Counter-Currents
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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
After the climactic gunfight between Frank and Harmonica, the latter and Cheyenne say goodbye to Jill. But just outside of the McBain property, Cheyenne falters. Harmonica stops and turns with concern. It turns out that Cheyenne was mortally wounded by Morton. Like Jesus, he has a bleeding wound in his side. This comes as some surprise. He must have been putting up a brave front with Jill. But the surprise comes off as a rather contrived plot twist; one of many. Cheyenne doesn’t want Harmonica to watch him die. But the men are friends now, friends to the end, and what’s a little death between friends? When Cheyenne expires, Harmonica loads his body onto his horse. They head west, of course, beyond where the rails have stopped, into the wild. Jill, in the meantime, brings water to the railroad workers who have brought civilization to her doorstep. The end.
There are many great things about Once Upon a Time in the West: a beautiful script, inspired direction, vivid cinematography, meticulously detailed and authentic costumes and sets, and superb performances, especially from Henry Fonda and Jason Robards. Ennio Morricone’s magnificent music deserves special mention. Half the emotional impact of the film comes from the music alone.
But be warned: the plot is often a mess, which is hard to forgive in a film that runs nearly three hours. I have already dwelt upon the film’s second act. But there’s a lot that makes no sense in the rest of the film as well.
When Cheyenne is first introduced at a ramshackle dive in the desert — What is it, anyway? A bar? An inn? A stable? Does a cyclops live there? — his behavior is so bizarre and menacing that any number of people would be tempted to shoot him dead in self-defense. But all he wants is someone to break the chains on his wrists.
Later, when Cheyenne visits Jill, he is again so menacing that she is tempted to kill him. Yet he is there to declare his innocence and offer his protection. I get it. He’s a man of few words. So why doesn’t he choose them more carefully? One feels here that Leone is just jerking you around, building up false suspense.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies here
Harmonica camps out at the McBain house to protect Jill, but he does not knock at the door and introduce himself. He starts playing the harmonica in the dead of night. Jill thinks he is a bandit and tries to shoot him. It is a natural reaction. Her whole family has just been killed.
The next day, when Jill and Harmonica meet by daylight, he does not greet her politely, exchange names, and explain he is there to protect her. Instead, he throws her around, roughs her up, and tears her clothes as if he is about to rape her. Is this his idea of an acceptable greeting? Does he play the harmonica rather than talk because he’s autistic? Then Harmonica abruptly breaks off the assault and asks Jill to get him water from the well, at which point two of Frank’s men gallop up to kill her, and Harmonica guns them down. Again, is there a point to this bizarre behavior, or is Leone just jerking us around?
When Frank returns to Morton’s train to find the results of a massacre, we are left to wonder who these men were and what happened. Later, we learn that Cheyenne led that raid. But why? Was it to take revenge on Morton? I guess that makes sense.
I think it is important to lay all of this film’s flaws on the table, because the payoff in the end is worth waiting through them.
Leone’s early films are perfect, but not particularly moving, because they aren’t particularly deep. The conflicts are merely about money, not principle. In Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone stirs us more deeply because this is not just a movie about men; it is a movie about ideas, about the principles from which different lives and different civilizations spring.
The Western lends itself to political philosophy because on the frontier, one leaves behind civil society and enters a state of nature, thus highlighting the distinction between nature and convention.
The frontier is also a realm of clashing tribes — white, Indian, and Mexican — thus highlighting race, identity, and enmity as political forces.
The frontier also stimulates the re-emergence of archaic values such as the honor code and archaic institutions like the Männerbund, prompting reflections on how these can be integrated into civilized society, if at all.
The frontier is a realm of freedom and adventure, which are especially bracing to men. Can this freedom be preserved under law and civilization?
Finally, the frontier is a dangerous place. It selects for strength, vitality, and masculinity, posing the question of whether these can find a place in civil society.
Or will it always be the case that hard times produce strong men, strong men produce easy times, easy times produce weak men, and we are doomed to hard times again?
What is the politics of Once Upon a Time in the West? The film is clearly anti-capitalist. But is it anti-capitalism of the Left or of the Right? There is not a word about inequality or exploitation in this film, which counts against any sort of Leftist interpretation. The primary victims are not the proletariat, but the McBain family, who are landholders seeking to get rich from a railroad concession.
