Remembering ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’ The Definitive Western

LOS ANGELES(GaeaTims.com) — After Sergio Leone finished his spaghetti Western trilogy(For a Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars more and The Good Bad and the Ugly) with Clint Eastwood in the lead he wanted to work on a film that was not in the “Western” genre. But his producers insisted that he made another such film. The films were not only profitable because it was a masterpiece but the fact that the movies were made on a very tight budget. After Leone was convinced he decided to make the movie “Once Upon A Time In The West”.

The film follows a battle for a piece of land in a fictional town called Flagstone. When a rail road tycoon Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) tries to get a piece of land from McBain, played by Frank Wolff he hires a hitman Frank (Henry Fonda) to intimidate McBain. Frank kills McBain and his family. He also frames a bandit called Cheyenne for the massacre. In this situation a mysterious stranger(Charles Bronson) arrives in the town to have his revenge on Frank.

When this film was released in Europe it was a huge commercial success. But it was panned by the critics in America. It was a financial disaster. But after some time the film started to gain popularity amongst the masses. The film was named in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as a “culturally,historically or aesthetically significant. This film is now regarded as one of the finest Western Epic of all time.