One Day (2011)

Supposedly, there's a mini-series of this on Netflix released this year. I saw the movie version  in 2011, and I wrote about it at the time of the film's release.

"July 15ths with Emma and Dex"
or
"Same Time Next Year"

Can a man and woman "just" be friends? (the question posed by When Harry Met Sally)  I've gone 'round and 'round with this one. I've said "Yes" for many years, and then that became "No," then back to "Yes," and now, it's something of a toss-up. "It's possible," I say noncommittally (which is the basis for many of the male-female problems, friendship or no).

But anything is possible.

 
"One Day" was a nifty best-seller by David Nicholls, smart, tight and funny, a romance told in snap-shots of one day that was realistic about the vagaries of life and love and the "yin" and "yang" of both. What makes the novel special gets distilled somewhat in celluloid form, making One Day feel a bit less exceptional, the humor muted somewhat, and given the twenty year time-span of the movie, some of the anniversaries celebrated are given short shrift, skipping to the more complicated "good parts," as opposed to those years when nothing much happens...you know, like "life."*

Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) have "just met" at their graduation as they string along with their mutual friends, a couple. Emma is bookish, unstylish, a bit of a character—has a "nice personality"—Dexter is boyishly handsome and knows it, and Emma is "crushing." An awkward "overnight" happens, where it is unclear what transpired, but it's important enough that Dexter is helping Emma move when the next 15th of July occurs, but not important enough that Dexter isn't moving to Paris to teach.

July's come and July's go, as Emma suffers through waitressing at a London Tex-Mex restaurant and Dexter jumps from job to job, eventually becoming  the smarmy host for a late-night dance teen program. Where Emma is a busy bee, droning through know-where jobs until she catches her big break, Dex is a moth attracted to the brightest (or blondest) thing in the room. They're devoted to each other, but only so far. As her star rises, his sets—first Mom (the ever-reliable Patricia Clarkson) dies of cancer, then his fortunes go South, followed by years of over-indulgence. Before you can say "This is Mrs. Norman Maine," he is seeking her out, where she has nearly given up. As traditional as this is, what is nice about One Day is that Emma does just fine without him, she makes her way in the world without a man's help (and frequently, they're a hindrance), whereas in most films of the romantic genre, everything can be solved by anything in pants.

The director, Lone Scherfig, previously made An Education, which, while well-acted and elegantly directed, suffered from a distinct lack of heat and a little too much posh. The former problem still applies here. The film is decidedly chilly in tone, and while this is a welcome change from the day-glo color, syrupy music rom-coms that chirp incessantly about Moon, June, (premarital) Honeymoon," poking you in the heart-area that "Love is Great, right? RIGHT?" One Day makes it hard to feel anything beyond "Gee...that sucks."

Maybe it's the skipping around from year to year, but there's a distinct lack of focus in the story, as it spreads itself around a bit too thin, the ancillary characters populating the movie to make life difficult for Emma and Dexter, necessary irritants and bothers that will drive them into each other's arms every year. Plus, the story arcs of the two main characters run precipitously up and down, without any jolts of happiness amidst the gloom, or hurdles to happiness on the ascent.**

Things settle down as people "settle" and, although One Day manages to avoid many of the cliches of the romantic genre, it also hasn't found anything as compelling to replace them. Plus, with the mutual reversals of fortune, there seems to be a dramatically required "leveling of the playing field" in order for things to resolve "the way they should".

One should be grateful that one is asking these questions about a romance movie (haven't done that in a while), so it's nice to see somebody making the attempt. But, one gets the idea that the same old "Love Potion No.9" is being hawked. All they've done is change the shape of the bottle.

* One of my favorite quotes is by Anton Chekhov: Any idiot can survive a crisis; it's the day-to-day living that wears you down.

**  Well, that's not entirely true, but we don't want to give anything away. 

Oppenheimer

Ch-Cha-Chain (Reactions) of Fools

or

Fallout: If the Radioactive Doesn't Get Ya, The Political Will 

 

I took a course in college called "The History of the Atomic Bomb," so I already knew about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, and Lester Groves, and Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi, and Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman. Our best and brightest...as well as Germany's best and brightest, having escaped the Nazis.

