate army uniforms, get captured by a passing Union army and placed in a prison camp, which, as it oddly turns out, happens to be overseen by Angel Eyes, who is now operating as a Union army officer.  Seeking information about the treasure, the sadistic Angel Eyes has Tuco cruelly tortured in a lengthy scene lasting eight minutes.  As in past Leone films, the torture portrayed would kill ordinary people.  Tuco survives, but reveals everything he knows.

Angel Eyes now dispatches his deputy to take Tuco on a train back to a town to be hanged.  Then he decides to team up with Blondie to find the buried treasure.  Again the unscrupulous scoundrels change partners at the first opportunity.

4.  Shifting Alliances
In the fourth act the alliances will shift once again.  Tuco manages to miraculously jump from his train, kill Angel Eyes’s deputy, and escape. He makes it to town and encounters a previously-seen bounty hunter who appears ready to kill him.  But in a memorable moment, the bounty hunter first taunts Tuco, who then shoots him dead, after which he admonishes the corpse,

    “When you have to shoot, shoot! Don’t talk.”

Meanwhile Blondie, not trusting Angel Eyes and his five henchmen, chooses to bolt.  He runs into the just-escaped Tuco, and the two of them decide to reunite and work against Angel Eyes.  In a typical Leone-styled shootout, they knock off Angel Eyes’s men one by one, but Angel Eyes, himself, gets away.  So they decide to head for the Sad Hill Cemetery.

5.  War Interruption 2

Before they can get to the cemetery, though, they are captured again by the Union army, and we come to Leone’s anti-war segment of the film.  The Union and Confederate armies are engaged in a mutually annihilating slaughter over the control of a bridge.  Blondie and Tuco need to get to the other side of the river, but they cannot go anywhere while the two armies are relentlessly engaged in suicide charges.  So they decide to blow up the bridge with stolen war explosives; and once they do so, the senseless killing stops, and the two armies withdraw.

6.  Finale at the Sad Hill Cemetery
The last act, for which the viewer has been waiting for more than two hours, takes place at the cemetery, where Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes converge.  And Leone plays it up for all it is worth.  When Tuco arrives at the cemetery, he begins running desperately, searching for what he thinks is the right grave (but, of course, he has been deceived by Blondie).  As he does so, the camera begins panning past the graves he is running past, and the swirling images lapse into a deliriously accelerating montage that lasts for three minutes.

When Blondie, Angel Eyes, and Tuco finally confront each other and are ready to draw their guns, they move into a classic three-way Mexican standoff.  Nobody will die until somebody makes the first move, but each has to decide at whom he will take aim.  Leone builds up the tension by showing a shifting montage of momentary extreme closeups of the three desperados lasting more two minutes.  This is probably the most memorable sequence (among many candidates) of the film. Then the shootout ensues. In the end they do find the money, but you will have to see for yourself who winds up with it.

Perhaps the outstanding feature of the film is the way the cinematography and editing build up psychic tension throughout the tale.  Famed cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli was working on his first Leone film, but he would continue to do the cinematography for Leone’s three remaining features. One aspect of this camera work I particularly liked was the way the extreme closeups have the characters almost, but not quite, looking straight into the camera.  This has a slightly unnerving effect on the viewer that heightens the tension.  And all of these shots are tightly integrated into the flow by the editing of Eugenio Alabiso and Nino Baragli. 

Perhaps because of this fascinating mise-en-scene, a number of reviewers rate The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as the best film of the Man with No Name trilogy [1,2].  However, although I think this is a good film, I still think For a Few Dollars More is a more tightly integrated and effective work.  The problem, for me, with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is its self-conscious indulgence in the comedic, and it all comes down to the Tuco character as presented by Eli Wallach. Admittedly Wallach’s performance provides vitality to the film, and his character of Tuco is one that we get to know much better than Blondie and Angel Eyes.  But this spoofing performance interferes with the suspension of disbelief, which is crucial for films of this nature. 

Comparatively speaking, in For a Few Dollars More, the viewer is immersed in a tense and constantly life-threatening world that holds together in the viewer’s mind.  Not so in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where the coherence of such a tense world is constantly mocked.  In For a Few Dollars More, death is a disturbing possibility that might appear at any time, but it is more often a threat and not always a desired goal.  In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, death becomes a joke, a game earnestly pursued by all three principal characters.  Depending on your tastes, you might buy into this spoofing, but such a flippant approach undermines the overall effectiveness of the expressionistic presentation.

Sergio Leone’s movement towards the self-parody seen here in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly would not continue, however.  His best films, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984), were still to come, and they presented further expansions of his expressionistic scope.
★★★

Notes:

1. Murtaza Ali Khan, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966): Sergio Leone's Epic Tale of Greed and Betrayal”, A Potpourri of Vestiges, (March 2012). 
2. Roger Ebert, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, Rogerebert.com, (3 August 2003).  

“Once Upon a Time in America” - Sergio Leone (1984)

Once Upon a Time in America (C’era una Volta in America, 1984) was the last film that Sergio Leone directed and also his most monumental achievement.  This epic production about young Jewish gangsters in early 20th-century New York City pushes the boundaries of cinematic expression in several dimensions and remains as breathtaking today as when it was first released.  Leone’s previous directorial outing had been Duck You Sucker (Giù la Testa, aka A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon a Time… the Revolution, 1971), and although he had been active in the film industry over those intervening years, he had stepped out of the limelight and seemed to be preparing the foundations for his masterpiece.  He had even turned down an offer to direct The Godfather (1972) so that he could concentrate on his own conception of American underworld society.

