Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 59: Tue Feb 28

Once Upon A Time in the West (Leone, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5.30pm


This 35mm screening is part of the Big Screen Classic season at BFI Southbank and is also being shown (in NFT1) on February 25th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Sergio Leone, famous for his spaghetti westerns shot in Spain, dared to invade John Ford's own Monument Valley for this 1969 epic. He brought back a masterpiece, a film that expands his baroque, cartoonish style into genuine grandeur, weaving dozens of thematic variations and narrative arabesques around a classical western foundation myth. It's very much a foreigner's film, drawing its elements not from historical reality but from the mythic base made universal by the movies. Moments of intense realism flow into passages of operatic extravagance; lowbrow burlesque exists side by side with the expression of the most refined shades of feeling. The film failed commercially and was savagely recut by its distributor, Paramount Pictures; copies from the European version may be as close as we'll ever get to the original. With Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, and Jason Robards; Bernardo Bertolucci contributed to the script.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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