I've listened to the plays, seen previous adaptations, know the story backwards and forwards. I got a C+ on my final paper around the subject of "Should we have dropped the bomb on Japan?" (I don't remember which side I took, but I believe it was favoring the Demonstration scenario).

 

But, I've been interested in seeing Oppenheimer, because I wanted to see what director Christopher Nolan would do with it. J. Robert Oppenheimer led a life that could have filled a few movies, but Nolan has compressed it into one three hour film, with the highs and the lows, and of the parallel tracks and rippling occurrences that underscored and undercut his career, and made the man who oversaw the construction of an atomic bomb from theory to reality become a pariah to the very country he handed it to on a desperately sizzling platter.

And Nolan in the past has been a wizard of sorts playing with the possibilities of story-telling and film-making, and juggling and parsing scenarios so as to create  adrenaline-generating third acts that brings everything together for a thematic jolt. One could say he creates these puzzles in the editing room, if the conceits of the films weren't so inextricably linked to the construction.

But, here, Nolan keeps it rather simple: two stories running parallel to each other, both involving hearings on their subject matters. They're sub-titled 1: "Fission" (in which atoms are split): in color, involving an older Oppenheimer in 1954 being grilled by a back-room secreted committee over whether he would retain his top security clearance; 2: "Fusion" (in which atoms are combined): in black and white, involving the very public hearing of Lewis Strauss to become Secretary of Commerce in Eisenhower's cabinet in 1959.

Two seemingly unrelated stories, but tied together so deeply that to split the two would be like splitting atoms, as they both deal with brilliance, arrogance, ego, and their limitations. There couldn't be one story without the other. And just as you can't have a nuclear explosion without fallout, both men—Oppenheimer and Strauss—would learn of consequences, that will haunt them to the end of their days.

Nolan starts the movie with a peaceful image—rain falling in water—but, as serene as it is, it's the natural image to describe the film. Just as rain falling will ripple out in concentric circles, actions will have reactions and those will spread without much control, a chain reaction that will only dissipate until it runs out of energy. And Oppenheimer is a film interrupted with small moments—a spark, a ripple, the sound of stamping feet, a line of poetry—that will echo throughout the film as mysterious fragments until we see them in context and realize their importance to the whole, like little figments of conscience that haunt until they are reasoned into clarity.

We see the the path of Oppenheimer (brilliantly played by Cillian Murphy) to Los Alamos—a terrain he loves ("If I could combine physics with New Mexico, my life will be perfect"), through European studies—he gives lectures in Dutch—meeting the great minds of physics—Heisenberg, Bohr—then re-enters the U.S. to teach at Berkeley, hoping to initiate a field of study in quantum physics, which starts with one student, then many. Concerned with unionizing the colleges for faculty and techs, he flirts with the Communist Party, but, does more with one of their members, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), who will challenge him, mystify him, and ultimately be used against him.

He marries Kitty Puening (Emily Blunt), has a child, and although he's playing with things nuclear, he can't seem to manage a nuclear family. He's approached by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to lead the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear bomb before the Nazis, and although Groves knows Oppenheimer's leftist leanings, he still wants "Oppie" to lead the project—"I wonder if you could tell me how the Army would treat a humble physicist" "I would if I ever met one"—and as part of the project, Oppenheimer figures out the best rail-access for delivering fissionable material from three corners of the country and winds up with New Mexico, isolated, empty of population and surveillance, to build something that is only a theory...before the Nazi's do. "We have one advantage," Oppenheimer tells Groves. "Antisemitism." Germany has driven out its top nuclear physicists.

Well, you know the story. We've all lived in a world with constant nuclear brinksmanship, and the few souls who remember a time before "The Bomb" are dying off. We're used to it now (which seems inconceivable to me) and we're at a time of such complacency that you still hear mentions on the news of "nuclear options" and "tactical nukes." But, Oppenheimer takes us back to a time when the Atom Bomb was not only apocalyptic, but also inconceivable. At the time of its creation, there were a lot of "unknowables" about the Bomb. All they knew was that it would be big and cause a lot of destruction in a wide area—a city destroyer. But, at the time of the Trinity test, nobody knew if the chain reaction in the air would stop or if it would keep feeding on itself, incinerating the area, and possibly more. And, they didn't know anything about fallout.

