1) Once Upon A Time In The West
Sergio Leone’s operatic, sweat drenched love song to the genre would go on to inspire a generation of filmmakers (see also, The Long Riders), and remains the defining vision of an artist and of a genre.
Blending surreal poetry with swift, merciless violence, Leone paints every scene onto the screen and in the process creates his masterwork. The fist clenchingly tense opening is a fine start to a journey through the dark heart of America during the expansion West.
Charles Bronson is at his finest as a squinting, bedraggled, deadly, harmonica playing badass, while Henry Fonda burns up the screen playing magnificently against type as hired killer Frank. Jason Robards is the closest thing the film has to a hero, but it is the inconceivably beautiful, dazzling screen presence of Claudia Cardinale that takes the breath away. Through the dust and sweat and blood she is a shining ray of hope, on all sides tarnished and corrupted by the men in her life, but strong and fearless in the face of oblivion.
It is quite simply the greatest Western of all time. It is transcendental filmmaking, speaking to something beyond reason or logic, and somehow being a universal parable of greed and waste.
