Another Sergio Leone masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West isn’t nearly as beloved as any installment in the director’s “Dollars Trilogy,” consisting of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — which is rather a shame, as we consider it to be superior to any of the Man With No Name adventures. It might be because West isn’t as “cool” as its predecessors; it’s darker and more cynical, as much a melancholy send-off to the western genre as it as a celebration of it. West is as much an “anti-Western” as High Noon before it and Unforgiven after it, depicting a dangerous, unpredictable world of violent psychopaths in which everyone’s motives are unclear and morals are shady at best; indeed, this is a world where a widow (Claudia Cardinale) willingly sleeps with the blue-eyed devil who gunned down her husband (Henry Fonda), despite the fact that she’s hired two mercenaries, Harmonica (Charles Bronson) and Cheyenne (Jason Robards), to hunt him down and give him what’s coming to him. Like all of Leone’s westerns, this is a slow-moving yet majestic and grand piece of filmmaking, one that leaves as big a mark on the very concept of American myth as it does on American (well, Italian, technically) cinema.