The fallout—of all kinds—is the new thing here. With the responsibility of building a weapon with so much destructive power—with the complete agency of the government to do it—comes with it the emergence of those who see that power and covet it. And this is where the Strauss story comes in. Played quite amazingly by Robert Downey Jr., Lewis Strauss is a political operative and functionary, whose ego cannot merely appreciate the accomplishments of Oppenheimer and his team, so he must control it, harness it, and by doing so, subvert it to his own ends. As Oppenheimer did to nuclear fission, Strauss does to Oppenheimer and does so with a cold-blooded zeal. And given Oppenheimer's past propensity to fill any intellectual void with affairs and radical politics, Strauss is given the very weapons needed to undermine any attempts to prevent the scientist's efforts to keep the destructive genie contained, slowing nuclear proliferation and ever-increasing mega-tonnage. "Amateurs chase the sun and get burned," Strauss says at one point "Power stays in the shadows."

Oppenheimer is a solid three hours long, packed pillar to post with detail and small roles by very good actors—Nolan newbies like Rami Malek, Casey Affleck, Alden Ehrenreich, Josh Hartnett, James Remar, Jason Clarke, and vets of past films like Kenneth Branagh, David Dastmalchian, Matthew Modine, Tom Conti, Gary Oldman—and one may begin to think that the Strauss story gets a bit superfluous and should even be cut, but it is essential to the story and theme of how one man can make a difference, for good, evil or both. And of how power corrupts—even the pursuit of power corrupts—and though one may blaze with brilliance like a nuclear flash, it is not self-perpetuating...and fades...even if it consumed by itself.

Yeah, I took a course in college. But, you learn something new every day...if you're doing it right.

 

Nolan wrote the screenplay, based on the 2005 biography "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" and starts with these apt words: "Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity."

The haunted gaze of the elder Oppenheimer

—a look both accusing and guilty

The Other Guys

Written at the time of the film's release...

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day. (Remember when Adam McKay made comedies?)

"Did That Go the Way You Thought It Was Gonna Go?""Nope."

or 

"Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used...(what's the rest?)" "As a Flotation Device..."

More comedy, and this one's even very funny for its first half, but then, once one scene goes sideways and doesn't work, the whole thing falls apart like a hostage situation gone wrong.  And the audience is the hostage, waiting for it to kick back in...but it never does.

Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) are two New York City detectives working in the considerable shadow of detectives Danson and Highsmith (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson in nice parodies of their "serious" screen-work), a team of glory-hounds for whom property damage is all in a day's conflagration, but who refuse to do the paperwork.  Gamble is self-described as "an accountant for law-and-order," and Hoitz is riding a desk-job after a shooting that goes wrong.* Gamble loves the mundane filing, but his partner Hoitz, itches to be "in the field." "I'm a peacock!" he is fond of remonstrating. "You've got to let me fly!" At which point, he is reminded that peacocks do not fly.** 

Unperturbed, and when advancement in the ranks becomes possible, the two glom onto a white-collar crime that Gamble has discovered that has connections to a series of high-profile robberies.  The mis-matched pair (Hoitz is volatile, Gamble is eerily up-beat) are completely street-dumb and their investigation is constantly being dis-railed (sometimes literally) by distractions and their lack of ability to resist the charms of their high-rolling suspect's lifestyle. Their increasing frustration with the case and each other (as well as Hoitz's relationship problems, in contrast with the milquetoast Gamble's inexplicable attractiveness to women) is fertile ground for situations that explode in conflict.

It works and works gang-busters for the first hour. The combination of loose script and improvisation is beefed up by all the actors (especially Ferrell and Michael Keaton, who does quick-silver wonders with the cliche "harried Captain" role), especially when the story is building and we're getting to know the characters. The "left-field" surprises come fast and loose, and the timing by the actors (and the editing) is crack. One senses trouble early on when Anne Heche (uncredited, by the way) is given a thankless role in which she's really not allowed to do anything funny...or much of anything. But Ferrell, for the most part, is at the top of his game playing the contrary stiff in a room full of crazies, and Wahlberg who, depending on the material, can be brilliant, plays pathetic frustration hilariously.  Even Eva Mendes acquits herself well in the mix, milking laughs out of the role of Gamble's absurdly perfect wife—Gamble's sexual magnetism makes for a great series of running gags throughout the movie.

