Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West

Jill McBain: Claudia Cardinale
Frank: Henry Fonda
Manuel "Cheyenne" Guitiérrez: Jason Robards
Harmonica: Charles Bronson
Morton: Gabriele Ferzetti
Stony; Woody Strode
Snaky: Jack Elam
Sam: Paolo Stoppa
Sheriff: Keenan Wynn
Brett McBain: Frank Wolff
Barman: Lionel Stander

Director: Sergio Leone
Screenplay: Sergio Donati, Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Art direction: Carlo Simi
Film editing: Nino Baragli
Music: Ennio Morricone

An acknowledged genre classic, Once Upon a Time in the West is also a rather self-conscious product of European filmmakers tipping their hats to the American masters of the Western movie, particularly John Ford, whose favorite setting, Monument Valley, plays almost a cameo role in the film. Ford would never have made anything quite so slowly paced, however. Director Sergio Leone's film is full of stylish gestures that make it immensely watchable, but draw attention to themselves rather than the story being told -- a pitfall that the great Western moviemakers like Ford or Howard Hawks or Sam Peckinpah never let themselves stumble into.

The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges, 1960

In July, Turner Classic Movies, my indispensable source for movies, ran two 1950 films by Akira Kurosawa that demonstrated how profoundly influenced by Hollywood Kurosawa was: the film-noir-steeped The Bad Sleep Well and the romantic drama Scandal. (In the latter, Toshiro Mifune plays a pipe-smoking, motorcycle-riding artist who could have come out of a Paramount or 20th Century-Fox film of the 1940s -- an imitation of any number of Hollywood leading men of the era, such as Gregory Peck, Dana Andrews, or Joel McCrea.) But as any Kurosawa fan knows, the major influence on his films, especially his samurai movies, was the American Western. No wonder that filmmakers eventually turned things around and borrowed from the borrower. Sturges's version of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), was the first to do so, but Martin Ritt soon followed suit with The Outrage (1964), his version of Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950), and Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone because of the unacknowledged remake of Yojimbo (1961) called A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Magnificent Seven, though probably the best of the Kurosawa copies, pales in comparison with its source, but it helped make Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn into stars. In his book Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges, my former Mercury News colleague Glenn Lovell has some amusing stories about the jousting among the actors for screen time, and you can clearly see McQueen, with his more naturalistic style, upstaging the stiff and mannered Yul Brynner.