The central contrast of the film is between man and businessman, not capitalist and proletarian. The “ancient race” that the Mortons of the world wish to kill is not the proletariat. It is not colored people. It is men of honor, men who prize honor over life itself. This is the pre-modern, aristocratic ethos. These are the men of “pride and vainglory,” the “contentious and quarrelsome” whom Thomas Hobbes and John Locke wished to replace with the rule of the “industrious and rational.” Thus, Once Upon a Time in the West offers a critique of capitalism from the Right.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.
I argue that Once Upon a Time in the West is objectively Rightist, even though this was not the filmmakers’ intention. Leone himself had fashionably Leftish ideas. Bernardo Bertolucci, who co-authored the original story with Leone and Dario Argento, was an avowed Marxist. Yet there is nothing Marxist about Once Upon a Time in the West. (Nor is there anything Marxist about his greatest movie, The Last Emperor, which I review here; it is also included in Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema.) The fact that Once Upon a Time in the West was hugely popular among the Parisian student Leftists of 1968, who were crazy about the movie’s long “duster” coats, proves nothing, either. These kids had great taste in film and fashion, but they were too poorly educated to understand what they were seeing.
Hegel held that the duel to the death over honor was the beginning of man and the beginning of history. Before the duel, men were just clever animals ruled by natural desires, above all self-preservation. By subordinating life itself to the imagination — specifically one’s image of oneself — man created the realm of history and culture, which is defined as going against nature. Hegel saw history as a struggle for self-consciousness, which would end when men have realized that we are all free and have built a society that expresses that truth. But Hegel’s critics from the Right realized that if making history makes us human, the end of history will be the end of man, the return of merely the cleverest animal.
Once Upon a Time in the West ends by showing us the beginning of history reenacted in the showdown between Frank and Harmonica just as the end of history is pulling into town on Morton’s gleaming rails. What do our heroes do? They head west.
We should follow.
It is one thing to write about such ideas, another thing to show them. That’s why the end of Once Upon a Time in the West feels less like a movie, and more like an initiation into some great mystery: why we rise, why we fall, and why there’s no stilling or stepping off the great wheel of time.
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14 comments
“Bernardo Bertolucci, who co-authored the original story with Leone and Dario Argento, was an avowed Marxist”
Argento was also very much a Leftist. In his 1975 giallo Deep Red (Profondo rosso) – starring David Hemmings investigating a string of murders – the first victim is a psychic medium. It’s laid on thick that she’s Jewish, despite that fact having zero relevance to the plot.
So what’s that all about? Well, the murderer is played by Clara Calamai, who would have been well known to Italian audiences as a star of fascist-era cinema. So “a fascist kills a Jew” was the gratuitous, subliminal message.
Great movie, though!
Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because I seem to notice that all the villains in this movie, once a time on the west, have very distinct blue eyes. And the camera seems to emphasize it with facial shots that only capture the eyes. In particular, the villain himself, Frank has very piercing, beautiful, blue eyes. As if they were making some subtle Nazi/Mediterranean dichotomy. Notice that a lot of stuff in my favorite movie, Conan, the barbarian, please, don’t judge me, takes a lot from this movie. Including the theme of revenge, and when thulsa doom, the villain, uses his hypnotic power, his eyes turn blue!
“my favorite movie, Conan, the barbarian, please, don’t judge me”
I’m a big fan, also. The film gets better with each viewing, and Schwarzenegger’s lines are mercifully kept to a minimum.
Our esteemed editor ‘Trevor Lynch’ reviewed it over at Unz. I’m not au fait with the root-race genealogies of Robert E. Howard’s world, but one ‘Priss Factor’ commented: “Note the blue eyes of the James Earl Jones character Thulsa Doom. He’s not black; he’s of alien race, pre-Atlantean.”
Agree, it’s a great movie! Great sound tack too. Anytime I’m not sure what I want to listen to, I pop that in. It’s a very very deep movie, too, lots of deep themes and meetings, particularly of a Jewish nature. Similar to the movie Clueless in that way. The eye colors in both movies are so well chosen.
This isn’t really true. Frank has blue eyes, but so does Harmonica, his nemesis. Morton and most of the other baddies have brown eyes. Most of the other good characters are brown-eyed as well.
