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Once Upon a Time in the West

C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West)

1968

Sergio Leone

Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Gabriele Ferzetti ...

8.2

26,886

Western Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), the power-hungry owner of a railroad company, hires Frank (Henry Fonda), a gunfighter without a conscience, to kill anyone who stands in the way of the completion of the railroad. After Frank murders land owner Brett McBain (Frank Wolff), McBain's widow (Claudia Cardinale) hires two killers of her own to protect her and gain revenge: a mysterious, harmonica-playing desperado (Charles Bronson) and his rogue sidekick (Jason Robards). [+]

	Media	Author	Review
		Andrew Sarris The New York Observer	"Leone is here at the peak of his epic powers"
		David Jenkins Time Out	"This is a film that rewards the eyes and ears without properly considering the heart and head."
		Vincent Canby The New York Times	"Granting the fact that it is quite bad, 'Once Upon the Time in the West' is almost always interesting"
		Village Voice	"If only the first 10 minutes of Sergio Leone's 'Once Upon a Time in the West' still existed, this most hyperbolic of oat operas would still be acknowledged as one of the genre's greatest exhumations."
		Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"[It] is a painstaking distillation of the style he made famous in the original three Clint Eastwood Westerns (...) There is also, unfortunately, Leone's inability to call it quits. (…) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"
		Philip French The Guardian	"A violent, poetic elegy that links a revenge story (...) to the epic of the building of the transcontinental railroads."
		Kim Newman Empire	"Nobody has made a better Western since. In fact, nobody has made a better Western, period (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Nick Schager Slant	"'Once Upon a Time in the West' has become what Leone had perhaps always hoped: the antiquated genre’s triumphant final masterpiece (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"
		Scott Tobias AV Club	"Fonda not only knows evil, but also embodies it in every inch of his towering frame."

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