Review of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by E Quique B — 03 Dec 2011
Transit Oriented Development in Utah. The film is one of the best Westerns ever, bounding over The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for me. Overflowing with scope, visual style, epic combinations, and urban development concepts that remain relevant today in the modern West.
Also, with a story by Leone/Bertolucci/Argento, can you spell E P I C? The acting is pretty good, with Charles Bronson playing the mysterious drifter role. There is also more story than in the aforementioned and more notorious Western, which brings us to the relevance I was talking about.
The film is basically a drama built around the competing interests in a Transit Oriented Development dispute, extrapolated to Wild West levels of intensity. The gunfights are quick and awesome and the main male characters are expanded to monumental levels with intense closeups on their respective countenances and incredibly moving and epic music.
The look of the film is pretty timeless, with new wavey use of slow motion and camera maneuvers. The film has a pretty consistently fresh and precisely rendered visual palette and the result is not looking as old as other films from the era sometimes do.
Leone proves once again that he is the man who can be credited with modernizing the Western and making it spicy for the ages.
This review of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) was written by E Quique B on 03 Dec 2011.
Once Upon a Time in the West has generally received very positive reviews.
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