Movie #60: Released in 1968, directed by Sergio Leone, 166 minutes. Seen it before!

LetterBoxd Score: 4.5 stars

The opening, say, 45 minutes of this movie are really magical. The movie takes its time, giving you a feel of the slow pace of living in this time, when you might sit and wait for a train with nothing to do but try and get a fly off your face. Then, one of the first of several great lines: “Looks like we’re shy one horse!” “You brought two too many.”

From there we transition to a drawn out little horror movie, where a family has the uncanny sense that they are being stalked by something. Soon they’re all dead, most of them children. The horror seeps into the next scene too, as Jill McBaine has the dawning realization that something is wrong and no one is going to help her get to Sweetwater (a name that draws laughs).

I think the rest of the movie is great too, but doesn’t quite reach those magical highs for me until the final showdown. Possibly it’s just fatigue; maybe I got used to the pace? Maybe it’s because it gets ever so slightly bogged down in machinations, instead of feeling primeval and mythic.

But the ending is the rare one that lives up to the movies hype. Throughout the movie we’ve wondered what the (mythic, unreal) Harmonica has against (psychopathic, but understandable) Frank. Most of the time, the reveal can’t live up to the mystery, but I thought this one did: music and moving image and narrative working in perfect harmony.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

The movie is clearly a huge influence on future cinema. Bronson is a precursor to Patrick Swayze in Road House. Blue Velvet’s Frank feels like a nod to this Frank (black western threads, “why are there people like Frank?”).

But on its own terms, it has that mythic feel, but it’s also about the end of a (itself mythic) era, at the hands of modernism.

(Weirdly sentimental about sexism though?)

Next: Wanda