Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West opened in December 1968, straight after his Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood. It was a commercial disappointment in the United States and a major hit in continental Europe. Decades on, it is the Leone film most often placed in the canon, alongside The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and it holds a permanent place in the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll. Sergio Donati and Bernardo Bertolucci developed the original story with Leone before Dario Argento joined the screenplay.

A harmonica-playing stranger (Charles Bronson) arrives in the dust-blown town of Flagstone, where a beautiful widow named Jill (Claudia Cardinale) has inherited a piece of land that both the dying railroad baron Morton and the killer Frank very badly want. Frank is Henry Fonda, cast against type, and his blue eyes are terrifying. Jason Robards, as the bandit Cheyenne, makes up the fourth corner of the central quartet.

Casting Fonda as a child-killer, when he was the most beloved good guy in American cinema with John Ford and the Joads behind him, was Leone's most provocative coup. Tonino Delli Colli's wide-frame Techniscope photography and Morricone's score, composed before shooting and played on set for the actors, define the film. The opening, twelve minutes of creaking windmill and dripping water, is one of the great suspense sequences in cinema.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: It absorbs the whole genre and turns it into elegy: three hours of slow ritual, and the most beautifully composed film Leone ever made.