Not a Fairy Tale

Film: C’era Una Volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I doubt I will have much new or original to say about Sergio Leone’s C’era Una Volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West). This is a film widely considered one of the all-time great Westerns in film history. I very much feel like the last person in the world to see and comment on it. In an effort to at least be honest and stick with only my own thoughts, I’m writing this initially in longhand while watching, so at least my thoughts will be my own, even if they’ve been uttered by hundreds (or thousands) before me.

The genius of C’era Una Volta il West can be seen in the way the first act unfolds. Leone introduces us to the principle players in stages, giving us enough of a glimpse to define each character without a complete picture. We start with a long tension-building sequence as three men wait for a train. The train arrives and a man appears on the platform. This is Harmonica (Charles Bronson). The three men have been sent to kill him by someone named Frank. One short burst of violence later, and Harmonica is patching up a wounded arm while the other thre lie dead. And that’s all the introduction for Harmonica we need.

Good, Bad, Other

Films: Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo (The Good the Bad and the Ugly), Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom (The Good the Bad the Weird)
Format: DVD from personal collection on middlin’-sized living room television (Ugly), DVD from NetFlix on laptop (Weird).


Say the words “spaghetti Western” to someone and I can virtually guarantee that the first film they will think of is Sergio Leone’s classic Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). Start talking about great film soundtracks, it won’t be too long before someone howls “Ah-ee-ah-ee-ah, wah-wah-wah” in imitation of the great Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack—one of the greatest ever, and certainly the most memorable soundtrack for a Western ever done.

For such a long movie, the story is incredibly simple. Three men, the eponymous title characters, discover that hidden somewhere in a graveyard is $200,000 in gold coin. Two of them have one piece of the information while the third has the other piece of information. They fight with each other, team up, chase each other, and eventually all end up at the right spot at the same time for a three-way battle over who ends up dead and who ends up rich.

There are dozens of characters in the film, of course, but only three really matter—the three in the title. The Good (Clint Eastwood) is essentially the Man With No Name from Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Here, he still has no name, but everyone calls him Blondie. He’s good only in the sense that he isn’t one of the other two characters. He’s not a complete bastard or completely evil.

The second important character is the Bad (Lee van Cleef), typically called Angel Eyes but also known as Sentenza. He’s a hired killer and supremely nasty, but he does live by a particular moral code. If he’s paid for a job, he finishes the job. He has no compunctions with killing, hurting, maiming, or otherwise messing with people just because he wants to. At the opening, he learns the name of the man who stole the $200,000, kills the man who told him, and then kills the man who hired the hit—because he was paid to do so.

Our third and final character is the Ugly (the vastly underrated Eli Wallach), the only character who has a name we’re sure of: Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez. Tuco spares himself from being the Bad not because he’s any better. If anything, he has fewer compunctions about killing than Angel Eyes does. He’s also completely ill-mannered, dirty, and brutish.

When our film starts, Blondie and Tuco are pulling a scam on various towns. Tuco has a large price on his head ($2,000 as the film starts). Blondie captures him, drags him into town for the reward, and then shoots the rope on his noose before he can hang. Then, as the bounty goes up, they head to the next town and repeat the scam. When Tuco complains that he deserves more than half because it’s his neck at the end of the rope, Blondie severs the partnership, leaving Tuco with his hands tied in the middle of nowhere.

And so, a large part of the beginning of the film is this rivalry between Blondie and Tuco. Eventually, Tuco catches up and exacts his revenge on Blondie, forcing him to walk across the desert without the benefit of a hat or water. Part way across, though, they run into the man who stole the gold, who is dying. He tells Tuco the name of the cemetery where the gold is hidden, and while Tuco runs to get him water, Blondie crawls up. The dying man gives the name of the grave to him—and now Tuco and Blondie are partners again.

Eventually, they encounter Angel Eyes, who is masquerading as an officer in the Union Army. He beats the name of the cemetery out of Tuco, then teams up with Blondie and a gang of thugs to find the money. But Tuco chases them, reteams up with Blondie, and eventually, the three wind up in the correct place. Before this happens, though, Blondie and Tuco join the Union Army and blow up a bridge.

