@ Trains stopped in the middle of nowhere when they needed water. Or when the village was a mile or so from the train station. And if you pay attention to the plot you understand why the "farm" was a mansion.
You’d think that a 12 minute opening with little to no dialogue would fail to hook an audience, but Leone creates an atmosphere dripping with intensity, ambience and character! One of the greatest films of all time has one of the greatest openings of all time too!
Honestly, if any complaint was to directed at Leone, it would only be that he didn’t give us enough films! He understood, casting, screenplay, scenery, cinematography, and of course music! Oh what music! If any living composer deserves to be counted among the greats of previous centuries, it would be Leone’s friend and collaborator Enio Morricone! The music he wrote for these films is unparalleled!
Sergio was great for choosing faces and editing on the 'cut' ie on movement which makes the transitions so fluid and precise. I totally agree with everything you said. I would have loved to see the war film that he was in the process of acquiring finance for. The opening scene was a close up of hands playing the piano then tracking back to outside a window with soldiers, tanks, people fleeing a city in World War 2....all in one take....:) We have to satisfy ourselves with the war scenes in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly which were epically filmed :)
@@hennagaijin100 yeah, I’m aware. I’m referring to the decade hiatus between movies. It wasn’t meant as a critique, but a mere observation. Most directors who find the kind of success he did would’ve just gone after many projects in that time, but he didn’t. Again, not criticizing, just pointing it out. I would’ve loved to have seen what he would do in the eighties.
Fun fact: Ennio Morricone wrote the “Once Upon a Time in the West” music before filming actually took place, and Sergio Leone filmed everything to match the music. Fucking brilliant.
Rumor has it that the studios of the time would not finance Leone's film if Jack Elam was not in it. They wanted a really big name from western movies, and they put enormous pressure for Jack to be there. Sergio Leone finally caved in, up to a point. He told the studios "You want him in? He's in..." He just never told them for how long! 😆😂
Woody Strode makes a Mare's Leg almost look like a toy. Such an under appreciated actor. He got more mileage out of a single look than most actors with 1000 pages of dialogue.
Don't know how many times I have watched this excellent movie, always discover new details. On 6:51, at the end of the credits, the line "DIRECTED BY SERGIO LEONE", drops like a barrier in front of the stopping train.
It's brilliant. In highschool we had a short Film Festival and in my group's 10 minutes film we had a 5 minutes intro ending with a car coming to a stop and the last opening credit dropping down like that. Then we had a 2 minutes fight like 60's Batman and 3 minutes blank screen. We didn't win. =)
A lot of prejudice on these kind of westerns since they weren’t John Ford or Howard Hawks like visions. Leone brought it to the next level, same with Peckenpah
I think those are rail tie sleepers for building and maintaining the tracks, like the railroad just decided to use them as a platform while being stored.
It was a platform for loading and unloading hundreds of cattle. Leone wouldn't have wanted it to look perfect. He likes things to look used. It's a signature of his westerns.
To dedicate so much screen time to these three characters in the opening scene of the movie, to paint their patience and determination without a single word of dialogue. Every normal person who watches the movie forna first time would guess these would be the main characters of the story but no... in the next scene they are killed by the hero ofnthe story and never return to the screen. Its absolutely amazing directing. Sergio Leone is blowing my mind with this one. Every second of this scene is cinematographic masterpeice.
I saw this movie for the first time a week ago at a special showing at an old movie theatre. I am still processing it but I think it is the best movie I've ever seen, incredible!
Imagine you saw it first in 1968 - as i did - when Henry Fonda was Mr Squeeky-Clean Good Guy Hero. And then the camera cuts from that little boy standing among the bodies of his family...
Fonda was such a perfect choice. Like you I saw this in '68 and that pan to Henry's face... what a shock, fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. the closeups 10 feet tall of those eyes of Bronson... changed my view of film ever after.
well, there is a few equally good... by the same director... :-) Try "Once upon a time in America"... you won't regret! I can only bow down and say: "thank you, Mr Krzysztof Grzegdala for showing me these movies", nearly 40 yrs ago.
Tarantino makes live action Road Runner cartoons, who are you kidding. This movie is a massive boring exercise in excess but it's still a movie, not a cartoon.
Why would Quentin try to "beat" a style he uses excessively. That would be like an artist trying to beat a brush stroke technique, it doesn't make sense to say.
6:13 Gotta love how human life his little value in Sergio Leone's scripts, yet he lets the fly live. When I first saw this film I thought the fly going to be shot.
The one continuous shot when Claudia Cardinale leaves the train walks into the station and walks into town with the camera rising above the roof of the station to reveal the town is amazing.
