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Once Upon a Time in the West

C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West)

1968

Sergio Leone

Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Gabriele Ferzetti ...

8.2

26,867

Western Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), the power-hungry owner of a railroad company, hires Frank (Henry Fonda), a gunfighter without a conscience, to kill anyone who stands in the way of the completion of the railroad. After Frank murders land owner Brett McBain (Frank Wolff), McBain's widow (Claudia Cardinale) hires two killers of her own to protect her and gain revenge: a mysterious, harmonica-playing desperado (Charles Bronson) and his rogue sidekick (Jason Robards). [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Andrew Sarris The New York Observer	"Leone is here at the peak of his epic powers"	POS
United Kingdom	David Jenkins Time Out	"This is a film that rewards the eyes and ears without properly considering the heart and head."	NEU
United States	Vincent Canby The New York Times	"Granting the fact that it is quite bad, 'Once Upon the Time in the West' is almost always interesting"	NEU
United States	Village Voice	"If only the first 10 minutes of Sergio Leone's 'Once Upon a Time in the West' still existed, this most hyperbolic of oat operas would still be acknowledged as one of the genre's greatest exhumations."	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"[It] is a painstaking distillation of the style he made famous in the original three Clint Eastwood Westerns (...) There is also, unfortunately, Leone's inability to call it quits. (…) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"	NEU
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"A violent, poetic elegy that links a revenge story (...) to the epic of the building of the transcontinental railroads."	POS
United Kingdom	Kim Newman Empire	"Nobody has made a better Western since. In fact, nobody has made a better Western, period (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Nick Schager Slant	"'Once Upon a Time in the West' has become what Leone had perhaps always hoped: the antiquated genre’s triumphant final masterpiece (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Scott Tobias AV Club	"Fonda not only knows evil, but also embodies it in every inch of his towering frame."	POS

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