But, right at the point where Bob, the union rep, gets dissed and leaves the room, the entire movie goes flat.*** Maybe the improv was getting too expensive and they decided to "coast." Maybe the assurance of an "action-filled" finale made them scrimp on the script.  Maybe the irrelevant story-line getting in the way changed the tone. Maybe everyone got tired. But, for whatever reason, The Other Guys is two movies..."Good Cop" comedy and "Bad Cop" comedy.

Interestingly, the most useful part of the movie is the end credits where the increasing disparity between the incomes of the top 1% earners and the rest of us is presented in chilling graphic detail.

"Wilhelm" Alert @ 1:30

 

* Hint:  He's called "The Yankee Clipper" around the squad-room.

** What can I say?  It's New York, and the Bronx Zoo is the closest they come to a peacock.  Peacocks do indeed fly, but it's a brief, clumsy, scary thing to watch—which I think was the point of bringing it up in the movie.

*** It's funny I can pinpoint it, because that's where the movie became NOT funny, and I thought to myself..."Well, THAT didn't work..." and watched to my amazement as very little worked after.

Oblivion

Written at the time of the film's release...

Finding Oneself in the Future
or
Scavenging the Sci-Fi Landscape

The new Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion (written and directed by Joseph Kosinski from his "unpublished" graphic novel* and whose previous film was Tron: Legacy) is a science fiction tale that borrows very liberally from the last 30 years of movie sci-fi to the point where you swear you've seen the movie before. 

You have, but which one depends on the reel of the film you're watching.  

The year is 2077.** Earth has just survived a long, devastating war with an alien race that, in its final act to "poison the well" destroyed Earth's moon, creating dire ecological conditions for the planet, wiping out civilization and leaving its coasts under hundreds of feet of silt from tsunamis and tidal devastation. Folks have moved to the moon Titan, off the rings of Saturn, the last remaining humans being Jack Harper (Cruise) and Vicca (Andrea Riseborough), a mated team of tech-mechanic and monitor whose job it is to keep the giant moisture evaporators running Titanville or wherever and keep them up and running from complications, both natural and unnatural. The natural being wear and tear and the unnatural the last vestiges of the die-hard combatants—Scavengers—who are still trying to tear apart the fragile mining of Earth's resources to defeat the human race. Jack monkey-wrenches and Vicca runs data, all under the watchful work-schedule of Sally (Melissa Leo) who oversees their efforts from a large rectangular control station in orbit around Earth, called the Tet.***

So far, so hum-drum. Yes, there's a lot of background that Cruise has to spew in the first ten minutes, but basically he's playing another working class stiff doing a dirty job in the future.

Jack and Vicca are a happy-in-love working team, awaiting the day when they can get off this rock and join civilization on Titan. Jack, bothered by dreams of the observation deck on the Empire State Building and a smiling beauty (Olga Kurylenko) in the New York crowd, gets in his dragonfly of a jetcraft, repairing busted defender drones, and keeping a wary eye on "scav's."  

Cruise's futuristic mechanic keeps an eye on those moisture-vaporators

That's just the set-up.  Things, as they are wont to do, "get complicated" and to say how would start a cascading spoiler effect that will ruin the movie. I can't even talk about influences without giving away key pieces of information that will kill the "reveals" (even if one does see some of this stuff coming from light-years away), so let's just say that you'll spend the same amount of time playing "name that reference" in post-screening mode, as you do actually watching the movie. (Would one call that deja-viewing?  And shouldn't a science fiction movie be looking forward, rather than backwards?****) 

One key sequence echoes Planet of the Apes. Jack's patrol sector is the former northeast coast of the U.S. (and we get a respectful nod at the decimated Statue of Liberty), but only that section, as there's a radioactive "border" he can't cross. He is told at one point to go explore beyond his limitations and into the radiation zone if he wants answers. One could easily hear Dr. Zaius echo the words "You won't like what you find..." in the background. This leads to the biggest revelation of the film, but, instead of answers, it just leads to more questions, which the film goes into warp-drive trying to explain, not very successfully, as plot-holes and logic disconnects begin to eat away at the movie like nano-viruses.

And science-fiction movies usually have a message for us livers-in-the-now, either cautionary or revelatory.  Oblivion fails there by having as its message that we are replaceable cogs in the wheel of society's meat-grinder. That message was delivered by Fritz Lang's Metropolis way back in the silent era of movies in 1927. Here we are in the 21st Century (when we should all be wearing jet-packs) and that's all we get...besides the obligatory shoot-outs and chase sequences? If there's a message there it's along the lines of "Take out the recycling."

