Murphy's Law (1986)

Film: Murphy's Law (1986)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Carrie Sondgress, Kathleen Wilhoite, Robert F. Lyons

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After Death Wish, Charles Bronson would spend the remainder of his career making, for lack of a better word, schlock, most of these movies for Cannon Films, a production company that produced our picture today Murphy's Law.  Cannon would make some notable films, including Runaway Train with Jon Voight & Eric Roberts, as well as Street Smart which featured a breakout role for Morgan Freeman (all three of these actors would get Oscar nominations for their parts), but it was best known for producing lucrative action flicks that would play really well in the emerging home video market.  In many ways it was a predecessor to the direct-to-video trend of the 1990's (and the later phenomenon of RedBox movies featuring fading action stars like Mel Gibson & Bruce Willis), and the two actors they were most well-known for working with were Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson.  Outside The Indian Runner with Dennis Hopper & Patricia Arquette, after 1980 Bronson would work pretty much exclusively on the 1980's equivalent of Poverty Row movies, making a fortune in the process, but largely eschewing any sort of acting legacy as none of these films post-Death Wish have really lasted in the public's memory.

(Spoilers Ahead) This doesn't mean that all of these films were bad, exactly, but they were formulaic and they were decidedly not Sergio Leone or John Sturges.  Murphy's Law is about a man who essentially feels like he's on autopilot (or maybe that's just Bronson's blasé performance).  Jack Murphy (Bronson) is a cop who spends the film's opening scenes arresting Arabella McGee (Wilhoite), a young carjacker with a foul mouth.  We see intercuts of a mysterious woman we later learn to be Joan Freeman (Snodgress), who is bent on revenge against Jack for imprisoning her years earlier, and frames him for murder, which means that he and Arabella must go on the run as he tries to solve the case.  The film involves a series of dead bodies stacking up, along with some nudity, drugs, and (because this is a 1980's action film with a female lead under the age of thirty) sexual assault, and a variety of character actors getting killed, including Bill Henderson, who you may recognize as the Cop in the movie Clue (or at least that's how I recognized him, though perhaps more learned people will know he was an accomplished jazz musician).  The movie ends with Arabella & Jack injured but clearly friends (and maybe more), while Joan is flattened on a pavement after a fall.

The movie almost works on a camp level, even if it's not remotely any actual good.  Wilhoite, whom you might know from either her years of voicing the title character in the cartoon Pepperann or from playing Luke's sister on Gilmore Girls, has some of the most ridiculous dialogue I've ever heard in a film.  She is asked to insult someone every 15 seconds, frequently with profane or even offensive (this movie is CRAZY homophobic, though notably there is in fact an actual surprise gay couple to at least make one of the insults feel accurate if still offensive), in a schtick that would basically suffocate your kidneys if you turned it into a drinking game.  We learn virtually nothing about Snodgress other than (as she goes) she's clearly mentally insane, but she tries her best to instill a sense of fun into these proceedings, but all-in-all, this film fulfills its purpose: it's fast-paced, feeding your baser instincts, and disposable.  That it isn't particularly good doesn't feel like Cannon (or Bronson's) concern since they already got your money.

This is where I put in that it's disappointing what Bronson would do with his later career, because he would never get a post-fame reassessment like some of his peers (I'm thinking specifically of Clint Eastwood & Burt Reynolds, both of whom would eventually become Oscar-nominated actors) would in the years that followed.  This wasn't for a lack of trying.  Bronson turned down the role of The Shootist (John Wayne's final role, and one of his best) because the main character was dying of prostate cancer, and Bronson didn't want to play that onscreen.  Ingmar Bergman was fascinated by Bronson, and tried to work with him, but Bronson didn't like Bergman's films & wasn't interested.  He tried out for a number of major movies of the era, including Capricorn One, Escape from New York, and bizarrely the lead in Superman, but wasn't "right for the part" and it went nowhere.