Societal themes had not really been part of Leone’s original claim to fame, which had been based on epic man-to-man encounters in the American Old West with his “Dollars" (aka “Man With No Name”) trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).  But after those early successes, Leone’s vision broadened to incorporate the social dimension, and his subsequent, and final, three films, sometimes referred to as his “Once Upon a Time” trilogy all include a perspective on significant social dynamics that have affected modern society:

• Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) incorporated an implicit view of how the spread of industrialization, symbolized by the railroad, was bringing the desirable social sense of corporation to the individual-centric Old American West.
• Once Upon a Time… the Revolution (1971) included a perspective on the intellectualized undergirdings that support modern revolutionary impulses.
• Once Upon a Time in America looked at the rise in America of organized crime in the form of the “Syndicate” (aka the National Crime Syndicate) [1].

Leone was inspired to take up this latter theme by reading the semi-autobiographical novel The Hoods (1952) by Harry Grey (real name: Herschel Goldberg). He then set about preparing his elaborate shooting script and assembling his production team, which included his invaluable collaborators, Tonino Delli Colli [2] for the cinematography and Ennio Morricone for the music. The cinematography and the music, of course, are essential aspects of Leone’s aesthetics and are what make his films stand out in the viewer’s memory.

As usual with Leone’s (and Delli Colli’s) cinematography, there are atmospheric and scenic wide-view tracking shots, here of cityscapes, that are adroitly combined with character closeups of the principals involved.  Also as usual, much of Morricone’s musical score was composed and recorded before production so that Leone could employ it on the film set to inspire the acting performances.  The music also included the wistful and evocative pan-flute tones of Gheorghe Zamfir.  The musical themes create a pervasive melancholy atmosphere throughout the film and are present both diegetically (performed on camera in the story) and non-diegetically (heard on the soundtrack).

Despite the film’s aesthetic virtues and lengthy production period, however, it was not a success at the box office.  After a 10-month period of shooting in 1982-83, Leone planned to make two three-hour films for commercial release.  Producers pushed him to shorten this, though, and he eventually released a 229-minute version for distribution in Europe [3].  For the American release, producers further forced, against Leone’s wishes, a drastically re-edited and shortened (and much criticized) 139-minute version, which turned out to be a commercial disaster.  Perhaps because of this box-office failure, Leone did not direct another film.

The story of Once Upon a Time in America revolves around the interactions of three principal characters from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and it covers three widely-separated time sequences that span a period of almost fifty years.  Although there are a number of dramatic and violent events in the story, the key elements concern the nature of these characters and how they affect each other.  We see them interacting when they are teenagers, when they are in their twenties, and when they are in their sixties.

• David “Noodles” Aaronson (played by Robert De Niro) is a gangster and almost the exclusive center of focalization in the story.  He can be violent, even murderous, when frustrated, but he has his sensitive side, too.  Although he wants to be wealthy, his primary value is friendship and loyalty.  When we watch this story, we are viewing a person who is basically a ruthless animal, but who wants to be human.
• Max Bercovicz (James Woods) is also a gangster and something of a senior partner to Noodles.  He also values friendship, but his overriding ambition trumps everything else, and he is more calculating and conniving than Noodles.
• Deborah Gelly (Elizabeth McGovern) is a young woman from Noodles’s neighborhood who dreams of winning fame as a dancer and actress.  She is the object of Noodles’s romantic desires, and she fancies him, despite his shady life as a hood.

There are two key and conflicting relationships in the story:

1. RM – Noodles’s relationship with Max, which is such a strong bonding that it is almost like an asexual love affair.  In some ways this relationship symbolizes Noodles’s sense of camaraderie with all his close male companions.
2. RD – Noodles’s relationship with Deborah.  In every one of the key RD scenes of the film, Noodles wishes for an affectionate response from Deborah, but he never quite gets it.

The story unfolds in a nonlinear, serpentine fashion, and these intertwined relationships are so compelling that they sustain the viewer’s interest throughout.  The three separate time periods shown, which I estimate to be in 1921, 1933, and 1968, are interspersed and not shown in chronological order, and the degree to which the earlier scenes represent flashbacks is not always clear.  However, the key relationship scenes in the film,  identified in the following  by RM# and RD#, are presented in chronological order. In general, Leone uses the technique of “slow disclosure” to develop a scene, whereby the context of some scenes is only understood gradually as the viewer pieces together information details that are presented  over time.  In any case, the story is presented in nine unevenly apportioned sequences.

1.  1933-4: Aftermath of the Shootout

At the beginning of the film, a young woman, Eve, who turns out to be Noodles’s girlfriend, is accosted and murdered in her apartment by gangsters who are looking to find Noodles. They also savagely beat up a restauranteur and friend of Noodles, “Fat Moe” (Larry Rapp), in order to find his whereabouts. (These are among the few scenes in the film that do not focalize on Noodles.)  Noodles at this moment is in an opium den that is upstairs to a Chinese shadow-puppet theater.  In his opium daze, Noodles recalls a phone call he had earlier made to the police that led to a shootout killing of his criminal partners, whose names are identified as Max, Cockeye, and Patsy. 

