I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a Western guy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In college, I watched (and really enjoyed) “High Noon” and “Unforgiven” for a class on masculinity in film. (Aside: Here’s a paper I wrote contrasting the two for that class [PDF]<\/a>. I haven’t read it in well over a decade, but I just remembered that I still have it in the ancient depths of my Gmail inbox. Here it is for posterity, why not?) I also seem to remember watching “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” at some point, although I may have just seen a clip of that famous stand-off scene somewhere. Oh, and “Deadwood” is one of my favorite TV shows, though I think it’s a Western in roughly the same way “Hamlet” is a play about Danish politics. But that’s about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So I realize that I came into Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” somewhat cold. Reading up about the film after I watched it, I came to learn that it was essentially a postmodern pastiche of tropes and allusions to other classics of the genre. From the website Cinema Reborn<\/a> (emphasis mine): <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although deeply indebted to the history of the genre \u2013 it includes multiple direct references to such celebrated, auteur-driven westerns as “The Searchers” (John Ford, 1956), “Run of the Arrow” (Samuel Fuller, 1957), “Western Union” (Fritz Lang, 1941), “High Noon” (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), “Man of the West” (Anthony Mann, 1958), “The Iron Horse” (John Ford, 1924), “Johnny Guitar” (Nicholas Ray, 1954) \u2014 most extensively \u2014 and many others, it is as much an inventor or re-shaper of forms as it is a work of dutiful homage. Both Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco celebrated its postmodern assemblage of archetypes, conventions and intertextuality, seeing its overwhelming summation or pastiche of the genre as its great contribution. This common view of Leone\u2019s film sees it as an overwhelming \u201chall of mirrors\u201d whose only point of reference is other westerns.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n So, how does one view such a film without said points of reference? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, I have to admit it struck me as somewhat less that the sum of its parts (of which, clocking in at just under three hours, it has many) \u2014 but I recognize that the shortcoming is primarily mine, not the Leone’s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, that’s not to say I didn’t like<\/em> “Once Upon a Time…” On the contrary, I liked a lot of it! Ennio Morricone’s score, of course, is fucking spectacular. Leone was clearly a master of visual composition. This early scene, in which the McBain family is murdered by the villainous Frank (played by iconic good guy Henry Fonda, another meta-textual twist), is a great example of both: <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n