Given the sound approval of Leone’s film, it’s easy to forget that on its release in 1968, Once Upon a Time in the West was both a critical and financial flop.

As you well know, there are more than a “fistful” of Westerns out there, and attempting to whittle down the selections for this months “See Also” articles was well, a bit tough.

We thought you’d enjoy this epic documentary on Sergio Leone, commissioned by Film Four that aired back in 2000. This sprawling commentary encompasses Leone’s entire career in 7 YouTube sized slices.

This deconstruction focuses heavily on the use of visual storytelling in Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography for the film. I’ve superimposed a grid representing the photographic principal known as ‘the rule of thirds’ to demonstrate how the cinematography was designed to follow the age old aesthetic.

It can be challenging to point to the true “birth” of the Western genre. Westerns have existed since the very first baby steps of the film industry, in one form or another, and grew up right alongside film as an artform.

It may seem counter-intuitive that film — a rising technology which in part heralded the death of the romantic period of cowboys, high plains drifters, lawmen and lawlessnes at the turn of the century — would so strongly embrace the very culture it helped to destroy.

But consider the concerns of the first examples of moving pictures.

We here at TFL usually refrain from talking about movies put out as recently as 2007. But in contemplating what other Westerns we could write about this month, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford kept popping into my mind. As a modern Western, it gains a lot of ground by refusing to even attempt to retread the usual visual terrain. Instead, the film builds on several visual influences removed from the Western genre itself but still linked to it thematically.

Redemption is a theme that never quite made it into Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but is the most prevalent major theme of the modern Western. Films like The Wild Bunch sparked the revolution known as the ‘Revisionist Western’, many choosing to de-emphasis the romance of the era and instead focusing on the intense reality of a life filled with hard choices made by hard men and women.

By Joshua Cornelius

Hope you’ll enjoy my commentary for the 13-minute opening scene for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.  This scene introduces Charles Bronson’s character of ‘Harmonica’ and features actors Woody Strode, Jack Elam and Al …

Marketing for a movie like Once Upon a Time in the West is an undertaking that boggles the modern mind. It’s easy to forget that a film has a life outside of it’s own native culture, and that marketing for audiences in those respective countries must be custom tailored to their individual societies. For a film to be an international success, it must truly have ‘something for everyone’. Demonstrating that is the job of artists and marketers around the globe.

Once Upon a Time in the West is a well-orchestrated period film with impeccable set design and cheeky dialogue. It is easy to love for many reasons, one being the varied themes of opposition. This is a world with identifiable bad guys and injustices that resolve in favor of the good guy.

This documentary entitled Something to do with Death accompanied the DVD and Blu-Ray releases of the film. While we favor original content, this documentary features great interviews with surviving cast and crew as they reminisce on Leone’s masterpiece.

“In all my films one of the dominant themes, as you can see, is male friendship, which may be the only sentiment that is still left. And the Western for me is the virility of the invididual, and therefore also vengeance. In Once Upon a Time in the West vengeance exists, it is precise, it is Bronson’s obsession. But after he obtains it he says: ‘I am finished.”