Waking up from his opium daze and escaping the thugs, Noodles visits the beat-up Fat Moe, and after killing one of the thugs still lurking on the scene, takes from Moe's place a key to a railroad locker containing a suitcase.  When Noodles retrieves the suitcase, he is shocked to find it empty. But evidently he feels the need to get away. Apparently seeking anonymity, he then buys a one-way ticket to Buffalo, New York.

2.  1968-1: Noodles Returns to New York City

A much older Noodles in 1968 is seen in the same train station, so we can guess that the earlier sequence was a flashback reminiscence on the part of Noodles.  Noodles goes to visit Fat Moe on the suspicion that Fat Moe had stolen the loot that was supposed to have been in that suitcase years ago. Quickly seeing that he was wrong about Moe, they exchange pleasantries.  Asked what he has been up to over the past thirty-five years, Noodles merely says that he has ‘been going to bed early.”  We never do learn anything about that period of Noodles’s life. 

Noodles does say that he has recently received a cryptic letter that indicated he has been found, and to find out what that means is why he has returned to New York City.  Then he looks into a back storage room of Moe’s restaurant and lapses into a reverie of the past.

3.  1921: The Teenage World of Noodles

The next hour of the film covers life the period when Noodles was 15 or 16-years old.  Noodles leads a small gang of delinquents consisting of himself and three others: Patsy, Cockeye, and Dominic, and they spend their time making pocket money by rolling drunks and carrying out punishments on deadbeats who owe money to loan sharks.  In one of their operations they run into another teenage tough, Max, who appears to be a couple of years older than Noodles.  Although Max and Noodles are potential rivals, Max quickly warms to Noodles, and they become close comrades (RM1).

Noodles admires Moe’s sister, Deborah, who spends her time practicing her dancing lessons.  She sometimes encourages his glances, but she puts him down as a common street thug who doesn’t aspire to the respectability that she wants (RD1).  

On another occasion when she is alone minding her parent’s restaurant, she invites Noodles in and reads poetry to him from the romantic biblical text Song of Songs.  But as she reads, she interpolates into the lines some of her own snarky comments about Noodles:  

“He is always lovable, but he will always be a two-bit punk, so he will never be my beloved.”

Still, she seems to like Noodles, and they come together for a kiss. When Max interrupts them, however, she is turned off by his punk relationships, and she sarcastically tells Noodes to “go on, run; your mother’s calling you.”  Noodles joins Max outside the restaurant, but the two of them immediately run into a rival gang of older boys led by another thug, “Bugsy”, who proceed to attack them and beat them to a pulp. When the beat-up Noodles tries to return to the safety of the restaurant, though, Deborah refuses to let him in (RD2).

Nevertheless, with the spirited participation of Max now leading them, their little gang has increasing success in their criminal capers.  They loyally decide to share all their plunder and stash it in a suitcase to be stored in a railroad station locker (the same one scene in Act 1). 

But they are operating in a dangerous world, and they have another encounter with Bugsy, who guns down Dominic on the street.  Overcome with rage at seeing his buddy killed, Noodles sneaks up on Bugsy and stabs him to death, and also stabs a cop who has come to intervene.  Noodles is arrested for murder and spends the next twelve years in prison.

4.  1968-2: Noodles at the Cemetery
The film now transitions forward to 1968, with Noodles visiting an upscale cemetery, where an elaborate mausoleum has been erected commemorating his former colleagues Max, Cockeye, and Patsy.  Noodles sees a key hanging on the inside wall and correctly guesses that it can be used to open up the old railroad station locker that had stored the gang’s suitcase full of loot.  When he goes there and opens up the suitcase, this time he finds it is full of cash, with a mysterious message indicating it is an advance payment. 

So Noodles figures he is being set up for something – but by whom and for what?

5.  1933-1: Noodles Rejoins the Gang

Another transition moves the film back in time to a short time before Act 1, perhaps 1932 or 1933. Noodles is released from prison and is welcomed back by his loyal friend Max, who provides him with a hooker for his immediate gratification (RM2). Max, now a successful rum-running gangster in the US era of alcohol prohibition and working with Cockeye (William Forsythe) and Patsy (James Hayden), takes him to a party at Fat Moe’s establishment, which is now a speakeasy.  There he meets the girl he had been dreaming of while in prison for the past twelve years, Deborah, who is now grownup and glamorous.  In a truly brilliant scene of tentative interaction (RD3), Noodles fishes for a warm reception from his dream love.  She is hesitant about saying that she missed him while he was locked up, so he has to coax something out of her.  

Noodles: “. . . you mean you weren’t counting the days?”

Deborah: “of course I was”

However, when Max summons Noodles for a private meeting, she again tells him,

“Go on, your mother’s calling you." 

But then she adds,

" . . . . it’s good to see you again, Noodles”

Max immediately arranges a meeting for the gang, now including Noodles once more, to engage in a diamond heist in Detroit for upper-level gangsters, Frankie (Joe Pesci) and Joe (Burt Young).  They pull of the heist, and when they return and go to an abandoned wharf to exchange their diamonds for a payoff from Joe, they massacre Joe and his men.  Noodles is shocked and disturbed by the double-cross, but Max explains that it was all part of Frankie’s plan.  Noodles expresses his concern to Max that their customary gang loyalty is being replaced by a corporate gangster mentality that dissolves trust (RM3).  This is where the film begins to make allusions to the rise of the “Syndicate” that began to emerge in the US at about this time.  The Syndicate was a criminal coalition that moved from illegal alcohol sales to a widespread infestation of American business and politics, including labor unions.

