past commentary

Torey 2022-04-19 09:01:18

I beg you, Once Upon a Time in the West.

Sergio Leone's 1968 work by Italian director Sergio Leone is regarded as the greatest Western in film history, following the classics of the Whore, Oh No, the Red Dead trilogy.

This film is nearly three hours long, and the whole film has a feeling of time freezing. It takes a lot of patience to watch it. Most people may fall asleep after watching it at the beginning. It is a very good movie to promote sleep.

The story progresses very slowly, using multi-character relationships and multi-threaded narrative, and the director spends a lot of time on the close-up of the characters' expressions and actions, and advances the plot through the slow dialogues between the characters that are ambiguous but meaningful. It is easy to feel that your IQ is disconnected.

But this is also the feature of this film. The frozen time, closed space, slow movements, unhurried dialogue, and sudden gunshots all create a good sense of tension.

The harmonica sounded several times, whimpering, and even a little harsh to make people panic, like a knife of wind, cutting through the desolate and peaceful west, and playing the prelude to the westward advance.

In addition, there are many characters in this film, and it has the effect of one-hit kill for patients with face blindness, so please watch it carefully.

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Extended Reading
  • Jeffrey 2022-03-25 09:01:05

    Is it true that the movies made by people in that era like such a slow rhythm and such a slow narrative, I really don't feel any good about it.

  • Violette 2021-10-20 19:02:10

    @影城; The rhythm of the first hour was really slow, and then it gradually became better; the desert is lonely, the long river is setting the sun, the money and desire in the weeping blood and the yellow sand, the sad harmonica is a revenge; the inverted suspense, so much big Close-up, the psychological time felt from the screen is almost equal to real time; the soundtrack and sound effects are superb!

Once Upon a Time in the West quotes

  • Cheyenne: You deserve better.

    Jill: The last man who told me that... is buried out there.

  • [first lines]

    Cattle Corner Station Agent: Hey. Hey-hey-hey-hey, if you want any tickets, you'll have to go around, eh, to, eh, the front of, eh, eh... oooh, well, I s'pose it'll be all right. The hell am *I* doin' around here if they walk in and can do as they damn please?