A spaghetti western
Not Western Australia and nothing to do with spaghetti.
Once upon a time in the west (C'era una volta il West) is a 1968 “spaghetti western”, as Italian westerns came to be called. Like other movies in that genre it has its quota of sexism and gratuitous violence, almost stylized enough to come across as a skit on traditional westerns.
Three features ensured that it was destined to stand out:
Lead roles played by Claudia Cardinale and Henry Fonda.
Enrico Morricone’s musical score.
That opening scene is filmed in Spain – close enough to an imagined American west! The cinematography is outstanding, but the real contributions to the landscape are oral. A buzzing fly and the regular clunk of a windmill with a worn bearing are the only sources of sound as a posse of thugs wait for a train at a miserably lonely station surroiunded by a treeless landscape.
Many Australians should be able to place themselves in that scene, but in America it met with a poor reaction from audiences, who were anxious for the film to get on with the action, and it was eventually severely cut in the US version.
