Once Upon A Time In The West -- 1968 -- PG-13

What to say about this one. I've been sitting here thinking about this film and (amusingly) thinking about what I think about it. Sounds goofy, but it's the truth. If ever there was a definition of a smooth movie, this one meets that definition head on. It was definitely smooth, but I'm not sure of how memorable it came out.

It starts with a bang. Three guys wait for a train, and the guy they meet shoots them. Next scene, a family prepares for their mother to come home, and a group of guys kills them all. This is the foundation laid. It is out job while watching this film to figure out why all this happened. The story begins from that point with a woman coming to town to find her family was blown away and there is also that stranger from the earlier train platform. How do they relate? What is his interest in her? What's with the harmonica? Everything that happens works to fill in the blanks, but not until we are finally told what the deal is with this and that, which doesn't happen till 2 hours into this 3 hour movie. It's a long wait for an anticlimactic revelation.

Maybe that was my problem. It was anticlimactic. Every scene worked to a peak and was played out very well. The characters were fairly well drawn for the genre and even interesting. Everything seemed to work really well, the plot really doesn't have any holes in it, and I understood the characters and their motivations, but maybe it just wasn't that dramatic to me. I really can't put my finger on it. It wasn't even boring.

I was drawn into the intrigue of these super secretive guys wondering who they are and why they're doing what they're doing. Little by little, their lives were unfolded to us showing us just a bit more, but leaving enough in the shadows to make us want even more. That worked really well.

So in the end, it's a movie without major problems except that it lays really flat for the 3 hour duration. It's not boring. It's not bad. It just didn't do anything. Someday, I will watch it again to figure out what it is I missed when I watched it this time because for the life of me, I can't figure it out.