ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WESTPG-13, 165 min.

Shows Aug. 29-31 at The Belcourt

By Jim Ridley

“Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France,” reads the chapter heading that opens Quentin Tarantino’s

Inglourious Basterds—a commando mis-sion in counter-mythmaking where a movie theater, a projector, a handy editing deck and a great big heap of flammable film stock (not to mention the climaxes of Carrie and The Wizard of Oz and the theme song from Cat People) team up to wipe out the Third Reich’s high command. It’s a movie about the power of movies to change history, in that celluloid parallel universe where memory and imagination stand off with the record.

How fitting that Tarantino’s chapter heading tips its visor hat to the movies of Sergio Leone, an alternate history of America conjured up from gunsmoke and mirrors. The first time I saw Once Upon a Time in the West, screening this weekend as the finale to the Belcourt’s Sergio Leone Month and its summer-long series of Westerns, I was a kid watching the WNGE “Award Movie” on Sunday afternoon, on the floor of my grandmother’s living room. For lots of rea-sons, it was the worst possible way to watch one of the most visually striking movies ever made. But I can still see this image, burned into my mind’s eye: a gaunt bald gunslinger standing impassively, staring into the cam-era, as a drip from the ceiling fills the wide brim of his hat with a thup! thup! thup!

Over the years, I’ve found something more to appreciate every time I’ve seen Once Upon a Time in the West. But every time, it leaves me feeling like an awestruck 10-year-old. It has something to do with the scale of Leone’s

gloriously excessive 1968 Western. Every dusty street is a football field’s width. Every grizzled face, shot in screen-filling close-up, looms like a head on Mount Rushmore. Ev-ery gunfight is a duel of the gods. A viewer becomes an HO-scale brakeman walking through a regular-sized trainyard. In this, the most elaborate and exhilarating of his grandi-ose pistol operas, Leone took the Western he envisioned as a child—an Old West of quick-triggered warriors, enormous open spaces and superheroic deeds—and transferred it to the screen with its mythic distortions intact.

Apart from the scale (and the title), there’s nothing childlike about Once Upon a Time in the West. An inextricable mix of cynicism, violence and delicate lyricism—as volup-tuous and perverse as you’d expect from a story dreamed up by Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist) and Dario Argento (Sus-piria)—the movie was a critical and com-mercial failure when released here in 1969, as the genre’s audience was either riding into the twilight with the Duke or grooving on the revisionist bloodbath of The Wild Bunch. It was not the time to be romanticizing mani-fest destiny, even if Leone’s quasi-Marxist take equates business with bloodshed.

Over the years, though, a funny thing has happened. Leone’s outsized rethink of the Western, an exaggerated pastiche of the John Ford films and gunfighter mythology he absorbed as a boy overseas, has gradually

edged aside the John Wayne and Roy Rogers models in the popular imagination. You can see it when you close your eyes: the figures at opposite ends of a dust-blown street, the close-ups of “two beeg eyes” glaring edgily, the duster coats whirling like a bullfighter’s cape. Thanks to Leone’s invalu-able collaborator, composer Ennio Morricone, you can hear it, too: the matadorial trumpets, the celestial female vocals, the trebly electric gui-tar that stabs and slashes.

Morricone’s score clarifies a convoluted plot that con-cerns four main characters: a shadowy avenger (Charles Bronson); a prostitute, Jill (Claudia Cardinale), on her way to a blood-soaked wedding day; a scruffy outlaw named

Cheyenne (Jason Robards); and a pale-eyed angel of death known only as Frank. He is played by Henry Fonda, who demolishes his decades of good-guy rectitude at the moment of his terrifying entrance. This is Tom Joad’s evil doppelganger—a guy who’s present wher-ever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, all right, but always working for those with a whip hand on the drawstrings of plenty.

Morricone composed the music before the movie even started shooting, and it is as much screenplay as score. Each character has a theme—Jill’s motif is a soaring solo wail, Cheyenne’s a pokey, halting clip-clop—and the composer interweaves them, stating the con-nections between characters without a word of dialogue. No one needs to state that Frank and his pursuer are bound; Morricone’s men-acing theme uses an ever-present harmonica to link them. Bronson’s harmonica is literally an instrument of vengeance. It’s the totem he wears around his neck, for a reason he means to explain to Frank at the point of death.

Oh, there’s so much more. There’s the tremendous opening sequence, in which Western icons Woody Strode and Jack Elam converge on a railway depot to the John Cage-like accompaniment of various squeaks and clatters. There’s the hangdog decency of Robards’ Cheyenne, the outlaw doomed by the suits moving West. And above all, there’s the almost inhuman perfection of Leone’s widescreen images, with their rhythmic alternation of flyspeck long shots and bul-bous close-ups. Each frame has a painterly precision and clarity, as if the director had somehow eliminated anything standing between the screen and the image he had in his head. Once Upon a Time in the West is the kind of movie whose total intoxication with moviemaking can lead to a lifetime’s love.

email jridley@nashvillescene.com, or call 615-844-9402.

Once Upon a Time, ForeverAfter 40 years, hot lead still hasn’t cooled in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West

An inextricable mix of cyni-cism, violence and delicate lyricism, the movie was a critical and commercial failure when released here in 1969.

ShortTakes

TAKING WOODSTOCKElliot Teichberg, the hero of this modestly

diverting flower-power comedy-drama, manages to succeed where Brokeback Mountain’s Ennis Del Mar, The Ice Storm’s Mikey Carver and the incredible Hulk all failed: he escapes an Ang Lee movie into a world that offers something better than emotional repression and furtive release. The setting, unbeknownst to the characters, is the Summer of Love; nudnik Elliot, played by Demetri Martin, tends to his parents’ rattle-trap motel in upstate New York while nursing ambitions of hosting a sleepy arts festival. When the location falls through for a nearby concert event—hint: see title—El-liot brokers a meeting between the hippie organizers and dairy farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy in American Pie so-uncool-he’s-cool dad mode)…and history is made.

Adapted by Lee’s longtime collaborator James Schamus from Elliot Tiber’s memoir, the movie overstates its understatement. Half the movie is small-town sitcom quirki-ness with a weirdly muffled tone, a Newhart episode overlaid with The Last Picture Show’s desolation. The other half keeps the actual Woodstock performances offscreen but blankets the mundane details of ticket selling, construction logistics and sunflower-seed pur-chasing with a haze of cultural significance. Elliot may miss much of the show, but fear not—as organizer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) tells him, with the oracular tone of a peasant in a history pageant directing Napoleon to Waterloo, they can meet up a few months later at that groovy free show in San Francisco…with the Stones! Psych!

The surprise about Taking Woodstock is how seamlessly it meshes with Lee’s other movies—not just the many emotional closet-cases who populate his films dating all the way back to The Wedding Banquet, but also the split-screen editing strategy he adopted for the underrated Hulk (here used to evoke memories of the Woodstock documentary). Even when the parts traipse into caricature, the connections between the actors register warmly—like the post-Stonewall rapport between Liev Schreiber’s sweet transvestite (the movie’s most winning character) and Martin’s gawky Elliot. As a whole, though, the movie evaporates almost as you watch. To paraphrase the old hippie bromide, you may not remember Taking Woodstock even if you were there. Jim Ridley

Film

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