Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is truly a masterpiece.
By which I mean that after about two hours of looking at it I had almost no idea what was going on, why everyone else around me still seemed to be looking at it and was wondering if they could get away with cracking open a box of strawberries.
Almost exactly the same thing happened in the Louvre when I was thirteen. I simply shut down, sat on the floor and ate until my family let me leave.
[waits for gun shots... peeks over computer... sees that the anti-philistine cattle gang have not arrived on horseback just yet.]
Okay, okay. I loved the film. It was breathtaking. The contrast of enormous, sweeping landscape with the claustrophobic, prickling heat between characters; the soaring score; the unashamed lingering close ups, the dazzling colours and the disquieting sense of terror, violence and liminal chaos.
But, in terms of film maths, it didn’t add up. And by films maths, I mean this simple equation:
Reduce dialogue by 78%, increase scene length by 86% and I will understand about 2% of your final product.
The sheer length of some scenes, and the sparsity of dialogue meant that I found it almost impossible to work out what was significant and what was incidental. When the making of a cup of coffee takes nearly 9 minutes, you start to think that it’s going to be crucial to the overall plot. Although, it isn’t. Well, it sort of is. But it’s not quite as tensely crucial as the angles, pauses and music might have you believe.
I know it is pathetic to blame a visionary for your own myopia, but honestly, the pacing of Once Upon a Time in the West shot my capacity to follow the plot like two barrels to the temple.
Why does Charles Bronson rip Claudia Cardinale’s sleeves up to the elbow? Who shoots all the people outside the train? Why do the crickets go quiet? What is Bronson hammering those posts in for? In many cases, of course, these hanging questions are eventually answered, and it is a rare pleasure to be left curious by a film, but the nigh-on melodramatic slowness of the scenes made me desperately overanalyse, thinking I was missing something important.
There are so many brilliant set pieces in the film to offset these moments of confusion that I will no doubt be labelled a swine for bringing them up. But, you can call me a swine, you can call me a philistine, hell you can call me a low down dirty dog. But you cannot call me a coward.
Once Upon a Time in the West is currently showing at the BFI.
