Once Upon A Time…..The Revolution Or Duck, You Sucker! Or A Fistful Of Dynamite Review (1971)

As I begin writing this review, my mind is simply confused if I am considering this film to be Leone’s masterpiece or is it simply because the man has wowed me so much that I’m unable to properly find the negatives in his film? I do not know, but what I do know for sure is this film, with its many names, is definitely Leone’s Top 3 films and represents him at his most politically explicit.

The film follows a Mexican Bandit, Juan, played by absolutely mind-blowing brilliance by Rod Steiger and an Irish revolutionary John, played by James Coburn teaming accidently in a fight for the Mexican Revolution.

This film has Sergio Leone’s most humorous but also most fascinating piece of opening scene, that its meaning can be taken in 3 different forms (as I know);

· A comment against censorship and not being able to know what truly happened

· About judging things quickly and to actually patiently analyse something

· A joke about The Wild Bunch, directed by another favourite of mine Sam Peckinpah, who had rejected to direct this film.

When Juan, asks for a ride from a stagecoach, he goes inside to realise that the coach contains only upper-class members who constantly criticise and abuse him and his class members. What Leone does here is he constantly and forcibly keeps showing us the mouths and eyes of these upper-class people in constant closeups in such frequency and editing that, after a point it is these, which begin to define them. It is almost like him showing that the only beautiful or important things these people know to talk about is absolute garbage.

Right from his 2nd film (this is his 6th film), Sergio Leone has always given his characters a certain past and has used that as a tool for narrative storytelling. With Once Upon A Time In The West (OUATIW), he literally builds a character (‘Harmonica”) and defines him solely by the event that happened to him in his past, and as he progressed from the Dollars trilogy, which had just verbal dialogues that gave hints about a past, only giving Indio in For A Few Dollars More a more visual flashback, from OUATIW he begins using the flashback as a sort of crutch for the character using it to define them and also explain their actions in the current. Here too, John, is constantly suffering from the trauma of his memory of revolting back in his hometown.

This film breaks Sergio Leone’s wide shots style, for a more personal and closer look the lives of these revolutionaries. The wide shot, synonymous with beautiful, is used so sparingly here, it is almost like Leone is preventing himself from romanticising this emotionally heavy and sacrificial revolution that the protagonist is fighting for. Probably the most emotional of any Leone film, Leone withdraws his suspense generating style for a more un-commercial style which is entertaining in other ways, like with all events involving Juan.

He is a bit of a loudmouth, but after a particularly horrifying event that affects him personally, he doesn’t seem to talk at all. The way Leone stages this shot where we see Juan’s sadness first, then his reaction and finally the reason for the sadness is magnificent in the way Leone has evolved his own style of suspense generation and also respects the character of Juan highly.

With Once Upon…. The Revolution, Leone has carved a place in my heart. And this I believe talks more about Once Upon…. The Revolution than any more words, I believe.