I was young the first time I watched this film, and I didn’t understand a lot of what Leone was doing. The final showdown, for instance, I thought went on far too long. Watching it now, though, I see Leone’s goal, and this scene is brilliant and I wouldn’t cut a single frame from it. I do think it could be a little shorter, though. The scene where Blondie and Tuco blow the bridge, for instance, isn’t that important. All that happens is Tuco tells Blondie the name of the cemetery and Blondie tells Tuco the name on the grave. It could be cut without much loss.

While this film is a Western in every sense of the word, it may be shocking to many people to realize that it’s not that far west. The film takes place during the American Civil War, and crosses path with the war over and over. It all takes place east of the Mississippi—the cemetery at the end is in Illinois.

Is it the greatest spaghetti Western ever made? If not, it’s second only to Once Upon a Time in the West.


The influence of Leone’s film crosses all boundaries and nationalities, as evidenced by Ji-woon Kim’s Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom (The Good, the Bad, the Weird). Unquestionably influenced heavily by Leone’s film, this is a much more modern take in every sense of the word. The themes are a little different, but the plot is very much the same. Three men look for buried treasure while a war (or something like it) happens around their private battle.

The setting is very different, though. Instead of the 1860s in the American Midwest, this story takes place in Manchuria during the 1930s, after the Japanese invasion. The plot centers around an ancient map that allegedly shows the way to a massive treasure buried during the Qing Dynasty.

Initially, the map is sold by the employer of our bad character, Park Chang-yi (Byung-hun Lee). Suave, good-looking, and ruthless, Chang-yi always fulfills his contracts. Once the map is delivered, his job is to steal it back. Rather than take the easy way of boarding the train, he hires a gang and stops the train.

What he doesn’t know is that on the train looking to rob the passengers is Yoon Tae-goo (Kang-ho Song, who I immediately recognized as the blonde main character in Gwoemul). He’s an evidently simple, goofy (the Weird) train robber, but as it turns out, he has quite a significant past, and ties to Chang-yi. He steals the priceless map before Chang-yi and his thugs can get it.

Also on the train is a bounty hunter named Park Do-won (Woo-sung Jung) who is our good character. He’s looking to capture Chang-yi for the bounty, and wouldn’t mind grabbing Tae-goo as well. Chang-yi is the prize, though; Do-won is convinced that he is the Finger Chopper, a notorious criminal from Korea who has come to Manchuria. Each of the three is on the road for the treasure, each wants to get rid of the other two, and a gang of criminals as well as the entire Japanese Army want the map as well. Everyone pursues everyone else, lots of people get killed in interesting ways, and eventually, the only three who make it to the correct place on the map are our title characters who duplicate a version of the three-way shoot out.

This is a wonderfully inventive film despite the fact that it is essentially an homage to Leone’s film. There are a number of other sly jokes and references as well—my favorite being Tae-goo dragged by a Jeep like Indiana Jones. No matter the various films being lovingly referenced here, and no matter the 1930s time frame, this is a tribute to Leone’s great work. The characters, the set-up, the ending—everything is a modernized Korean version of Leone. Even the soundtrack is a modernized version of Morricone’s brilliant work, and the camera work during the three-way fight is a shorter, stylized version of the same scene—close-ups of the eyes and the guns and a spinning camera.

Despite this, as I say, this film is wonderfully inventive. The action sequences are tremendous, like very few other films, or at least like no other films made outside of Korea. There’s bloodletting a-plenty and great stunts throughout. Despite the incredible number of deaths and the callousness with which these are often treated, this film is incredibly fun to watch. I almost want to watch it again immediately.

*** THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE SPOILER ***

At the end our heroes duke it out. Unlike Leone’s movie, there are no guns unloaded here. Instead, the trio shoot the hell out of each other, and as they lay dying, a gusher starts up where the treasure was supposed to be. The treasure is oil.

