Originating as a term of abuse, the "Spaghetti Western" now defines arguably the greatest works in the Western genre. Certainly the operatic flamboyance of Italian Westerns is unlike anything that came before. (Asked if he'd seen an Italian Western, John Ford's only response was "You're kidding.") As we've space for only one Spaghetti Western to conclude the PFA's Western retrospective, we've gone straight to the masterpiece-Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West from 1968 (now available in the director's cut after fifteen years in mutilated release). It's an explicit revision of the Hollywood myth (aficionados may spot visual quotations from High Noon, Shane and Johnny Guitar within the first twenty minutes alone), less concerned with U.S. history than with a part-Marxist, part-Brechtian exploration of capitalism-as-wild-West. With an original story by Bernardo Bertolucci, it's no surprise that in this West the six-guns are powered by fistfuls of dollars. The story is based on the most shopworn of stereotypes: a New Orleans whore turned frontier widow (Claudia Cardinale) who fights the land-grabbing railroad tycoon, alongside a likeable bandit (Jason Robards) and a taciturn avenger (Charles Bronson). Playing thoroughly against type is Henry Fonda, his blue eyes cold and murderous. But Leone's style is key to the transformations of the myth. His mastery of landscape, of music, of gestures combines into a Machiavellian sense of threat, augmented by silences that are less expressions of inner-directed cowboys than of tightlipped mafioso omerta. Only on the Cinemascope widescreen can one savor the Western that Leone has called "my ballet of the dead." Scott Simmon