Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il West (1968)

 Once Upon a Time in the West is Sergio Leone's best film:  a mess of double-crossing stars, manic close-ups and Rothko-like masses of color and space.  

-David Thomson

Sergio made Once Upon a Time in the West thinking it would be his last Western, and the melancholy one notices in the film , besides referring to a world vanishing in the face of an upcoming civilization, is somehow his own melancholy.  For this reason, unlike in Sergio's previous films, I thought about devising a sense of softness and weariness that would surface in the music.  There are neither trumpets, nor anvils, nor animal sounds. Instead, I used distended strings to dilate time, and Edda Dell'Orso's voice underpins the character of Jill.

--Ennio Morricone

C'era una volta il West can also be translated as "there once was a West," and Leone's film is a mythopeic film about the myth of the American Western, i.e., the myths of the Western as seen by a European.  Of course it is not just Sergio Leone's film, he had a great many collaborators, including Sergio Donati, a regular writing partner, and writers Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci (who were also directors), composer Ennio Morricone and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli.  Also, the film was shot in techniscope, a non-anamorphic widescreen format that used two widescreen images per frame, allowing for an unusual depth of field.

Many have called this film "operatic," not only for its slightly incoherent plot-- though not quite as incoherent as the shortened American version I saw at the New Amsterdam on 42nd St. in 1968 -- but also for its revenge theme and the fact that composer Ennio Morricone wrote the music before Leone shot the film.  It's a very stylized film, bordering on mannerism for its combined closeness and distance from its sources, everything from John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) to Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952), but literally soars over them all, just as Leone's camera soars over the train station when Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in Flagstone. There are many wonderful iconic moments in the film, my favorite being Jill's ride through Monument Valley, where John Ford shot many of his films, with Ennio Morricone's music (with Edda Dell'Orso's voice) on the soundtrack, emphasizing what complications are to come in Jill's life.