Did you know the actor who played knuckles at the beginning with the long blonde hair committed suicide before the scenes right before the shootout and they had to use a stand in for him? That's why they didn't show a close up of his face during the shy one horse scene....
@@swann433 He jumped out of the hotel window with his movie clothes on. And according to a rumour Sergio Leone commented..."get me the coat...we need the coat..."
The original plan for this scene was for the three gunslingers waiting at the station to be played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach, so that when they all get gunned down by Harmionica, it’s Sergio Leone’s way of telling the audience that he’s moved on from those films and characters and this is something new. Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach actually agreed to do it... but Clint Eastwood refused, as his career was really starting to take off. So they went with these three actors instead. Woody Strode and Jack Elam had already been in some classic westerns before, so they were the next best thing.
Few times in the History of cinema you can see this kind of dedication from a filmmaker to the composition of the characters, the time, the sounds, the scenario, the atmosphere. After this minutes we have been already dragged into the dirtiest but most evocative West you can imagine...
Such masterful contrast, from the sound of a drop of water to the screeching cacophony of a locomotive train. Sound, timing, detail, character building, camera angle, artistic interpretation; it is all here in one of the greatest film opening of all time...
One of the all-time great westerns, if not the best ever. Great music!! Bronson's best. Jack Elam and Woody Strode made the opening sequence, along with Bronson's line: "You brought two too many."
Two of the three hired guns were well-established actors at the time this movie was made: Jack Elam (with a really long list of supporting roles) and Woody Strode (who played the black gladiator Draba in Sparticus, and John Wayne's servant Pompey in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).
Al Mulock (3rd gunman) was a well established actor as well,and a Sergio regular. But he committed suicide before the opening scene was completed, and the reason you don't see his face the last few minutes. A stand in was filmed from behind.
There are not many movies I watch over and over again. But Once Upon is such a film. And the opening sequence I watch more often than "dank memes" clips.
They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I'm not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching... they'll see. They'll see and they'll know, and they'll say, "Why, (s)he wouldn't even harm a fly."
Imagine how fast on the draw Harmonica was that the guy with the fly was so fast and accurate to be able to catch it with in his gun barrel. Small details that only Sergio Leone could point out in such way to the audience.
Leone had a thin coating of jam put on Elam face so the fly would stick around...I don't believe we hear Elam's actual voice there was a lot of dubbing in this MASTERPIECE.Bronson should have gotten the Academy award for what he was able to say with his face and eyes and no voice when gets his lifelong quest for revenge..absolutely astonishing.
sergio leone wanted eastwood, eli wallich and lee van cleff as the three who were killed off by bronson. Van cleef and wallich agreed, eastwood said no. Sergio leone wanted to put an end to the eastwood saga.
Jack Elam that distinctive voice, the lazy eye and that stubble - he was probably born with it. Not much dialogue was needed for him here - barely ten words and then BANG He gets shot inside the first 10 minutes ! Like the way the film begins, the tension is slowly allowed to build up:
Saw this yesterday for the first time in a big screen. Not only the filmmaking, but the sound and sound editing are masterpieces that can only be fully appreciated in a cinema theatre. The use of sound in this particular sequence is a prodigy.
The sound of the creaking windmill to create tension is absolute genius, so many directors have copied the subtle technique of sound from Leone, truly the 🐐
"Leone’s inspiration for this scene came from none other than Morricone who once told Leone about an avant-garde concert he’d attended in which a man made “music” with a squeaky stepladder. As Morricone remembers it, “I recounted this experience to Sergio and he made those extraordinary first ten minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West from that idea. In my opinion, that was one of the best things Sergio did in that film.”
I'd love to see someone making a blockbuster these days, just to show the bosses a first cut that opens this slowly. I think they would be immediately fired. :D
As others have observed....the first 8 minutes of this film is a Film all by itself. Jack Elam and the supporting "baddies" almost steal this scene. The tone of the rest of the film is expertly set as well...8)
What an admirable movie. Leone's fluency in film making is just off the charts. Everything here is so fluid, calm, logical yet grand and meaningful at the same time.
I took a film class once, but I hope to god you are not majoring in a worthless degree like film. Take Sergio Leonne for example. He didn't go to film school.
One of the best build-ups to an opening film sequence. The tension never wavers. You know something is about to happen, but Leone lets the ambience set the mood that indulges you as you wait.
If you skip to the end your not getting the full experience the thing that makes this scene so great is the dramatic build up imagine how dull it would’ve been if the opening was in a hurry to get to the action
