Harmonica helps Frank kill them, though, by directing his attention to their whereabouts from the room where Mrs. Morton now pays Frank's men to turn against him.
![good bad i good bad i](http://ecmyers.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/chekhovs_gun.jpg)
Harmonica disrupts Frank's plan to keep the price down when he arrives, holding Cheyenne at gunpoint, and makes a much higher bid with the reward money for the wanted Cheyenne, but as Cheyenne is placed on a train bound for the newly opened Yuma prison, two members of his gang purchase one-way tickets for the train, intending to help him escape. McBain allows Frank to seduce her, seemingly to save her life, and is then forced to sell her property in an auction, where Frank's men intimidate the other bidders. McBain, and immobilizes him under guard on his private train out in the desert. Harmonica explains that according to the contract of sale, she will lose Sweetwater unless the station is built by the time the track's construction crews reach that point, so Cheyenne puts his men to work building it.įrank turns against Morton, who wants to make a deal with Mrs. Cheyenne arrives at Sweetwater soon after, and both men seem attracted to Mrs. McBain, Harmonica informs Cheyenne that the three gunfighters appeared to be posing as Cheyenne's men. In a roadhouse near West and East Mitten Buttes on the way to Sweetwater, where he also encounters Mrs. The film opens with a mysterious harmonica-playing gunman, whom Cheyenne later dubs "Harmonica", shooting three men sent by Frank to kill him. Meanwhile, former prostitute Jill arrives at Flagstone from New Orleans, revealing that she was McBain's new wife, and therefore the new owner of the land. When crippled railroad tycoon Morton-who wants to complete a transcontinental railroad before dying from bone tuberculosis-learns of this, he sends his hired gun Frank to intimidate McBain to move off the land, but Frank instead kills McBain and his three children, planting evidence to frame the bandit Cheyenne (Robards). The land was bought by Brett McBain, who foresaw that the railroad would have to pass through that area, to provide water for the steam locomotives. A struggle exists for Sweetwater, a piece of land in the desert outside Flagstone that contains the region's only other water source. The film portrays two conflicts that take place around Flagstone, a fictional town in the American Old West - a land battle related to the construction of a railroad, and a mission of vengeance against a cold-blooded killer.
![good bad i good bad i](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nQcnn-_oe8g/maxresdefault.jpg)
In 2009, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film is the first installment in Leone's Once Upon a Time trilogy, followed by Duck, You Sucker! and Once Upon a Time in America, though the films do not share any characters in common. For the US release on, Once Upon a Time in the West was edited down to 145 minutes by Paramount and was a financial flop. This version was shown in European cinemas, and was a box-office success. The original version by the director was 166 minutes when it was first released on 21 December 1968. During production, Leone recruited Donati to rewrite the script due to concerns over time limitations.
![good bad i good bad i](http://i0.wp.com/www.armedwithreason.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Guns.jpg)
After Clint Eastwood turned down an offer to play the movie's protagonist, Bronson was offered the role. He recruited Bertolucci and Argento to devise the plot of the film in 1966, researching other Western films in the process. However, Leone accepted an offer from Paramount Pictures providing Henry Fonda and a budget to produce another Western. The widescreen cinematography was by Tonino Delli Colli, and the acclaimed film score was by Ennio Morricone.Īfter directing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone decided to retire from Westerns and aimed to produce his film based on The Hoods, which eventually became Once Upon a Time in America. It stars Henry Fonda, cast against type as the villain, Charles Bronson as his nemesis, Jason Robards as a bandit, and Claudia Cardinale as a newly widowed homesteader. Once Upon a Time in the West ( Italian: C'era una volta il West, "Once upon a time (there was) the West") is a 1968 epic Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone, who co-wrote it with Sergio Donati based on a story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Leone.