Review of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Jim H — 27 Nov 2011

A man kills a family, another man who plays a harmonica joins forces with another man falsely accused of killing the family, and there's something else about buying land in the way of a train track.

Almost every critic and Super Reviewer mentions the nearly silent first fifteen minutes of Sergio Leone's film, and just so I don't feel left out, let me mention it too: the first fifteen minutes sucked. I have no problem with dialogue-absent beginnings; There Will Be Blood uses such a start to perfection. But in There Will Be Blood the character that is built on such silence and the event that occurs affects the rest of the film. The characters introduced during the first fifteen minutes of Once upon a Time in the West die unceremoniously.

At three hours, the film often becomes a chore. Leone meditates on the banal, and the exposition lasts about forty-five minutes, about nine times what it should be.

Once Leone got around to showing us what the story was going to be about, I thought it eventually picked up steam, and the performances by the leads were decent. I especially liked Henry Fonda's turn as a black hatted man (in typical Westerns - and this is a typical western - the bad guys always wear black hats - this is a little nugget you can learn if you move to Oklahoma [don't - it's not worth it]).

Overall, Once upon a Time in the West may be the slowest film I've seen this year, and though the performances are good here and there, in the end, it's not worth the wait.