6.  1968-3: Noodles Recollecting
The aged Noodles is watching TV in 1968 and notices that a politician shown on the screen is a former labor leader, Jimmy Conway O’Donnell (Treat Williams) that he was acquainted with back in 1933.

7.  1933-2: Falling in with the Syndicate

The 1933 story continues with Max’s gang now getting involved with protecting a labor union led by Jimmy Conway O'Donnel from corporate thugs. Noodles, though, is drifting away from the group and trying to get closer to Deborah. He decides to make his grand gesture and offer himself to her.  He rents an entire posh seaside resort during the off-season and takes Deborah there for an exclusive dinner. (RD4)  Deborah tells him,

“You’re the only person that I ever cared about.  But you’d lock me up and throw away the key, wouldn’t you?”

Noodles says, “yeah, I guess so.”  Deborah responds sadly, “the thing is, I probably wouldn’t even mind.”  Later, lying down on the beach. Noodles tells her,

“Every night I used to think about you.” . . . “Nobody’s gonna love you the way I love you.”

But Deborah’s ego refuses to let her abandon her dreams of being a star.  She tells Noodles that despite her feelings, she is leaving the next day for Hollywood.  Noodles is wounded by this rejection.  On the way home in the chauffeur-driven car, after she kisses him, he brutally rapes her in the back seat.  This frustration-driven act of animality ends their relationship, and he silently watches her leave on the train the next day.

Noodles returns to the gang office at the speakeasy, where Max and the others express  their displeasure over Noodles’s having lately neglected their activities (and hence falling short in terms of gang loyalty) while he was attending to Deborah.  This is shown via a dramatically effective silence, with only the sound of his spoon stirring Noodles’s coffee cup, while the gang scrutinizes him suspiciously.  But with Deborah now out of the picture, Noodles re-engages with the gang. 

With US Prohibition coming to a statutory end, Max, always looking for more new and ambitious criminal operations, now concocts a plan for the gang to rob the heavily guarded Federal Reserve Bank in New York.  Both Noodles and Max’s hooker girlfriend Carol (Tuesday Weld) know this will be suicidal, but they are unable to dissuade Max, who appears delusional.  Carol urges Noodles to save Max’s life by tipping off the police about an upcoming criminal heist so that they can be captured and jailed.  This would entail about 18 months in prison for all of them, but would save them from getting killed in a shootout.  Noodles sees this as a comparatively minor act of betrayal that would actually be a life-saving gift to Max, and he decides to do it (RM4).

At a party later at Fat Moe’s speakeasy, Noodles goes into the office and make that fateful police call that was shown in Act 1.  Just afterwards Max comes into the office and after going ballistic over what appears to be a trivial remark from Noodles, knocks his friend out cold with his gun.

8. 1968-4: The Final Encounters

The scene now shifts to 1968 with Noodles still trying to find out what it means to be “found”. He manages to track down his dream love, Deborah, who is now a prominent stage actress. Appearing in her dressing-room doorway, he asks, “aren’t you going to say anything?” He is still looking for the right response, but once more he doesn’t get it.  He tells Deborah that he has received an invitation to a party from a certain "Secretary Bailey", a wealthy and prominent political figure who is now under criminal investigation.  She urges him not to go to the party, telling him that all we have in life is our memories, and if he goes there he won’t have those anymore.  At this, Noodles tells her that he has already discovered that she has been Bailey’s mistress for years (RD5).

Noodles then goes to the party, and when he meets Bailey in his private room, he sees that Secretary Bailey is in fact Max!  Max/Bailey reveals that he had committed the ultimate betrayal back then – he had organized the shootout that killed his buddies Cockeye and Patsy, had faked his own death, and had stolen the gang’s money to start out a new life with a new name.  He had stolen Noodle’s life – his money, his girl, and subjected him to a lifetime of guilt feelings over the false belief that his phone call had killed his friends.  In fact the massacre had all been arranged by Max, and even the cops had been in on it.  Max’s knocking out of Noodles after that fateful phone call had been his preconceived act to keep his friend out of the upcoming massacre.

Now Bailey (Max) knows that he is targeted to be killed by the Syndicate (he knows too much), and he figures that he is already a dead man. The only honorable death for him is to have Noodles kill him instead – as a vengeful payback for his betrayal of Noodles (RM5). He gives Noodles his gun and tells him to shoot.

However, Noodles refuses to do it, and even refuses to acknowledge the truth of what has been revealed to him.  He tells Max

“Many years ago I had a friend, a dear friend.  I turned him in to save his life.  But he was killed.  But he wanted it that way.  It was a great friendship.  It went bad for him.  It went bad for me, too.”

Noodles walks out a back exit onto the street, where there is garbage truck waiting.  Looking back at Max/Bailey’s house, he sees what appears to be Max come out.  But his view of the man is obscured by the garbage truck, which has begun to move.  After the truck passes, the man is no longer to be seen.

9.  1933-3: The Opium Den
The final scene returns to the time Noodles visited the opium den above the Chinese shadow-puppet theater just after the fatal shootout.  He begins smoking the opium, and with his eyes closed, he smiles.

