Part of our CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS series. Saturday, May 23, 2020 @ 7p, Netflix Streaming Service: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969 , Netflix, dir by Sergio Leone, streaming, 175mns)
HOW TO: While we all work to be socially responsible during the age of coronavirus, Secret Movie Club is experimenting with news ways we can all come together as a community and watch great movies.
We want to keep this very reasonable since folks have to have Netflix to start with. So we're asking for $1, $2, $3, $4, and $5 dollar tickets to get the link. Whatever you want to contribute.
Just make sure you download NETFLIX PARTY on a Chrome Browser. You'll see the initials NP in the upper right hand corner of browser after a succesful download.
Secret Movie Club will email the link for the Netflix Party at 30 minutes before showtime using the email you provide here. Click that link then click the NP in upper right hand corner. This will synch you to our screening. We will start the movie at exactly 5 minutes after the hour.
There will be a chat function that allows everyone to comment as we go.
The Secret Movie Club team will be offering trivia, history, insights, articles, deep dives throughout the movie(s). We're going to work to make this as rich a feast as possible utilizing the technology at hand.
Then we'll want your feedback immediately on how we can improve/make it better! This also will allow Secret Movie Clubbers from all over the world to join in on a virtual screening!
This week, we’ll be looking at two amazing yet very idiosyncratic westerns. First up is Sergio Leone’s era-defining Once Upon a Time in the West made in 1969. Hugely influential on the careers of moviemakers like Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi not to mention foreign masterpieces like the Hindi Cinema classic Sholay, Once Upon A Time in the West allowed an Italian born and bred moviemaker to make a movie about American history yet frame it as a kind of fairy tale or dream.
At once more dreamlike in narrative yet more epic in ambition, West tells the story of four main characters-a newly married woman with a past, a stranger with a harmonica, a sly rogue bandit, and a handsome aging hired killer. All four stories revolve around the building of a railroad but Leone doesn’t completely tell us why when we start.
From there, we get a Western about as epic as you can make one with the four stories constantly cross-cutting including flashbacks to traumatic memories on the parts of two of the key characters. Bit by bit we get a clearer picture of how these characters relate until a stunning climax that delivers the goods and answers all the mysteries.
Once Upon a Time in the West is such a triumph of cinematic style that many moviegoers who often prefer a more rigorous kind of storytelling often find themselves willing to embrace the dreamlike/abstract nature of the narrative here because each sequence is so thrillingly and humorously crafted. Leone is making his first western without Clint Eastwood here and so Leone takes center stage.
Swelling with Ennio Morricone’s incredible score, based on a story co-written by Dario Argento (!), and starring American good guy icon Henry Fonda as one of the most amoral unsettling villains ever to grace a Western, Once Upon A Time in the West is as devoted to throwing the viewer off balance as it is celebrating its love for an American genre that must have been so foreign to Italians that it almost comes off as fantasy.
Join us as we screen this movie with deep dive facts/trivia/information this Saturday 5/23/20 @ 7p!
Best always,
Craig Hammill
35mm Secret Movie Club Founder.Programmer