C'era una volta il West (1968)

English title: Once Upon a Time in the West.

Second viewing; previously viewed in February 15, 1987.

(165 min version, English dub) (Atypically for this webpage, this synopsis will be accompanied by comments.) A stranger with a harmonica arrives at a small Western town. He's set a date with a man (Frank) who doesn't show up, but sends three of his henchmen instead. The three men are there to kill Harmonica, but he possesses supernatural shooting speed and kills the three men. Frank's motive for wanting Harmonica dead is not known yet. In fact, it will never be known, since Frank doesn't even know Harmonica's identity at that point. I guess he just likes to have random people killed. The railroad owner (Morton) feels that one particular man (McBain) who owns a property near the prospective passage of the railroad needs a scare. This is one plot point you should not ask me about, because I do not understand it. Morton tells his henchman (who happens to be Frank) to do the job, but he overdoes it and kills McBain and his entire family. Again, don't ask me why. On that very day, McBain was meeting his new wife (Jill) who was coming on the train. When she arrives and sees everyone of her new family dead, she decides to live on the property. Why she decides to do that is not known, so don't ask me. She may be crazy in the head or something. One of the town's bad guys (Cheyenne) enters a bar wearing shackles, after gun shots are heard on the outside. How he managed to escape his captors single-handedly and shackled is something we will never know. The plot continues on, with many more obscure points. At a certain point, Harmonica turns Cheyenne in for the reward. The excellent synopsis on IMDB conjectures that this is a "scheme devised by both  men", which is probably correct, since they were on friendly terms before and would remain so afterwards. Cheyenne is sent to a maximum security prison, but some of his henchmen follow the detachment and, later, Cheyenne appears again, free. His henchmen must be very competent indeed. Anyway, the basics of the plot is that Frank and Morton are the "bad" guys and all the other characters are more or less on the "good" side.

This film's strong point is doubtlessly its visual side. The framing of each shot, and how they are edited, is superb, particularly so in the opening credits sequence. The coupling of the visual narrative with the musical score is also artfully constructed, though some have objected, perhaps with reason, to a certain repetitiveness and intrusiveness of the score (this is a characteristic of all films by this director, however). The plot has its problems, as I somewhat outlined in the above synopsis, and the film really does not seem to make an effort in that direction: plotless moments are played out at the most leisurely pace imaginable, and key plot points are simply not played out at all, having to be presumed by the viewer. The performances are adequate for the most part; Ferzetti probably deserves some special accolades. My previous rating probably reflected some of the film's problematic aspects, but also that probably the copy I saw then was pan-and-scan and had a poor Portuguese dubbing.

Rating: 61 (up from 30)