The most famous role, and one that would've changed his legacy that Bronson would turn down was of Curly in City Slickers.  Initially the role went to Jack Palance, but Palance had a scheduling conflict, and so they brought in Bronson for the part.  But at the time, Bronson's beloved wife Jill Ireland was dying of breast cancer, and Bronson wouldn't allow himself to work while she was suffering.  Bronson turned down the role, the City Slickers producers found a way to get Palance into the schedule...and Palance would go on to win an Academy Award for the role.  Bronson would never have a role of that caliber offered to him again, and would work irregularly until a hip surgery eventually made it impossible.  Toward the end of his life, before his death from lung cancer in 2003 at the age of 81, Bronson would walk with a cane, one that contained the ashes of Jill Ireland, whom he couldn't bear to be apart from, even in death.  The cane would be buried with him.

Next month, we're going to talk about a contemporary of Bronson's, and a frequent costar (they would make three films together), but one whose legacy post-fame was decidedly more critical-friendly...though his life would be considerably shorter than Bronson's which would have an even bigger impact on that legacy.

Death Wish (1974)

Film: Death Wish (1974)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, William Redfield, Hope Lange

Director: Michael Winner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Charles Bronson's career and star persona would've certainly been different were it not for today's movie.  At the age of 52, most character actors are transitioning out of the limelight or more stunt-heavy spots, and instead becoming the sage for a younger, more famous actor (or playing the father to a younger, more famous actress).  It's rare, though, that you are going to become a true movie star in your 50's, but that's what Bronson did.  At this point, it's worth noting (as we've seen the past few weeks) that Charles Bronson was a relatively decent & successful box office draw, specifically in Europe, but he wasn't as big of a deal in the United States.  Death Wish would change that, though.  The movie, in 1974, would become a cultural phenomenon, making an extraordinary amount of money, and staying in the box office for weeks on-end.  To give you a perspective of how long the legs were for this movie, it became the #1 movie in America on its twentieth week at the box office, and would end the year as the #9 movie of 1974, putting Bronson in the same leading man category as people like Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, & Charlton Heston.

(Spoilers Ahead) The politics and cultural resonance of Death Wish, though, is controversial, and that involves getting into the plot.  The film is about Paul Kersey (Bronson), who is very in love with his beautiful wife Joanna (Lange), with whom he has one adult daughter.  One day, a group of hooligans (including a very young Jeff Goldblum) break into the Kersey's home, murdering Joanna and raping his daughter.  Paul, a relatively mild-mannered architect, cannot handle that the two women he loves will not receive justice, and so he decides to take the law into his own hands.  He goes out, trains himself with a gun, and then starts to purposefully get mugged in the streets of New York by petty criminals who threaten his life.  He then turns around, and starts to murder them, all technically in self-defense, but clearly with the intention of killing them each time he goes out.  During this time, the city of New York starts to celebrate him, even as Inspector Frank Ochoa (Gardenia) tries to capture Paul, which he does (with the help of a very young Christopher Guest), but has to set him free because Paul, as the "vigilante" has become a folk hero.

The politics of Death Wish are not subtle, and it's worth noting a history lesson here.  The New York of the 1970's was dramatically different than it is today, and that's also true of America at large.  Violent crime rates spiked notably in the 1970's, and that increase would hold until the early 1990's when they would drop precipitously (despite what you may see on Fox News, America is considerably safer now than in the latter-half of the 20th Century).  This would, oddly enough, coincide with when Bronson would be a proper leading man, and might explain the divergence in opinion on Death Wish.  The movie sparked hot debate at the time-virtually every film critic of the era, from Roger Ebert to Vincent Canby to Charles Champlin to Gene Siskel all made a point of arguing that it was kind of reprehensible, essentially arguing that violence is the only way to stop other violence, and that it's not important to understand what is causing this rise in crime-just that we destroy it, even if it means trampling on people's civil liberties & right-to-justice in the process.  Even the author of the novel that inspired the movie, Brian Garfield, would try to distance himself from the picture.