Oh, I wasn’t really sure about Bronson; aren’t they sort of greenish, right? The Internet consensus seems to be that Bronson eyes are green. But it seems like most of the ones at the train station had blue eyes. The guy from the rail company had brown. Seems he’s clearly trying to “say” something, and apparently milius picked up on it too. It’s also the blue of the doctor boy’s eyes.
At the train station Jack Elam and Woody Strode (a black man) are brown eyed. The other actor has blue eyes, I think.
Also, McBride looked extremely Jewish, didn’t he. Or Italian or something. I think that’s there.
He’s an Italian actor playing an Irishman.
“All the villains in this movie, once a time on the west, have very distinct blue eyes. And the camera seems to emphasize it with facial shots that only capture the eyes. In particular, the villain himself, Frank has very piercing, beautiful, blue eyes. As if they were making some subtle Nazi/Mediterranean dichotomy”
Extreme close-ups of the eyes in widescreen were something of a Leone motif. But you’re right that there was an especial focus on Frank’s (Henry Fonda’s) eye color.
Christopher Frayling quotes Fonda, in his autobiography, as recalling:
“I know that the guy he wants me to play is a heavy… So I went over to a guy in the Valley, an optometrist, and I had myself fitted for contact lenses that would make my eyes dark – because I didn’t think my baby-blues would be the proper look for this heavy character” (Something To Do With Death: p271).
But, when he arrived on set:
“Sergio, who spoke no English, took one look at me and let loose a volley of rapid-fire Italian, gesturing wildly with his hands and arms as he spoke… And the next thing was ‘Throw away the brown eyes. Where are the big blues? That’s what I bought’” (Something To Do With Death: p271).
Rather than seeing it as a Nordic/Mediterranean thing, it’s normally perceived more as a deliberate contrast between the perceived innocence of blue eyes, and the villainous part that Fonda was playing in this movie.
Leone himself is quoted putting it like this:
“The audience would be struck in an instant by this profound contrast between
the pitiless character Fonda is playing and Fonda’s face, a face which
for so many years has symbolized justice and goodness… The vice-presidents of the companies I have had dealings with have all had baby-blue eyes and honest faces and what sons of bitches they turned out to be!” (Something To Do With Death: p271).
Oh sure but that’s what I’m saying. Aryan equals evil. All of our good-seeming covers a murderous intent. And you can see from above the others in their circle thought that, so it’s more than one data point. But I imagine you have to say stuff like that to get anywhere in the film industry. If I were making a movie, that’s the card I would play.
Yes, come to think of it Leones next film, the not entirely successful ‘Duck You Ducker‘ (aka ‘A Fistful of Dynamite‘, ‘Once upon a Time the Revolution‘) has a weirdly Nordic-looking villain, Colonel Günther Reza, who even has a German first name and is portrayed as vaguely Nazi-like in his military uniform.
In contrast, most of the rest of the cast are of very dark, swarthy complexions, as you might expect the Mexican setting, so he does really stand out.
On the other hand, in the earlier so-called ‘dollars trilogy’, Eastwood’s character is probably the lightest-complexioned character (he’s even called ‘Blondie’ in the last of them) and he’s the ostensible ‘hero’ (or at least the closest thing those movies have to a hero).
@DarkPlato: Why are you so obsessed with eye color? My eyes are blue/green, appear light green with blue rim under light, more blue in darker environs. Green eyes are rarer than blue eyes and are mainly in Celtic and Germanic people ( most of my ancestry). You’ve mentioned Italians in a negative manner before as well. The DNA of Southern Italians, including Sicilians, which I’m part, is basically unchanged for the past 2,500 years. We are descended from ancient Greeks and native Italians, you know the founders of Western Civilization.
Great commentaries on a great film. Sergio Leone is not from a ‘realist’ school like John Cassavetes or Ermanno Olmi… Leone is a director of horse operas. Once that is accepted we can forgive the occasional contrived moments just as we do when we find out that the father of Like Skywalker is Darth Vader… aaaaah!
I also recommend and earlier horse opera by King Vidor, Duel In The Sun (1946). The theme of ‘cilvilizing’ the old west by a railroad was also used. For its day it was somewhat brash in its treatment of lust. The mestizo character is flawed and at times cunning, avoiding the sanctification you might see in a contemporary character.
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