*—"well, then, it doesn't really count, does it?"—

** The film is extraordinarily exposition-heavy in the beginning in a long narration spoken by Cruise.  So much so, that one wonders why they didn't just make a movie of the events spoken of in the exposition. The reason why makes up the plot of the movie and reveals the Cruise character to be the most unreliable of narrators.

*** Amusingly, the first sign we get of the orbiting Tet is a glimpse of it, traversing the globe on the new logo for Universal Studios at the film's beginning.

**** And, appropriately, into the future. One of the previews preceding Oblivion is for Elysium, the new film by District 9's Neil Blomkamp, where the 1%ers have moved to an idyllic space station, while the rest including cyborg-ish freedom fighter Matt Damon robo-cops attitude against the machinery of the uber-klass. The two movies could be book-ends for each other.  Think of the double-bill (and the headline): "Oblivion /Elysium/ Expatriatic/ Tedium"

Oz the Great and Powerful

Written at the time of the film's release...

What a World, What a World;
or
There is no Baum in Gilead

Any movie attempting to resuscitate L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books has to deal with the series' own Wicked Witch of the West—that being M-G-M's musical version The Wizard of Oz, which had Judy Garland in it, and set the bar very high as far as expectations go (for quality that is, whereas for the box-office TWoO was not a box-office success at the time of its release and only became a classic after a couple decades worth of Thanksgiving showings on network TV). Walter Murch's attempt to take an OZ story back to its roots, 1986's Disney's Return to Oz, was an abysmal failure, although artistically it was a terrific show--but probably butted heads with too many memories for its own goodness as, for instance, the Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow were not vaudevillians in theater-suits, as was the 1939 version, but looked more in line with the book's illustrations.

Sam Raimi, he of larky horror films and the Tobey Maguire Spidermen, is probably a very good choice for doing an OZ film, as he has equal qualities of sweetness and sour, where Tim Burton (the next usual suspect*) would have made the film travel heavier to the morose. Raimi's Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful (as convoluted and punctuationally challenged a title if ever, oh ever, there was one) manages to be its own thing while bowing and occasionally scraping to the previous' yellow brick road (which is revealed, as an aside, to have potholes, which nicely sums up the movie's respect, and lack thereof). A prequel, kinda sorta to The Wizard of Oz, it starts out in a black and white box-square format (with a special effect detail amusingly violating it here and there) on a sound-staged Kansas that creepily recalls the musical version. There scam-magician Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is conning rubes and comely assistants alike, and taking advantage of his stage-assistant, Frank (Zach Braff). He's a jerk, only revealed to better purposes when a lost love (Michelle Williams) comes to visit to tell him she's going to marry farmer John Gale (father of Dorothy, making her mother of), and he takes the higher road, telling her she chose the better man.

But his past catches up with him...or tries to...and his road goes even higher, escaping a vengeful cuckolded circus strong-man in a helium balloon. Kansas being Kansas, he is caught up in a tornado—one that presumably opens up a rip in the space-time continuum through some sort of meteorological consequence, and winds up in the storied land of Oz, where, true to movie-form, everything turns to color and the screen expands to wide-screen proportions.

The pattern is set—Diggs is an outsider, a stranger in a strange land, but enough of a roué that any sense of wonder he initially feels is soon replaced by annoyance (Franco is great at that). Oh, it's nice to have a minor seduction with the first female he stumbles on, Theodora (Mila Kunis), but the flying monkeys (in the form of Finley, voiced by Braff), and the girl who comes from hummle beginnings, the fragile porcelain girl (who comes from the neighboring land of China town and voiced by Joey King). 

But before long he's embroiled in Oz's matriarchal politics between witches Theodora and her evil sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz), who are lording it over the Emerald City, and the witch Glinda (Williams again), who is protecting the provinces from the influence of the Big Bad City. 

This troika of females all think that Oscar will bring some sort of balance to Oz, and despite himself, he's got enough answers to help Finely and China, who become devotees. Evanora is the first to see Oscar and think "there goes the neighborhood," and the plot and the make-up thickens in a battle royale between the various forces of magic, Evanora and Theodora in the Emerald City, and Glinda and Oscar and her army of tinkers, winkies and munchkins. Tinkers and winkies and munchkins. Oh my.