Watching the film, it's hard not to agree with these critics.  Bronson's character is not super complicated, and while he plays him as a bit of a fish-out-of-water, he doesn't have the same everyman appeal that, say, Bruce Willis would have a few years later in Die Hard in a similar motif.  The film's then-aggressive violence is rather tame by modern standards (save for the brutal break-in scene), and Winner's confidence with editing & cinematography (and Bronson's undeniable presence) make it very watchable-it's easy to see why this was a hit, but it's completely fair to say that the film glorifies the violence it indulges in, and offers little in the way of political commentary other than endorsing the behavior of Bronson's Paul.  Hell, even by the end the police officer is supporting this sort of brutality.  On its technical merits, it's a 3-star movie (it's too good for me to go lower), but it also borders into dangerous in its messaging.  It's so sleek and so well-paced that it's clearly condoning this type of violence, and so I think the film's complicated legacy is justified (and it's hard to celebrate it's glorification & countless sequels).  And as we'll talk about next week in our final Saturday with Charles Bronson, it would change the trajectory of the actor's career, definitely for the more lucrative, but also making him a far less daring performer compared to the man who once starred in genuine classics like The Great Escape and Once Upon a Time in the West.

The Mechanic (1972)

Film: The Mechanic (1972)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Keenan Wynn, Jill Ireland

Director: Michael Winner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

For the first six months of our seventh season of Saturdays with the Stars, we're going to talk about the prototypical and pioneering stars of the action genre who made it possible for the last six months' stars to dominate during the genre's heyday from the late 1970's through the early 2000's, when action films regularly were the dominant force during the summer blockbuster season.  Charles Bronson was one of the pioneers of that in part because of what he did in the early 1970's: he proved that action blockbusters had built-in insurance policies in the international box office.  Bronson, by 1972-73, despite not having had a success that was as big as, say, what some of his contemporaries like Robert Redford or Ryan O'Neal had had in the domestic box office at that time, was still commanding $1 million a picture, and that was because while his films would not be a huge presence at the domestic box office, they played super well internationally, particularly in Europe.  This would become critically important for this genre in the decades to come, especially as bloated budgets (and bloated salaries) of aging action stars in the 1990's were justified because even a break-even performance in the United States could be translated to huge returns overseas.  Charles Bronson is really the first action star of this nature to discover this phenomenon, and it made him a multimillionaire.

(Spoilers Ahead) Today's film was a pretty standard expectation from Bronson come 1972, and not just because it's another stoic tough guy commanding the screen with a violent attitude.  It was also a film that he made with Michael Winner, who teamed up with United Artists as his most common director collaborator of the era.  The Mechanic shows the artistry that you could find between the two, even if the film itself is not as fascinating artistically as last week's outing with Rider on the Rain (or the more conventionally excellent films that Bronson made in the 1960's).  The film follows Bronson as a contract killer named Arthur Bishop, who has killed a wealthy man named Harry (Wynn), and then inexplicably takes Harry's son (who has no knowledge of his father's death), Steve (Vincent) under his wing and begins to train him as a killer-for-hire.  The two butt heads, but seem to be in sync as Steve's sadistic tendencies fit the killer motif like a glove.

The film is, I'm going to be honest, quite dull.  Much of the middle is repetitive & predictable.  But there's a lot of intrigue in the bookends.  The beginning of the film in a lot of ways feels like a precursor to the David Fincher film The Killer decades later-largely wordless, meticulous character introduction through Bronson's Arthur going through the motions of a murder.  It's fascinating, and also something you don't see much in cinema (maybe why this didn't resonate with American audiences). And the ending is really extraordinary-a twist where a sociopathic Steve (picked for this job in part because he's a sociopath) murders Arthur for little reason other than he wants to...all the while dooming his fate as Arthur's set up a booby trap to kill Steve as well in case he is betrayed.  It's like a sandwich with nothing impressive inside but with great bread, and it honestly made it hard to judge.

The Mechanic would be, though, the last film of this era to really test Bronson as an actor.  Up until this point, Bronson (as I've said) would make a lot of good movies, and when he wasn't, they were at least experimental films.  Next week, we're going to talk about the most important film (or at the least the film was most-associated with) of Bronson's career, and I'm fascinated to see how I respond (I haven't watched it yet), because up until now it's very clear that these films have a true perspective to them (and have made me become a proper fan of Bronson's if I wasn't already), but if you look at the critical reviews of his upcoming films, they crater pretty quickly...just in time for American audiences to absolutely fall in love with Bronson and make him one of the biggest domestic stars (not just international) in the country for a time.  Next week, we will finally get to Death Wish.

