Sergio Leone is definitely one of the directors that I admire the most.

I have discovered his westerns during my childhood, and I have seen them again and again since... with a pleasure that has never died out, on the contrary !

I think that one of the westerns wich has impressed me the most is Once upon a time in the west... and I have to tell that the music has played a big role in the emotion that the film may have aroused in me...

I have read in the book by Noël Simsolo titled Conversation with Sergio Leone, that the basic idea of the director was to stage a ballet of death, taking as material all the ordinary myths of the traditional western : the avenger, the romantic bandit, the rich owner, the criminal businessman, the whore... to show the birth of a nation. Thus, all these characters, as archetypes, are destined to die, because the Progress settles in.

That is why Sergio Leone chose to stretch the time of the film and to give it a slow rhythm, in order to give his characters the time, to study themselves, to measure themselves, as if they were aware that they were going to die at the end. Sergio Leone adds : « this game takes on a real weight because it embodies the strength to survive. If Once upon a time in the west has a Japanese aspect, it is also because the Orientals have this philosophy about death.” Moreover, Sergio Leone explains that Japanese cinema fascinates him with its particular use of silence : he particularly appreciates the rhythm that this gives to films.

Personally, I have a lasting memory of the film’s opening credits - that is to say the first 20 minutes - and I think it perfectly illustrates our previous words.

To explain the silence of these cult first twenty minutes, in the book Once upon a time in Italy by Christopher Frayling, Ennio Morricone recounts an experience he had lived some time before the filming. He had attended a concert in Florence where a man had come on stage and had begun to make to grind a ladder in a complete silence. It had lasted several minutes, and the audience did not understand at all what he was getting at. But in the silence, the grinding of this ladder has taken on another dimension : the philosophical argument of this experience being that a sound (any sound) isolated from its context - in total silence - becomes something totally different in reality. Ennio Morricone says : « this idea is the basis of the extraordinary first twenty minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West. In the middle of the silence, the drop of water that falls on the hat, the fly, the wind, the mill, the squeaking of steps ; in a way, it becomes a kind of fantasy. In my opinion, it is one of the best moments of the film. » (I have to say that I totally agree with Ennio Morricone !).

But this silence is finally there only to better prepare us for the extraordinary entry into the stage of the Harmonica, this absolutely mystical character masterfully interpreted by Charles Bronson.

Ennio Morricone explains that Sergio Leone « had perfectly understood that a music « internal » to a scene, which develops itself from a scene, keeps all the force of expression acquired during this scene. » And indeed, the first time that we hear the harmonica, the music is internal to the scene ; then when we hear it again, it is no longer an internal music, but it retains all the dramatic force, the irony and the tragedy derived from the initial internal context.

In the film, the sound of the harmonica is born « by chance » from the mouth of the brother who supports his elder on his shoulders, an older brother condemned to die when the other will fall from fatigue. That is why this sound is a symbol in the memory of the spectator as well as a dramatic representation of the whole story – that is also why it remains present throughout the film, and that it marks the memory of the spectator even far beyond...

For the anecdote, Sergio Leone tells that to get this complaint of pain which is the theme of Charles Bronson (the Harmonica), he squeezed the throat of the musician. He absolutely wanted to make him get the sound he wanted ! The poor musician was thus at the limits of suffocation, his eyes bulging, in tears. And Sergio Leone finishes by saying : "But the result is great. The melody fit perfectly with Bronson’s stature."