ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
Building tension through the absence of sound
Spoilers for Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
When we think of growing tension in movies, the soundtrack often does a lot of the heavy lifting. Bernard Herrmann’s orchestral score builds to the discordant strings in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), or the repetition of John Williams’ iconic soundtrack to Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). Music can sometimes be one of the most memorable parts of a film – after all, we all mimic Ennio Morricone’s main theme in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966).
Yet the absence of sound can be just as effective in creating tension and so we turn to Leone’s next, and penultimate Western, Once Upon a Time in the West. Once again teaming with Morricone and working from a story co-created with two future heavyweights of Italian cinema, Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, Leone creates an epic that sees its characters struggle with the transition from the Wild West to an industrial, connected America.
The very first two scenes highlight the power of silence within the soundtrack. The first is used simply to build up the arrival of Harmonica (Charles Bronson), the film’s equivalent to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, as three gunmen (Woody Strode, Jack Elam and Al Mulock) wait at a train station.
Rather than fill the vast American landscapes (substituted by the Spanish plains here) with sound, Morricone allows the diegetic sound of flies buzzing, water dripping and the cracking knuckles of one of the gunmen to echo. The tension builds because we know that they are waiting for someone or something, but Leone keeps exposition to a minimum, making the audience wait it out with the three characters in near silence until the train comes into the shot: the thrumming of the steam engine building into a soundtrack of its own.
Yet it’s the next scene where the silence within the sound design truly work to build tension. We close in on the McBain family as they prepare a meal for the father’s new wife. Brett (Frank Wolff) is organising his children, putting Maureen (Simonetta Santaniello) to work laying the table, while the youngest Timmy (Enzo Santaniello) gets changed and Patrick (Stefano Imparto) prepares to head to the train station to collect his new stepmother (Claudia Cardinale).
Again, we get very little in the way of a typical soundtrack. Morricone builds layers from the sounds around the McBain ranch. The noise of the cicadas in the brush, and the wind blowing across the plains, interspersed the family chatting and humming. What’s strange is that occasionally the noises drop away, leaving nothing but silence.
This isn’t just for the audience; the characters notice the quiet. Brett appears to be particularly suspicious of this. It’s a near-supernatural touch; a premonition of something evil coming to the ranch. For the audience, it’s a jarring pull back into the lawless world that Leone sets his films.
The result is the massacre of the McBain family, including the youngest child at the hands of Frank (Henry Fonda) and his henchmen. It’s a shocking scene, especially for the murder of children (something that remains a little taboo even today) but that feels inevitable even without the context given by the rest of the film.
The intermittent silence is as effective as if Morricone had created a bombastic orchestral movement, with the peaks and troughs that move with the action. It’s effective because the diegetic sound highlights how dangerous the world is. It’s a heightened version of the Wild West for sure, but we know there were enough gunslingers and thieves to make living on the American frontier difficult.
It's also indicative of Leone’s feelings towards the Western genre at the time. He had wanted to start work on Once Upon in America (1984) after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly but was only offered more Western films. He relented to make Once Upon a Time in the West because Paramount offered a large budget and promised to cast Henry Fonda. The western Leone would present, however, was far darker, and more morally ambiguous than his previous works.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA
Morricone’s sound design then represents this. This is not an entertaining, upbeat western, but the story of people finding that their place in the world has been phased out. There is none of the ‘wah wah wah’ that we heard in earlier soundtracks, instead the harsh sounds of the American frontier become the basis for a more sombre musicality, only broken by the sudden bursts of violence.
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Â Sergio Donati, Sergio Leone
Starring: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson
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