   
Once Upon a Time in America’s labyrinthine and multilayered narrative leaves viewers with some open questions, and two of them in particular stand out and have been widely discussed:

1. What happens to Max at the end of the film?
2. What is the meaning behind Noodles’s smile in the final shot?

I will come back to these two specific questions below, but first there are some other, more general topics to consider.

As with Leone’s earlier films, the expressionistic decor and atmosphere created by his misc-en-scene is compelling, but Leone's artistic expression now encompasses a new feature: the subtlety of the acting.  The performances of James Wood and Robert De Niro, as the two main figures, are outstanding.  De Niro is particularly good, precisely because he reins in his well-established capabilities for emphatic expression and presents the image of a more thoughtful person trying to figure out how to navigate through a violent and confusing world.  To be sure, Noodles can be deplorably violent when provoked.  But he (as presented by De Niro) also evinces a more hesitant and introspective side in his interpersonal dealings.  This representation of a tentative groping for something helps sustain our interest throughout the long story.

In addition, the teenage actors in the lengthy1920 sequence (Act 3) of the film are also very good. They work effectively as an ensemble and create their own little society of teenage hoods. Moreover the physiognomies of several characters that are performed by different actors in the chronologically later sequences are surprisingly well matched, especially those of Fat Moe, Patsy, and Cockeye. 

On a higher plane there is the societal perspective that Leone brings into consideration, and it is interesting to compare Once Upon a Time in America with Once Upon a Time in the West in this respect.

• In Once Upon a Time in the West there was a somewhat elegiacal representation that the brutal, often savage, individualism that characterized the Old American West was gradually giving way to a more civilized and orderly form of social interaction.  This was symbolized by the relentless westward extension of the railway tracks, which facilitated the introduction of and linkage to more cooperative and normative-based ways for people to interact.  Thus the spread of the railway signified the decline of the Old West, but it also represented something that transformed American society in a positive way.
   
• In Once Upon a Time in America, there is an indication that crime was gradually becoming corporatized and directly wired into the business end of American society via the Syndicate.  This transformation was ironically triggered by the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, which prompted the criminal underworld leaders, such as Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, to expand and organize their operations into a crime machine.  The suggestion, as presented in this film, is that loyalty and brotherhood were diminished by this process of syndication. And clearly the infestation of American society (reaching into high levels of government and trade unions) was something that transformed American society in a negative way.

What Once Upon a Time in America is fundamentally about, however, is not just social transformation but something deeper, and perhaps darker. It is about the basic narrative construction of reality [4,5,6]. I have discussed this idea concerning narrative structure of "reality" in connection with reviews about some other films: Memento (2000), Blow-Up (1966), and The Passenger (1975). The basic idea is that we all understand the world around us in terms of the narratives we construct from our experiences or from narratives that we have heard about.  Even our most fundamental sense of temporality is based on narrative, as described by Paul Ricoeur [6].  Most importantly in the present context is the fact that we understand ourselves in terms of the narratives that we construct about ourselves.  Deborah emphasizes this point to Noodles in Act 8 (1968-4: The Final Encounters), when she tells him that all we really have is our memories (i.e. our stories about ourselves).  She is warning him that if he goes to visit Secretary Bailey, his self-understanding (and hence his self) will be destroyed.  

The most essential narratives that we construct about ourselves concern (1) personal relationships: our interactions with the people we hold most dear and (2) the social world: our operations and interactions (our “personal journeys”) that establish our standing in the social world around us.  In terms of self-constructed narratives, we can see their operation with respect to the three principal characters.

• Deborah always wanted to be a star actress.  This was the narrative that she had constructed for herself, and she wasn’t going to allow her personal feelings for a hood like Noodles to interfere with her envisioned narrative scheme. She was determined to live out that “social world” narrative, because that, to her, was her essential nature.
   
• Max was an opportunist. Like Deborah, he treasured his personal relationship narrative with Noodles, but he was willing to sacrifice that in order to climb up as a major criminal in his social world narrative.  When things got too hot for him, he chose to construct an entirely new social-world narrative for himself and sacrifice his relationship-narrative with Noodles.
   
• Noodles was primarily interested in his personal relationship narratives.  His social-world narratives were of secondary importance.  Thus when he spent 12 years in prison and another 35 years in Buffalo, as far as he was concerned, nothing of much significance happened to him, and so the film doesn’t even cover that material. Although Noodles is shown sometimes to be a killer and a rapist, the film presents his struggles to hold on to his self-narrative based on his personal relationships.  When Max presents him with information that would destroy his self-narrative, Noodles resists.  He still reveres Deborah and praises her for having become a star, and he refuses to vengefully kill Max.  To condemn them would be to deny who he is.

In this context we can return to the two open questions I mentioned earlier. 

What happens to Max? 
Since this film is really about narrative, Leone has left the viewer with (at least) three possible narratives to account for what has happened. 

1. Max kills himself by throwing himself into the grinding augers of the garbage truck.
2. Max is somehow killed by unseen Syndicate assassins hiding in the garbage truck.
3. Max makes a previously-planned escape by boarding the garbage truck that is operated by some confederates.  In this scenario, Max is commencing the construction of yet another new self-narrative.

Take your pick.  Ir seems that Leone is challenging the viewer to make out his or her own narrative conclusion on this point.

