CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/24/2019

Martin Scorsese on 'Once Upon a Time in the West'

Angelo Novi's July, 1968, photograph of legendary Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone showing Henry Fonda—veteran of many Westerns—how to hold a gun, is reproduced from Reel Art Press's whopping new study of Leone's Western masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, authored by renowned London film scholar Sir Christopher Frayling and reviewed this week in The Washington Post. In the book, Frayling interviews Martin Scorsese on the film's influence. "What I found so fascinating," Scorsese states, "and how Once Upon a Time in the West became such a favorite film of mine—such an obsession—was that I began to understand more and more the combination of commedia dell'arte with operatic tradition and the framing; the framing which was not simply comic-book art—which is very strong and very visual, it's very cinematic—but also baroque art, the faces of the characters like landscapes, explored in close-ups and in even tighter close-ups, extreme close-ups; the extraordinary manipulation of the editing, slowing down time—first in the opening sequences of Once Upon a Time in the West before the titles—slowing down time or accelerating time; and the choreography of Morricone's music was the overall cue. I began to understand that this is opera, this is commedia dell'arte, this is Italian, it's not an American Western, this is an evolution of the Western—this is a whole new genre and that's what made it so important…"