As Donald Rumsfeld said, you fight with the army you got.

And just to show this isn't Gramma's OZ (or Louis B. Mayer's) when we get welcomed to Munchkinland this time, and the town's welcome wagoneers start into a bouncy little song with high, tight voices (provided by composer Danny Elfman), Diggs just calls the whole thing off: "Stop! Stop it!" Musical numbers are not tolerated in this more cynical fantasyland. Nor is anything approaching the good-heartedness of Baum or Fleming. 

Even Glinda the Good Witch turns out to be something of a bad-ass here, far badder than in the '39 version. And that's just a little backwards because the original has an empowered little girl who saves the day, while in this one it's a man, a messiah, who must sort things out in the messy rule of a matriarchy.  

This is progress?

The movie ends with some fantasy-nastiness. Glinda is captured, tortured, and made to grovel before the sisters, Oscar comes to the rescue with his own Earth-bound pyrotechnics, similar to what he's use in the future. But the movie feels very much like a movie of today—things end not with a splash of water, but a lot of impressive fireworks. You want something a little meatier, though, something that might last and impress longer, but given the Oz that will come post-prequel, there's really nothing much to do about it. The great and powerful Oz is merely a humbug, the man behind the curtain. The evil sisters will remain evil, although Evanora's fashion sense (especially regards hosiery) will take a serious hit. And Oscar will become a patriarch based on big promises with nothing much to back it up. Sounds like any politician, really. This Oz is not so magical, not so great and not so powerful. What it needs is more brains, more heart and more courage.

Yellow Brick Road?  Check.  Emerald City? Check.  Dark Forest?  Check.
So...what's wrong with this picture?

* Frequently recalled as this film is scored by Burton co-conspirator Danny Elfman.

Oh, yeah. Flying monkeys.

Anytime Movies #3: Once Upon a Time in the West

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,* when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

Landscapes.

That’s what’s featured in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Whether it’s the vast, aboriginal spaces of Monument Valley—an affectionate genuflection to the films of John Ford—or the intricately chiseled planes of the faces of Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda—you spend a lot of time looking at both in Once….—as well as deep close-ups of the faces of Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale. There is one shot where Bronson ever so slowly relaxes a smile out of existence. Bronson does it so subtly you don’t know what’s happening until it’s happened. It’s one of the things I look forward to in the Dance of Death of Once Upon a Time in the West. Here are some others:


1. “Looks Like We’re Shy One Horse…” The first twelve minutes. A dilapidated train station in the middle of nowhere. Three long-coated bad-men wait for a train. They while away the time, each in their own unique fashion. Driven mostly by sound and filmed in extreme close-ups, the sequence, accompanied by the homely squeak of a windmill—one of the out-sized sound effects typical of Leone’s westerns—and the jokey placement of the credits, rolls on and on until a confrontation ends explosively. It’s an opening of great economy and intricate film-making. Few words are spoken throughout. I’ve shown students this sequence to show just how much presence and atmosphere simple sound effects can bring to a scene. It’s just the opening gambit in a plot by two men who are playing against each other. It will take the entire movie to explain why.

2. “You Don’t Know How To Play” The gist of Once Upon a Time in the West is a chess game with lives and futures as the playing pieces. As scripted by Sergio Leone and his co-scenarists--the soon to be master of Italian horror films Dario Argento and the young Bernardo Bertolucci--the movie is a series of moves and counter-moves by the antagonists, each one trying to tame the frontier in their own way, and taking their own sweet time about it. Each has to make the pieces fall their way. For the first-time viewer it can be maddening following the strategems of the four participants in the story, but by the end the motivations and loyalties—or lack of them—become clear.
3. “People Scare Easier When They’re Dyin’” The villain of the piece is the meanest, rottenest most conniving scumbag to ever walk a dusty street and spit on it. “Frank” is a sadist who smiles when he kills and for the first time in his life he has a patron with a vision—one big enough for Frank to start to see how there might be such a thing as a future, and that one man can own it. He just can’t understand why people are getting in his way.

