The fun is over. When the first Italian westerns washed up on American shores, audiences were delighted with their frenzied hyperbole, their melodramatic distortions of American cinematic folklore. Everyone assumed they were great satire and that Director Sergio Leone was either a big put-on or a superb con man. Leone's newest effort, Once Upon a Time in the West, with a major cast and a lot of big studio money behind it, proves that he is simply a serious bore.
A director like John Ford, if he thought this tedious two-hour tale worth the telling, could have done it in a tight ninety minutes. Leone spends most of his time focusing on the actors' eyes squinting tensely into the camera lens. The intent is operatic, but the effect is soporific. Stuck in this gluepot horse opera, such veteran range hands as Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale and Keenan Wynn struggle helplessly and often hysterically. But the picture, such as it is, belongs to Charles Bronson. A flinty character actor who has appeared in everything from The Great Escape to The Dirty Dozen, he plays his first important lead with commendable skill. Unfortunately, such an overblown and overbearing film as this is too great a weight for any one man. The only thing capable of carrying Once Upon a Time in the West is a stagecoach—the one headed out of town.