Rider on the Rain (1970)

Film: Rider on the Rain (1970)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Marlene Jobert, Gabriele Tini, Annie Cordy, Corinne Marchand, Jill Ireland

Director: Rene Clament

Oscar History: No nominations, though it did get a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  France, however, in 1970 chose to submit Hoa-Binh, and wasn't nominated at all.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Charles Bronson's career as a movie star was bizarrely-timed.  Similar to actors like, say, Morgan Freeman & Samuel L. Jackson, Bronson spent decades after coming to Hollywood working in a host of small & supporting roles before getting top-billed parts in his 50's.  Like most of these men (and honestly even more so), Bronson did this in notably good movies.  While early roles had him playing occasionally in B-Pictures (like the Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax or the celebrated Roger Corman biopic Machine Gun-Kelly), he appeared in a number of really popular & classic movies in the 1960's, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Sandpiper, & The Dirty Dozen, all of which had him in key supporting roles...but not getting the lead parts that were going to men like Richard Burton & Steve McQueen.  Bronson did, during this time frame, get a part you could arguably say he's the male lead in, Once Upon a Time in the West (he gets fourth-billing in the film, but of the three main men in the movie, he has the most screen-time), a film that was not a success when it was released to American audiences (it was filmed in Italy), but has since been considered by many to be a masterpiece.  I will go on record as saying it is my favorite movie of all-time (full stop), and Bronson is wonderful in it.

(Spoilers Ahead) But that changed in the early 1970's, as Bronson started to regularly to get lead roles, one of the first of which was Rider on the Rain.  Rider on the Rain is about a man named Henry Dobbs (Bronson), whom we don't realize until much later in the picture is not a true blackmailer or a cop, but instead a member of the military.  It's also true that much of Rider on the Rain is not really Bronson's movie-the main character in this (despite billing to the contrary) is Mellie (short for Melancolie, one of several cheeky monikers in this picture), played by French actress Marlene Jobert, who despite not being super well-known to American audiences now, was a regular lead presence in French films of the 1970's (and would go on to win an Honorary Cesar for her troubles in 2007).  Jobert & Bronson have a weird chemistry, one that feels at odds with his famed brevity as an actor (Bronson in virtually all of his roles speaks in short, clipped sentences...if you've never seen him, think something like Clint Eastwood but with slightly more inflection).

Rider on the Rain, though, would not be the prototype for a Charles Bronson picture, and that's a kind of a pity because while the film isn't very good, it is quite odd (and if you know me, you'll know I'll take "weird & not very good" over "boring but fine" any day of the week).  Jobert's Mellie kills a man who rapes her in the opening scene, and for much of the movie is trying to convince everyone around her (including herself) that she didn't do it.  It's a weird juxtaposition because in 1970 (and especially in 2026), the audience is rooting for her, and is fine giving her a pass for dealing out very direct vigilante justice.  She's also played strangely, with Jobert feeling at once a mature woman, one who is lusting after a shockingly jacked (the man's abs are incredible for being nearly 50 and not having modern workout techniques) Bronson, while also playing a "little girl" role in parts.  The film in many ways feels like a sort of New Wave take on Hitchcock, and some of the camerawork mirrors that (as does a twist at the end that I won't spoil even with the spoiler alert-you'll have to see the movie to find out).

The film also starred Jill Ireland in a supporting part.  Ireland is going to show up in one more movie we profile this month, but I'm going to take this moment to talk about her a little bit given that she was so crucial to Bronson's public persona.  Ireland & Bronson met in a rather nefarious way (she was married to David McCallum, Bronson's costar in The Great Escape, and according to legend Bronson told him that he was going to "marry his wife," which of course he would in 1968, and the two would star in 15 films together throughout the course of their career.  Ireland is important to understanding Bronson's public profile in part because she was in so many of his movies (and would even produce some), but also because he was famously shy.  Bronson rarely sat for interviews, so he didn't get the traditional cultivated celebrity-treatment that other stars would get as part of media coverage, but one thing the public knew about was his devotion to his wife.  You watch one of the rare interviews he did in the 1970's (with Dick Cavett) where he was joined by Ireland and you see the devotion, and by all accounts they had a very happy marriage.  We'll talk a little bit about this as we go along, but wanted to give Ireland her due alongside our month of Charles Bronson given she was such an important component in his filmography.