What is the meaning of Noodle’s smile in the final shot? 
Again, narrative considerations lead to multiple possibilities [7].

• One could argue that everything that happens diegetically later than the opium den scene is a drug-induced dream on Noodles’s part.  He unconsciously concocts this dream to salve his guilt about his complicity in the deaths of his comrades.  A number of commentators have adopted this viewpoint, but I don’t hold to it..  For Noodles to construct this dream, he would build a new, demeaning narrative that would perhaps be worse than his existing self-narrative.
   
• Or perhaps one could say that the opium put Noodles into a conscious state enabling him to see his real future.  This would only be plausible if Noodles were to wake up from the dream and have no memory of it during the chronologically later sequences.

But I think there is a third possibility concerning the meaning of that closing smile that is more compelling. We could construe this shot to be Leone’s cynical final wink to his audience – that life is no more than a Chinese shadow puppet show. By making this parting gesture, Leone is alienating his viewers from their immersion in the foregoing narrative and thereby making a comment about the nature of narrative, itself.
★★★★

Notes:

1. “The National Crime Syndicate”, Wikipedia, 6 March 2015.
2. Tonino Delli Colli was also the cinematographer for films directed by Roman Polanski, Louis Malle, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Federico Fellini.
3. The version of the film that I saw for this review was 221 minutes in length.
4. Roger Schank and Gary Saul Morrison, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory)  (1995), Northwestern University Press.
5. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, in Narrative Intelligence (2003), Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers (eds.), John Benjamin Publishing Co.
6. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vols. I- III, (1983-1985), University of Chicago Press.
7. Roderick Heath, “Once Upon a Time in America (1984)”, Ferdy on Films (accessed 8 April 2015).

“Once Upon a Time in the West” - Sergio Leone (1968)

After rounding out his famous “Dollars”,  (aka “Man With No Name”) trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) – Sergio Leone’s intention was to move on from Westerns to other forms. However, American production companies only wanted to fund another “Spaghetti Western”.  So Leone set about erecting his epic commemoration of the Old West narrative: Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una Volta il West, 1968). 

The film was constructed to go beyond even the grandiosity of Leone’s big box-office hit, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  But when it was released, critics and the public alike found Once Upon a Time in the West to be confusing and ponderous. The film bombed at the American box office.  Over time, however, the film’s reputation has grown, and it is now considered by many people to be Leone’s masterpiece. 

In my view the film does have some serious flaws, but those are outweighed by the work’s considerable virtues.  Curiously, one could say that the sum of the film’s many wondrous parts amounts to greater than its whole.  In many ways, nevertheless, as I will try to explain, the film stands as a unique monument of cinematic expression.  One of Leone’s problems with the critics was that, like Alfred Hitchcock, he was sometimes dismissed as a hack showman who lacked artistic talent and subtlety. That was because Leone’s dramatic deployment of visual compositions and sounds was so emphatic and absorbing that the viewer felt overwhelmed.  Anyway, specific artistic accreditation is not the focus here; this cinematic work was the collaborative product of numerous talents.

• The script was based on a commissioned story by Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argeneto, two young film writers who would go on to have considerable success of their own.  Bertolucci, at that time still only in his twenties, was an established film director even then, having already made La Commare Secca (The Grip Reaper, 1962) and Prima Della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964). 
• From that story the screenplay was written by Leone and Sergio Donati.
• The breathtaking cinematography was handled by Tonino Delli Colli, who besides working on Leone’s films, also handled the cinematography for films directed by Roman Polanski, Louis Malle, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Federico Fellini. 
• The music, always a crucial element to Leone’s films, was once again composed by Leone’s friend and former classmate, Ennio Morricone. 

The resulting tale that these creative talents put together concerns the fates of four principal characters who have distinct personality types that represent almost archetypal narrative character attitudes:

• Harmonica (played by Charles Bronson)  is the iconic, taciturn, and mysterious “Man With No Name” in this story and is only identified by his frequent harmonica playing.  Indeed the original Man With No Name role in the Dollars trilogy had been offered to and rejected by Bronson before it was taken by Clint Eastwood.  But in some ways Bronson is the truly perfect embodiment of this character.  As a character type in the story he is the Relentless Avenger.
• Frank (Henry Fonda) is the epitome of cruelty and evil, the Sadistic Narcissist. Casting Fonda, whose entire career was spent playing upright and morally self-assured characters, in this dark role was a stroke of genius.
• Cheyenne (Jason Robards, Jr.) is an outlaw who becomes entangled in the story against his will.  As the Reflective Outsider, he offers assessments as to what is going on.  Another case of interesting casting, Robards’s raspy voice reinforces his commentary.
• Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) is the Pragmatic Cooperator. The inclusion of her role added depth and humanity to Leone’s story. 

The story itself has several concurrent threads and is sometimes obscure, partly because significant information is withheld from the viewer for the narrative purposes of slow disclosure.  In fact the narrative comprises a set of discrete scenes, most of which can stand on their own as fascinating and memorable mini-narratives.  Perhaps the best of such is the opening scene at the railway station.

1.  The Killings

The unforgettable opening scene of about 12 minutes, which is shown while the film’s title and opening credits roll across the screen, offers an extremely slow and deliberate buildup of tension.  Three armed men with murderous intent are waiting for a train to arrive at a remote railway station in Arizona.  The train arrives and a lone passenger, Harmonica, gets off looking for someone named Frank. There is a deadly shootout that results in the deaths of the three gunmen, but no motivations are given for what has happened.

