Once Upon A Time In The West (Leone, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm
This is screening as part of the BFI's Passport to Cinema series and is introduced by Christopher Frayling who has written extensively on spaghetti westerns and the director Sergio Leone.
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. 165 min.'
Dave Kehr
So many scenes to choose from. Here is one.
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