Saturdays with the Stars: Charles Bronson

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we talked about Sean Connery, the man who in many ways forged the mold for what we think of as a modern action hero.  This month we're going to talk about a man who, like Connery, had a history of fine acting but was largely overshadowed by the action films that the public adored & would ultimately become his legacy.  Unlike Connery, though, he seemed to be more comfortable with this, and would largely eschew any attempts to reclaim some of the impressive, dramatic work of his early career after one movie, the one he would be most-associated with, would forever cement his public image as a violent vigilante on the big-screen.  This month's star is Charles Bronson.

Born Charles Dennis Buchinsky in 1921, the future Charles Bronson grew up in a small coal-mining town in rural Pennsylvania, the 11th of 15 children born of immigrant parents from Lithuania.  Bronson grew up in abject poverty, his father dying when he was just 12, which forced him to go to work in the mines to help support his mother and siblings.  He still was able to finish high school, though, and in some ways World War II offered him a different life, as he joined the Army Air Force and was a pilot in the Pacific, eventually winning a Purple Heart.  After the war, he would take on stagehand work and eventually small parts in the Philadelphia theatrical community (even living with future Odd Couple star Jack Klugman) before moving to Hollywood and working as an extra in movies starring opposite Katharine Hepburn, Mitzi Gaynor, Spencer Tracy, & Gary Cooper.  His big break came with a scene-stealing turn as Igor in House of Wax (a surprise hit starring Vincent Price), which led in the 1960's to key supporting turns in some of the biggest action/war pictures of the era, such as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and The Dirty Dozen.

Bronson's career is fascinating in part because he could've stayed a supporting player forever, making a good living as a stoic figure stealing scenes in war pictures that would continue to be popular throughout the 1970's & 1980's, but instead two odd things happened.  First, he would gain international recognition in two films (Once Upon a Time in the West and Rider on the Rain), the former considered by many (including me) to be the greatest film ever made, and the latter a commercial & critical triumph that would win the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1970; both films were lensed outside of Hollywood, giving him an international flavor despite very American roots.  But instead he would largely sell out when he came back to Hollywood as a leading man, making a series of action films that were wildly popular, but didn't have the gravitas that he was clearly capable of, all culminating in Death Wish, his most famous movie, and the role with which he would be (for better or for worse) associated with for the rest of his life.  This month, we're going to talk about Bronson's career, why he ended up being an action film hero that (unlike Connery) never really also made promise on his clear acting talent in serious dramas, and how this would in some ways set up a paradox that future stars in this series would have to jump past.

OVP: The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Film: The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Stars: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn, Eli Wallach

Director: John Sturges

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Yul Brynner: click here to learn more about Mr. Brynner (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Throughout this year, we're profiling a lot of western stars, obviously, and with that, a lot of westerns.  These are all westerns that I've never seen before, and for the most part, are westerns I'm pretty comfortable saying that I've never seen before.  The films of Anthony Mann & Budd Boetticher are classics, but if we're being honest, they're not classics in the same way that The Searchers or The Wild Bunch are...they aren't universally-seen films by most film fans.  Today, though, we're getting to one of the few classic films of the western genre that I'm kind of looking sideways on, admitting that I have somehow never seen before.  Yul Brynner in 1960 was cast in a movie that, quite frankly, didn't do super well at the domestic box office (it was a smash hit overseas, particularly in the Soviet Union), but in the years that followed has become synonymous with the genre and is arguably the most important (culturally) western that we'll profile all year, and one pretty much everyone who is invested in the genre has seen before.  It is also one of the only westerns to spawn a genuine franchise, with three sequels, a remake, and a TV series all coming out of it, along with an Elmer Bernstein score that counts as one of the most iconic in film history.  Today, we are going to talk about The Magnificent Seven.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, the movie is about a poor Mexican village that is run by Calvera (Wallach), a ruthless leader of a group of bandits who frequently rob the villagers, who are defenseless, of their food to feed his men, leaving them largely to live by on scraps.  They decide one day to fight back, and look to initially buy guns to defend themselves.  When Chris Adams (Brynner) tells them that men are cheaper than guns (great line), Chris helps them recruit a band of men, seven in total, to defend the city.  Throughout, we learn about these men, who come from different backgrounds (a hotheaded young shootist, a fortune seeker, a knife expert, a drifter...it's a motley crew), but come to find some honor in defending the people of the city.  This honor is what Calvera, who keeps assuming they'll give up, can't see beyond, and it is his downfall.  In a shootout that kills four the seven, Calvera dies, and the townspeople are saved, with Chris and one of the other men, the drifter (played by McQueen) going off into the sunset, with Chris ending with the enigmatic line "only the farmers won...we lost...we'll always lose."