The action cuts to another setting, a homestead where a widowed father, Brett McBain (Frank Wolff), is preparing for his wedding party with his three children.  Frank suddenly arrives with some companions and, with a sadistic smile on his face, cruelly murders the defenseless family.  Again, no reason is given.

Jill McBain, the new second wife of the father just killed, arrives by train in Flagstone and arranges to travel by horse and buggy to the McBain homestead, known as “Sweetwater”.  On the way there, as her buggy is shown passing through Monument Valley in Arizona [1], her driver stops at a way station saloon which at that moment is also visited by Cheyenne, an outlaw gangster who has just escaped from jail.  Harmonica is there, too, and accuses Cheyenne’s men of being behind the assassination attempt on his life in the opening scene, because those men wore the long duster coats characteristic of Cheyenne’s gang.  Jill then goes on to Sweetwater and learns that her intended family has been massacred.

At this point we are 50 minutes into the film and have been introduced to the four main characters, but they are all disconnected and there are many unanswered questions.

2.  Connections
In this section of the film a few connections between the main characters are made. Framed for the Sweetwater killings and trying to find out why, the outlaw Cheyenne goes to Sweetwater and talks to Jill.  Neither he nor Jill knows what Frank’s men were after, but we do at least learn that Cheyenne likes coffee and that Jill used to be a prostitute in New Orleans before meeting Brett McBain.  The scene cuts to an isolated railway car luxuriously outfitted to hold the mobile office of a terminally ill and crippled railway baron, Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), who is in a discussion with Frank.  The ever-westward spreading railroad line has so far only reached Flagstone (we periodically see shots of new railroad track continually being laid down by workers extending the line west of Flagstone).  In this connection Morton has hired Frank to get hold of the Sweetwater property that lies a little further to the west.  Meanwhile back at Sweetwater, Cheyenne departs, but Harmonica shows up and guns down two more of Frank’s assassins who had apparently come to kill Jill.

There are now, halfway through the film, three principal locations for further actions: the town of Flagstone, Morton’s railway car, and the Sweetwater homestead.  We still don’t know

• why Morton and Frank are after the McBains
• why Frank and Harmonica want to kill each other
• what Cheyenne is doing in this story.

3.  Some Answers About Sweetwater
Separately seeking answers, Harmonica and Cheyenne sneak over to Morton’s parked railway car to spy.  Harmonica is captured by Frank, but on the urging of Morton, Frank passes up the chance to kill his mysterious nemesis and merely has him tied up while he rushes away on horseback to deal with Jill McBain, himself.  Cheyenne then makes his presence known and kills all four of Frank’s men guarding the tied-up Harmonica, whom he frees.

Back at Sweetwater, Harmonica explains the mystery of Sweetwater’s importance.  It has the only water well in a region west of the built railway, and therefore its land is a highly valuable site for a future town.

4.  The Sweetwater Auction
Meanwhile Frank captures Jill and forces her to have sex with him.  This is a further revelation of Jill’s character – she will cooperate in whatever way necessary in order to survive.  Frank forces her to sell the Sweetwater property at a rigged auction in town.  However before the final gavel comes down, Harmonica shows up (he has this practice of mysteriously showing up at critical moments) holding at gunpoint Cheyenne, whom he turns over to the town sheriff for the reward money, which he uses to win the auction.  Cheyenne is then to be sent back on the railway to a jail in another town.

Afterwards at the town bar, Frank and Harmonica confront each other once more, but again they only exchange words, not bullets.  There is then another assassination attempt – this time on Frank by four of his own men who have been bribed by Morton to kill him. But with the unexpected help of Harmonica, Frank escapes, and his attackers are all killed. 

Frank rides out to Morton’s railway car and discovers the results of another deadly shootout: 10 more dead bodies, plus Morton, who is dying of a mortal wound, much to the grinning delight of the sadistic Frank.

5.  The Coming Together

The scene shifts back to Sweetwater, where Harmonica watches the relentless laying down of railway track that is now within sight of Jill McBain’s new train station and surrounding town under construction.  Cheyenne arrives (so we must infer, at least in the version of the film that I saw, that he somehow escaped his jailers) and has another coffee chat with Jill.

Frank arrives for what we know will be the final confrontation with Harmonica.  But again Leone draws out the scene, like that with the matador and the bull, for its full dramatic effect.  We learn at this point that Harmonica’s single-minded mission has always been to take revenge for a murder Frank committed long ago.

There are still some other narrative threads to be tied up, though.  Harmonica and then Cheyenne take their leave of Jill and head to unknown destinies.  Only afterwards do we learn that Cheyenne received a fatal wound sometime earlier, apparently at the railway car shootout mentioned in Act 4. This means that when Cheyenne was having coffee with Jill in Act 5, he was suffering from a mortal gunshot wound.

The final long shot shows Jill attending to the railway construction workers, while Harmonica departs on horseback with Cheyenne’s dead body.

Once Upon a Time in the West is a varied cinematic potpourri, with both effective and ineffective elements.  The weaknesses are mainly associated with the narrative, itself.  Certainly it lacks sufficient realism, even for a horse opera. Though we are generally willing largely to suspend our disbelief and immerse ourselves in the mythology of the Old West, some of the things depicted here are too much of a stretch even under those circumstances.  For example, Harmonica and Frank meet several times during the story, during which they could have come to their final accounting.  But instead, though we know they are bent on killing one another, they merely engage in aphoristic discourse. 


