| |
| | slant // magazine.com: Film Review - Once Upon a Time in the West |
 | | The film, about four lives headed on a collision course in a grimy, ramshackle town of the Western plains, is set against the backdrop of the encroaching railroad, which promises to bring civilization to this unruly, harsh country. |
 | | Still, even though West's pensive, tragic romanticism recalls vintage Bertolucci, and its abundant use of visual and aural signifiers brings to mind Argento, the film's seductive interplay between image and sound—a relationship that would reach its apex with the director's final film Once Upon a Time in America—is trademark Leone. |
 | | West recognizes that Morton is only the first in what will be a long line of industrialists plundering the land, and that the future he brings is no more distasteful, and might be slightly more tolerable, than the ugliness, corruption, and immorality of the old world embodied by Frank. |
| www.slantmagazine.com /film/film_review.asp?ID=907 (1291 words) |
|