The film itself, I'll be honest, is a pretty standard western on its surface.  The cast was in various stages of their careers, with Brynner at the peak of his stardom, while McQueen, Coburn, & Bronson were all years away from the peak of theirs, and it shows in the casting.  Given where they were in their careers I get why some of these supporting parts weren't given stronger credence in the story (Brynner was the headliner in 1960), but Bronson & Coburn are such good actors I kept wanting more from them.  So the cast itself feeds into the standard western line-a basic story, admittedly one stolen from one of the greatest films ever made, with a misused cast should be cause for complaint.

But it's impossible to care too much because even if it's misused, the film itself still comes off successfully.  The scenes we do get of Coburn, Bronson, and especially Wallach are well-done, and the dialogue is solid, and a bit above-the-board for a western in 1960.  It's also aided by a grand slam score from Elmer Bernstein.  This lost to the theme from Exodus, which is a fine piece of music, don't get me wrong, but given that Bernstein was writing one of the defining pieces of music (it is regularly used in everything from Oscar clips to commercials to other movies) at the time, and that the theme from Psycho, another anthem of Hollywood, wasn't even nominated...the Academy missed the train a little bit on this one.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Film: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Stars: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzetti
Director: Sergio Leone
Oscar History: In one of the worst decisions in the history of the Academy, the film received no Oscar nominations, making it arguably the best film ever made to never receive an Oscar nomination.
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

I recently bought a house, and as a project for that house I'm working on the creation of my own little movie room in the basement.  While it's not quite finished yet (I feel like I shall have a similar attitude toward my blog & novels about my house in that I'll never be entirely satisfied with it, always tinkering), it's the closest any room in the house is to being exactly what I was dreaming of it being, and as a result I've been inaugurating a number of my favorite films in the room.  This weekend, I gave the room arguably its biggest classic title yet with Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, my favorite western of all-time and a film that, quite frankly, I can't recall the last time I'd seen it and was a little worried that it had become too storied in my memory to actually live up to the hype.  A nearly three-hour epic western that regularly ranks in my favorite films list as one of the greatest of all-time (it's currently positioned at #11, and is well-poised to crack the Top 10 the next I update the list), I don't think I'd even seen my Blu-Ray copy of the film yet, and may not have seen it for at least four years.  Thankfully, my memory didn't evade me-Once Upon a Time in the West was better than I remembered and even more glorious on the bigger screen (that is featured in my movie room), particularly with the Blu-Ray.  A true epic in every sense of the word, and a landmark picture that, despite its growing fame, doesn't feel as essential to any movie-lover's "must see" list as it should.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is hard to summarize into one simple paragraph as we so often do in my reviews, but here goes.  The movie takes place in a land where modernity and the wild west meet-a train magnate named Morton (Ferzetti) is making his way to the Pacific Ocean before he dies of a debilitating illness (it feels like muscular dystrophy, but the illness is never identified in the picture).  In order to get there in time, he hires a ruthless band of thugs, led by one of the nastiest villains in film history, Frank (Henry Fonda, of all people, playing a truly cruel baddie that totally upends his longtime nice guy persona), to kill an Irishman and his family on the eve of his wedding to a New Orleans prostitute named Jill (Cardinale).  Unknown to Frank, Jill is not in fact his fiancé but his wife, having gotten married in New Orleans and is therefore the legal owner of his desert ranch, which it's later revealed is a shrewd investment since the railroad must run through it to get there, and her husband McBain (Frank Wolff) planned on building a train station and making a fortune.  While trying to figure out what to do with Jill & the ticking clock of the railroad, we are dealing with two mysterious men in the story.  One is Cheyenne (Robards), a bandit whom Frank impersonates while killing McBain in order to frame him for the murders, and Cheyenne is none-too-happy about this, vowing revenge on Frank and his men.  The second is a man that only goes by Harmonica (Bronson), his real name never being revealed, who is known for playing his eponymous instrument and always keeping a cool head and his strategy to himself.  The movie ends with a showdown between Frank and Harmonica where it's revealed (wasn't kidding about that spoiler alert) that Frank killed Harmonica's brother many years earlier, not by shooting him but by hanging his brother from a noose and then having Harmonica serve as a living gallows, knowing that he can't stand forever but having him fight to keep his brother alive.  It's a nasty reveal in the showdown, when you finally realize why Harmonica has to win, and why he's hated Frank with such a blaze.