However, after the credits start to roll, we see a wanted poster for Tae-goo, and a figure with a scarf over his face sees it and rides away. The implication is certainly that Tae-goo and Do-won have survived, just like in the original. Do-won is pursuing him because, as it turns out, Tae-goo is the nefarious Finger Chopper who cut off Chang-yi’s left index finger.

*** THE END, THE SPOILER IS OVER ***

The biggest surprise to me isn’t how much I enjoyed this movie. If you’d asked me at the start of the year what I thought of Korean films, I wouldn’t have had much of an opinion. But based on this and a few others, I’m willing to say that Korean cinema is more than up-and-coming. It’s here, and it’s worth watching.

Why to watch Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo: A Western the way it should be done.
Why not to watch: Too long by 20 minutes.

Why to watch Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom: A brilliant homage, and a unique film in its own right.
Why not to watch: The ending is pretty cryptic.

The Trouble with Noodles

Film: Once Upon a Time in America
Format: DVDs from NetFlix on laptop.

Sergio Leone didn’t do a lot of short films. Of all his films, perhaps the most controversial of these is Once Upon a Time in America. It’s not controversial because of the events of the film or the subject matter, but because of how it was released. Leone created a sprawling film of close to four hours length with his desired cut. The American distributor chopped the film down to almost half of this length. More severe, the American distribution removed the three separate timeline structure from the film and placed the remaining scenes in chronological order, ruining the slow reveal of the story.

Chopped to pieces, the movie is terrible. Placed in its proper order and at its proper length, this is a powerful and meaningful film that touches on themes of love, loss, loyalty, betrayal, and the integrity of criminals. It is a sprawling narrative, and it can be difficult to follow at times, but the film is absolutely worth the near four hours of screen time.

The film takes place in three main time periods. The first is the early 1920s during prohibition, when our main characters are children and young teens. The second is the mid-1930s, right around the end of prohibition. The final period is modern, roughly the mid-1960s, when the remaining surviving characters are much older.

In the ‘20s, we start with a gang of young boys in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in New York. This group is led by David “Noodles” Aaronson (Scott Tiler). His underlings are Philip “Cockeye” Stein (Adrian Curran), notable for his mostly-closed right eye and ever-present panpipe; Patrick “Patsy” Goldberg, identifiable by his strangely beautiful eye color; and Dominic (Noah Moazezi), the smallest of the group. These four are friends with Fat Moe (Mike Monetti), whose father runs the local kosher restaurant, and whose sister Deborah (Jennifer Connelly) is the neighborhood beauty and the obsession of Noodles.

The boys work for a local gangster named Bugsy (James Russo) doing small chores like burning down the newsstand of a man who refuses to pay protection, and rolling drunks for their wallets and watches. They’re stopped from rolling a drunk by a newcomer named Max Bercovicz (Rusty Jacobs). He and Noodles face off against each other, but when both are robbed by the local cop on the beat, they resolve to be friends and form their own gang. Max becomes a co-leader with Noodles, and the two break away from Bugsy. This causes some problems for them, as both are severely beaten by Bugsy and his gang. Eventually, this culminates in Bugsy’s shooting of little Dominic and Noodles’s revenge, which leads to Noodles doing a dozen years in prison while the other three gang members expand their criminal empire. It also ends the first act of the film.

From here, we leap ahead to the ‘30s, and the release of Noodles (now played by Robert De Niro) from prison. While he was in, Max (James Woods), Cockeye (William Forsythe) and Patsy (James Hayden) have gone into the mortuary business. This is a front for their real business, bootleg liquor and running a speakeasy and a variety of criminal enterprises. Their prostitution ring is run by Peggy (Amy Ryder), a girl from the neighborhood who used to prostitute herself for sweets. Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern, who looks disturbingly like Jennifer Connelly) is still around, and there’s still something between her and Noodles.

This section of the film starts with a diamond heist at the behest of a man named Frankie Manoldi (Joe Pesci), who is doing the job as a favor to his brother Joe (Burt Young). What Joe doesn’t know is that as soon as the heist is complete, Max and the gang have agreed to eliminate him, also at Frankie’s behest. This bothers Noodles, since he doesn’t want to have to work for anyone.

