It took everything I had not to simply reprint late Scene editor-in-chief and film critic Jim Ridley’s ardent review of Once Upon a Time in the West here. But I decided to take a shot at writing about the masterful revisionist spaghetti Western myself. Sergio Leone’s widescreen epic is a symphony of glances and close-ups. To paraphrase Jim’s piece, Leone treats every sweat-soaked, dust-caked face as if it were carved onto Mount Rushmore. While most classic Hollywood Westerns were about building up the myths of the West, the one-two punch in 1969 of Once Upon a Time in the West and Sam Peckinpah’s brutal The Wild Bunch was concerned with burning those monolithic figures down. This approach is epitomized by Leone’s casting of classic Hollywood everyman hero Henry Fonda as the vicious villain Frank. Seeing Fonda — who starred as the hero in foundational ’40s Westerns like The Ox-Bow Incident and My Darling Clementine — commit despicable acts is disorienting at first, but his casting makes this grand tale of revenge sing.
11:30 a.m. Aug. 21-23 at the Belcourt
2102 Belcourt Ave.
