Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West opened in December 1968, immediately after his Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood, and was widely regarded as a commercial disappointment in the United States — though it became 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 is permanently 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 blue-eyed killer Frank (Henry Fonda, cast against type, ice-blue eyes terrifying) very badly want. Jason Robards as the bandit Cheyenne provides the third corner of the central quartet.

The casting of Fonda — at the time the most beloved screen good-guy in American cinema, with John Ford and the Joads behind him — as a child-killer was Leone's most provocative coup. Tonino Delli Colli's wide-frame Techniscope cinematography and Morricone's score (composed before shooting, with the actors playing along on set) define the film. The opening, twelve minutes of windmill creak and dripping water, is one of the great suspense sequences in cinema.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The Western that absorbed the genre and turned it into elegy. Three hours of slow ritual, and Leone's most beautifully composed film.