Noodles tries to rekindle his relationship with Deborah, but she rebuffs him, telling him that she wants to get to the top, and she’s leaving for Hollywood. In response, he rapes her, then watches her leave on her train, something of a microcosm of Noodles’s life—if he can’t keep something, he destroys it. In typical Leone style, this is filmed as brutally as possible; it’s an uncomfortable scene and painful to watch.

The focus of the gang now turns to a labor union. A union leader named James Conway O’Donnell (Treat Williams) is fighting with the owners of a local factory, and his life is constantly threatened. When he police enter on the side of the scab workers, the gang reacts by switching his infant son in the hospital with a girl and threatening not to tell him where his son is unless he calls off his men. The war between the union leader and a corrupt businessman named Van Linden (Dutch Miller) ends with the death of Van Linden’s gang and the serious wounding of O’Donnell. O’Donnell’s lawyer tells Noodles and Max that prohibition is ending, and they should do something legitimate.

But neither Noodles nor Max wants to go legitimate, and instead comes up with a plan to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. Noodles doesn’t want to do it, figuring no one would make it out alive. To save his friends, Noodles tips the police to the robbery. His friends are killed anyway. Noodles flees, going to Buffalo.

Through these first two sections of the film, we constantly flash forward to the ‘60s and Noodles as an old man. He’s returned to the old neighborhood because of a backwards summons—the old graveyard is being dug up, and he is told that his three friends are not buried there anyway, so he doesn’t need to worry. Essentially, this tells him that someone knows who and where he is. For the rest, though, a spoiler warning is necessary.

*** SPOILER TIME ***

In the present day of the film, Noodles discovers that his buddy Max didn’t really die, but changed his name and appearance. Max is now a senator named Bailey, who is being investigated for corruption. Max wants Noodles to kill him, because he doesn’t want to have to deal with the investigation. Noodles refuses because of the wasted 30 years of his own life spent in Buffalo dealing with intense guilt over the loss of his friends. Max leaves, and it is strongly suggested that he does himself in, although there really is no resolution.

However, the film ends in the 1930s around the time of the bank heist. Noodles, rather than being on the job, is in an opium den smoking and zoning out. Since opium (from reports, not personal experience here) produces intense and vivid hallucinations of past and possible future events, the implication is that everything after the failed heist may simply be the opium dream of Noodles. Additional evidence for this is the fact that Deborah ages very little—in the ‘60s, she looks almost the same as she did in the ‘30s. There are other hints as well—the cars that drive by the old Noodles are vintage cars from the 1930s, and the champagne bottles that fall from one of them are the same brand seen in all of the prohibition scenes.

Additionally, just before the end of Prohibition, we’re told that the last job pulled by the gang was done without Noodles, because he was zoned out in an opium den. We see this only at the start of the film and again at the end, implying virtually everything after the rape of Deborah came from the opium. At least that’s how I choose to see it.

*** END SPOILERS ***

I respect Leone’s vision, but this movie is damn long, probably too much so. There’s so much going on all the time, that I had a tendency to lose focus on it from time to time. I understand the problem with the bastardized two-hour version of the film, but I think there are a few minutes here and there that could be cut, bringing the film down to about three hours. This is very much Leone’s style though, long takes of people’s faces where the action is internal rather than on the screen.

Nonetheless, it is a great film. Anything of this size and scope is going to be either magnificent or terrible, and it certainly isn’t terrible. I do question the odd placement of the intermission, though. It comes at nearly the 3-hour mark in the film, leaving a shade over an hour for the finish. While it is probably the most sensible place in the story for the intermission, it does make the film feel lopsided. This is the main reason I’d like to see some cuts in the first part—the film feels top-heavy.

Why to watch Once Upon a Time in America: A brutal, vicious epic.
Why not to watch: Leone spends a lot of time with his camera implying rather than showing.