Another narrative weakness is the issue of the Cheyenne character.  Why is he so prominent in this story? Setting aside the unrealism of the extended time period during which he shows no ill effects despite suffering from the effects of a concealed mortal wound, his entire character seems to be an odd throw-in to this story.  He is a notorious outlaw who freely kills Frank’s men on occasions, and yet at other times he seems to be thoughtful and sensitive to others. 

A third weakness to the film is the insensitivity to killing (the film has a vast body count) and the celebration of vengeance as a worthy mission to undertake.  Harmonica, the presumed hero of the story, has no other interest than to satisfy his thirst for revenge.  We don’t even know why he wants revenge until the very end, but his relentless pursuit of old-fashioned “justice” is chilling.

And yet the film does have its undeniable strengths.  Leone’s magisterial cinematography is so compelling that it is an artistic end in itself.  His use of deep-focus shots in depth goes further than just about any film I have seen. And these shots don’t just stand out on their own, but are woven into a visual tapestry that fits together into a smooth-flowing dreamworld.  On top of that is Leone’s characteristic coupling of wide-view long shots and extreme close-ups. This creates a more intense and interior emotional involvement in what is being presented. 

In general, Leone understands that presence requires neighboring absence, and so sound requires closely occurring silence. Thus with respect to the temporal interweaving of effects, the use of sound in the two opening killing scenes is notable. In that wonderful first scene at the train station, the sound of the squeaky windmill and the buzzing fly portend something awful that is about to happen.  And in the second killing scene, at the McBain residence, the momentary cessation of the cricket buzzing is eerily disturbing and cause for existential alarm.

The grandest use of sound, of course, is the musical score, which drives the "inner” emotional narrative that is always under construction in the viewer’s mind.  Ennio Morricone has surpassed himself here by constructing a score that does justice to Leone’s monumental cinematography.  Each of the four main characters has a musical theme that serves as an aural motif for when he or she makes an appearance.  The way these themes are blended together during interactive scenes of the principal characters adds further to the cognitive experience. As usual with the Leone-Morricone collaboration, the score was produced before the shooting was begun so that Leone could engage in the shooting with the musical themes in his mind.  But on this occasion and since the film was, as usual, not shot with synchronous sound (all sound was dubbed in the editing phase), Leone had Morricone’s music playing on the set during the shooting.  This was used to inspire the acting performances with the operatic mood that Leone wanted to achieve.

Leone also liked to use the technique of slow disclosure to great effect.  For example, for a long time we don’t know why the McBains were murdered or why Harmonica is after Frank.  The slow disclosure of Jill’s screen entry enables the viewer to have a slowly revealed and circumspect view of Jill's character and the Western town that she has traveled to.  These slow-disclosure effects, in combination with Leone’s juxtapositions of long landscape shots with extreme close-ups, build up a pervasive sense of tension and expectation that runs throughout the film. 

Some reviewers have remarked that Once Upon a Time in the West has, more than Leone’s earlier films, characters that are deeper and that evolve during the course of the story.  I don’t think this is true.  The four main characters are types, as listed above, that don’t change much during the story.  What is unique here, though, is the fact that these principal characters spend much of their time trying to make out what makes the other main characters tick. In that sense they show some empathetic instincts that engage our attention. Like the viewers watching the film, they are all trying to figure out what is going on and why. 

So what is ultimately going on with all these characters?  Are there larger themes above that of revenge?  I would say so.  And I would say that the story is more than just a depiction of the coming of technological civilization, as symbolized by the railroad, to a barbarous territory.  All societies and civilizations have their narratives that underlie how they see themselves.  The Old West had its own narratives, too, about integrity and manhood, toughness and independence.  This film presumes that the viewer from the outset is very familiar with that Old West mythology, and this is supplemented by the inclusion of a number of familiar Hollywood images  (e.g. Monument Valley) and character actors, including Jack Elam, Keenan Wynn, Woody Strode, and Lionel Stander. In this connection the film often invokes, and sometimes inverts, some of the classic Old Western film themes from American cinema, as typified by the productions of John Ford.

In particular, Frank represents the ultimate narcissistic adulteration of these characteristics – a representation of how simple Old West norms can be perverted in the direction of nihilistic perfidy. Jill, on the other hand, represents compassion, compromise, and working for a communal harmony.  The fact that Leone had this character played by the extraordinarily beautiful Claudia Cardinale (to me, the most beautiful of all screen actresses) is an indication that this was the real hero (heroine) of his story.  She is not just a passively pretty image; instead her soulful, expressive eyes and her graceful physical movements indicate that she wants to be compassionately involved with those around her.  Her character does not force a programmatic scheme of how to act on others; instead she is willing to compromise and make the best of any situation. 

This suggests to me that an underlying theme of this film is that American promotion of simplistic and self-righteous independence (and hence selfishness), as exemplified by the Old West mythology, was passing away.  It was time for a new cooperative sense of humanism to take its place. In that sense we can see Once Upon a Time in the West for the masterfully expressionistic elegy for the overdue passing of the Old West narrative that it really is.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Most of the film was shot in Spain, but there was some exterior shooting done in Arizona.