4. “Instead of Talking, He Plays. And When He Better Play, He Talks.” The composer and the director did it backwards. Ennio Morricone wrote the music for the film first and Leone built his sequences around the music, playing it on-set to establish mood. There are two spectacular pay-offs--one in the previously mentioned Monument Valley sequence. But the other is at a train station where Claudia Cardinale, has just arrived from New Orleans to find no one to meet her. After a long wait (which is actually mercifully short for a Leone western) she decides to hire passage. Sounds disappear as she is seen through a station window talking to an official, and then the camera HEAVES up and over the roof, and in a burst of music reveals a burgeoning western town full of life and activity. It’s as if all of America is presented in that one astounding crane shot. My wife audibly gasped when she saw the shot in some movie clip program on TV, so stunning is the effect. And more than a little of the power of that shot is due to Morricone’s music and the angelic voice of Edda Dell’Orso, wordlessly cooing an ode to the country and to the protagonist around whom the movie and the future hinges.

5. “Ma’am, It Seems To Me You Ain’t Caught The Idea” For the first time in a Leone western, a woman is the hero, but like her predecessor—"The Man with No Name"—she is flawed and has some learning to do, and it’s up to Leone’s trio of men – another man with no name (going under the aliases of dead men), a wolf-like vagabond-thief, and the villain, Frank—to push, prod, blackmail, challenge and coerce her into a new role. It’s a role each man knows they’ll have no part of, and that, for a time, she is reluctant to fulfill. In the last shot of the film, she is seen bringing water to the railroad work-crew who will be bringing people and prosperity to what will be her town. It may seem a servile role, but as we pull away and follow the disappearing tracks to the frontier, leaving her to her future, she begins to bark orders, to direct and take charge. Her station will become a cornerstone of the push west. “This movie drips with testosterone,” a colleague once told me after a screening. Yes, but Leone includes a healthy shot of estrogen as, for the first time, he is dealing with a story that not only leaves the past behind, but also looks forward to the future.

After his spectacular success with the "Dollars" trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, Leone was given a lot of money, quite a bit of it from Paramount Pictures, to not make his next planned film (based on the novel, "The Hoods" which would eventually become his last film Once Upon a Time in America) but make his next production a western. When he delivered this slow-moving epic on a small scale writ large, the full length film (2 hours, 46 minutes) became a hit in Europe, but Paramount cut what it considered "extraneous" material—a full 25 minutes of it—for its American release.* The film was a bomb in the States. It was released, after all, in 1968, the year of Bullitt, Rosemary's Baby, and 2001: a Space Odyssey. Cinema, and its audience, was changing. The next year Easy Rider would be a huge hit. Once Upon a Time in the West might have seemed a little archaic to the youth audience. Eastwood, a popular star outside of the Leone films by then, wasn't in it. Bronson—popular in Europe, but a supporting actor in America—was. Fonda, Cardinale, and Robards, perfectly cast though they are, did not bring in droves of film-goers.

But, despite its reputation from the box-office performance upon its release in America, the film has developed a cult following here—more than that, it is acknowledged as a masterpiece of film-making, one of the great films of the 20th Century, maybe a little behind-the-times for the box-office, but certainly ahead of its time for the influence it has had on subsequent film-makers.

For me, it is simply beautiful, dusty and hard-scrabble though it is. Some of the images, some of the sequences, run through my head daily, and Morricone's music "ear-worms" into my head once a week. It is still, despite the acolyte-directors who "one-off" the style and sometimes the film, wholly original, while acknowledging its debt to films of the past, presenting them in its own unique way. You'll never see a wide-screen film filled so interestingly as Once Upon a Time in the West. Filled and brimming. Rustic and operatic, Once Upon a Time in the West is a fairy-tale of Myth and History—film history—while making its own.

Claudia Cardinale: The West wrapped around her little finger.

Anytime Movies:

Once Upon a Time in the West

-Only Angels Have Wings
The Searchers

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

** There had been a precedent: United Artists cut 16 minutes from the nearly 3 hour The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. And Paramount made a worse decision when it eventually released Leone's Once Upon a Time in America: restructuring the director's intricate flashback structure into a chronological narrative, which robbed the movie of its melancholy tone, and removed any mystery the film contained. Curiously, the longer film is fascinating throughout, but Paramount's re-edit seemed interminable. It just shows the differences between a genuine film-maker and studio hacks.