Man I'm jealous. Have fun!
For a lesson in how to resuscitate a dying genre, you could do worse than Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone’s masterpiece from 1968. Leone makes his subversive intentions clear when a gunman shoots a small boy in the back and the camera curves round to reveal that the man in the black hat is none other than Henry Fonda.The story was partly devised by Bernardo Bertolucci and the film might qualify as the first Marxist Western. Fonda isn’t the only legend to be toppled. The plucky homesteader who soldiers on after her family is gunned down turns out to be a former prostitute — a ripe and resplendent Claudia Cardinale — and the frontier town is revealed to be a Hobbesian dystopia in which ruthless predators compete for limited resources.“Forget what you’ve heard about the Old West,” Leone seems to be saying. “This is how it really was.”The irony, of course, is that in seeking to debunk one set of myths Leone created another. From the film’s opening scene, in which three gunmen are waiting to kill a man at a railway station, we’re plunged into an atavistic, dream-like world in which everyone is motived by either greed or revenge. This is drama at its most primitive and it unfolds like a Greek tragedy.If you can endure the glacial pace, this newly restored 165-minute version is a must.15, 165mins
From the UK Times today:the frontier town is revealed to be a Hobbesian dystopia in which ruthless predators compete for limited resources.