Once Upon a Time in the WestFrom the against-type casting of venerable American actor Henry Fonda as a sadistic gunslinger to the soaring score by Ennio Morricone, Sergio Leone's dazzling, cinematic valentine to the Wild West - with exteriors shot on location in Arizona's Monument Valley - stands as one of the most vividly realized portraits of a mythic American frontier.
With a tip of the auteur hat to Visconti (whom the director greatly admired) and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, Leone cast Cardinale in the only significant female role in his entire Western oeuvre. As the widowed Jill McBain, Cardinale's unbowed character was a "moral centre and Mediterranean earth mother in [an] otherwise violently male and amoral universe" (Cinematheque Ontario).
Screens in a fully restored, complete and uncut 35mm print.