The film, as I mentioned above, is the greatest western of all time, a much-maligned genre for those who simply think of Peter Griffin saying "pilgrim" when they think of the classics of this era, rather than realizing the rich history of the many westerns that challenged the John Wayne tropes (even Wayne's own The Searchers would do just that).  The movie's genius lies in the way that it starts a ticking bomb in its first, meandering opening scenes, where Harmonica kills three nameless robbers (played by veteran character actors Woody Strode, Jack Elam and Al Mulock).  From then on, both Harmonica and Frank are marching to their inevitable end, and the film in some respects feels like one long ending.  This wouldn't work in virtually any other film, but it's the ending of a story that began long ago, of the men who created the west, but were too rough and too violent to make a proper civilization in this short-lived period of American history.  Frank, Harmonica, and Cheyenne are relics, and they know it as the film progresses, each realizing their way-of-life is not just threatened, but gasping for air, and it will be Jill, thoughtful, planful, and modern, who will bring the new world to the West.  This is a tall order for a film to carry, and almost any other director would have fallen under the weight of such a task as creating a gargantuan epic about the decline of the American West, but Leone was clearly the kind of director who took such tasks to heart.  The last thirty minutes makes for one of the best endings to any movie, period.  Think of the risk of having Harmonica's true reason for killing Frank come just seconds before Frank's death, an ending where we don't entirely know if Frank understands why he's being punished by this mysterious man.  Or the gravitas that Bronson brings to his still-faced goodbye to Jill, his "someday" not being literal but in fact that men of his nature will eventually come to save the world from evil if they are ever needed...that should read as so hokey, but it really never does.  It's hard to grasp how many jumps the film makes with its viewer that could fall flat, but Leone's confidence that he's making just a near-perfect film won't be deterred, and it pays off.

The film received no Oscar nominations, which is an unforgivable sin.  I'd argue it's not just the best movie of the year, but arguably of the decade, and it was probably ignored because Leone's film performed poorly at the box office (the western being on its last legs of Hollywood glory at the time as well), but has been rescued in decades since by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, who both consider it a landmark.  The film surely deserved nominations for Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, and the top prizes, but perhaps most egregious would be Supporting Actor and Score.  The performances are uniformly good, with Claudia Cardinale tasked with a tough part, playing the introverted hooker-with-a-heart-of-steel, and Jason Robards a brute who is also kind underneath.  But it's Bronson and Fonda who deserved the most credit.  Bronson's lone wolf is mesmerizing, the sort of performance you don't know an actor has in him until you give him the script.  Known for his tough guys and the Death Wish pictures, Bronson gives a soulful, deeply-felt performance as Harmonica, and it's hard to look at this and still see the caricature he's known as in popular culture.  Fonda is his equal as nasty, vicious Frank.  Villains are Oscar's raison d'être for Supporting Actor, so I don't know why the Academy ignored Fonda here since he was woefully without an Oscar (he'd win one 13 years later for the fine but not remotely as good On Golden Pond). Both men deserved nominations more than any performance I've seen from that category in 1968, and the same surely goes for Ennio Morricone with the most luscious score in film history.  Seriously-this is the best work from one of cinema's finest composers, lilting and iconic, frequently associating specific music with each of the four leads and it's instantly recognizable.  Morricone's work, not to get too hyperbolic, is my favorite cinematic score of all-time, and as a result it's a crime that it wasn't victorious, much less nominated.  Still, though, Oscars are one thing, but a critical reputation that grows almost every year since it's release is another.  Once Upon a Time in the West may not have gotten the attention it deserved when it came out, but a movie this good will always be found, and thankfully critics and film-lovers have done just that.