Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) • 50 Years Later

A mysterious stranger with a harmonica joins forces with a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin working for the railroad.

The Western genre has always dealt in mythologies. Some Westerns could be accurately labelled as revisionist propaganda — a nation trying to get to grips with shameful episodes from its own history by pretending things were different. There was a time when good Christian settlers were brutally victimised by the heathen redskins, the sheriff was always righteous, the good guys had square jaws and wore white hats, and the bad guys sported stubble and preferred black Stetsons. It was a history to be proud of, but that was just the movies. Perhaps that’s why it was down to European filmmakers to re-invent and reinvigorate the genre just as it was falling from grace in the mid-1960s.

Sergio Leone is certainly one of the most important film directors. I was just about to qualify that statement by adding “to come out of Italian cinema of the 1960s” but I realise that would only be a disservice to his standing…