Once Upon a Time in the West

"Its not like today, when everyone thinks they are a director, a genius," remarks cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli about a bona fide genius filmmaker, the late Sergio Leone, in one of three featurettes included on Paramount's fine new two-disc edition of Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone's operatic discourse on the birth of the American West. The featurette, An Opera of Violence, is one of three pieces produced by England-based Lip Sync that comprise a 70-minute examination of Leone, the Godfather of the "Spaghetti Western," and his grand opus, a film which also functions as a summation of Hollywood's views of the American West (its homages to the films of John Ford's High Noon are unmistakable). Each featurette is filled with clips, vintage interviews with Leone and actor Henry Fonda (who recounts the infamous brown contact lens story) and new talks with such Leone collaborators as Bernardo Bertolucci (who co-wrote the film's original story), filmmakers John Carpenter, Alex Cox and John Milius and actress Claudia Cardinale. Although the famously proud Bertolucci takes his share of credit for the film, all give worthy praise to Leone, most notably Sir Christopher Frayling, a Leone scholar and biographer, who succinctly addresses the filmmaker's history and that of the turbulent Italian film industry. The majority of those who appear in the featurettes also can be heard on the commentary track--again led by Frayling--giving their takes on a scene-by-scene basis. The package also includes a fine nickelodeon-styled short on the growth of the railroad as America stretched out to its Western borders and a couple of equally well-produced stills galleries that transpose the film's locations, many found in Ford's beloved Monument Valley, with the locales as they appear today. --Cyril Pearl