John Launer is a GP and family therapist, now working as a medical educator and writer. @johnlauner.bsky.social
Sergio Leone’s final and arguably greatest Western, “Once Upon a Time in the West” is famous for its long, drawn-out gun fights, which open and close the movie like two gruesome bookends. Less often noted is the fact that the plot centres around a woman who is a sex worker, and it shows her in an almost entirely positive light. Jill McBain, played by with extraordinary finesse by Claudia Cardinale, is a New Orleans prostitute who has accepted a proposal of marriage from one of her clients, a hot-headed Irish widower with three children and a ranch in the remote Arizona desert. Cardinale’s name appears in the opening credits before any of the three famous male actors who star alongside her, and she appears in more scenes than any one of them.
Early in the movie, Jill arrives at the McBain ranch for the first time to find that her entire new family has been slaughtered. Initially she is led to believe that the murderer was a notorious local bandit and gang leader called Cheyenne (played by Jason Robards). She soon understands that Cheyenne was framed, and that the culprit was a far more sinister man named Frank (acted by Henry Fonda). Frank leads a band of enforcers, working on behalf of an avaricious tycoon who is building a coast-to-coast railroad. Frank’s job is to “clear all obstacles” in the way of the progress of the railroad and the profits of the company. The movie makes it clear that rapacious capitalism represents the lowest circle of Hell, with banditry somewhat higher up the scale of morality and prostitution barely an issue.
The movie makes it clear that rapacious capitalism represents the lowest circle of Hell, with banditry somewhat higher up the scale of morality and prostitution barely an issue.
Apart from Cheyenne and Frank, there is a third male protagonist who remains unnamed, but is known as Harmonica after the instrument he plays. His role, performed by Charles Bronson, is as an avenging angel of justice, pursuing Frank in retribution for a hideous crime in the distant past. We only learn of its nature in a flashback during the final duel between the two men.
Like Harmonica, Jill engages our sympathy from the moment she appears, and sustains it throughout the movie – as widow, inheritor, detective, and survivor amidst the brutalities that surround her. Despite this, there are three scenes involving Jill, one with each of the men, which will provoke moral discomfort in many viewers. The first is when Cheyenne appears with his gang to explain he was innocent of the massacre of her husband and children – and to see if there is anything at the ranch worth stealing. Assuming his motives go beyond exculpation and theft, Jill mocks him with how little it would mean to her if he raped her. “If you want,” she says. “You can lay me over the table and amuse yourself, and even call in your men. Well, no woman ever died from that. When you’re finished, all I’ll need would be a tub of boiling water, and I’ll be exactly as I was before. Just another filthy memory.” Contrary to her expectations, Cheyenne proves to be a reliable ally and confidant.
Later the same morning, Harmonica appears at the ranch, seemingly with the intention of becoming Jill’s protector. He has evidently overheard her earlier conversation with Cheyenne. His first action is to push her backwards onto what looks like a table, and to pin her down by her neck, as if carrying out exactly the rape scenario she expected with Cheyenne. It is a brief scene, over in a minute. He releases her and asks for some water. Shortly afterwards, he saves her life by shooting two of Frank’s men who have arrived to kill her. But in that moment, we have seen a side of the avenging angel that appears nowhere else in the movie.
It is a magnificent movie, but more magnificent for not making virtue look easy or straightforward.
In the last of these morally ambiguous scenes Jill is alone with Frank, the arch-villain of the movie. Although he intended to dispatch her just as he dd with the rest of her family, Frank has calculated that he can gain more gratification and wealth by exploiting her in other ways. He has abducted her to a Navajo cave that serves as his band’s hideout. There, in what can only be described as a love scene, the two embrace and make love, with Jill physically taking as active a part in the kissing and undressing as Frank. The dialogue, where she admits that she will “do anything to save her skin”, implies coercion, but is at odds with the romantic, passionate way she surrenders her body to Frank. The scene suggests there is only a thin line between a convincing performance of consensual sex and a convinced one. Later, in a hotel in town, Jill takes a hot bath, the panacea for violation that she mentioned before, but it scarcely washes away the viewer’s sense that she has crossed an uncomfortable moral boundary. Or perhaps it is the director, actors and audience who have crossed it.
The movie ends as one is led to expect. Harmonica kills Frank in their duel. Cheyenne shoots the evil tycoon, but receives a bullet wound in return that also proves fatal. By the time the railroad reaches the ranch, Jill has turned the place into a thriving staging post with emerging town around it, and a credit to her late husband. In the last scene, Harmonica rides off while Jill takes out pitchers of water to refresh the black railroad workers. It is a magnificent movie, but more magnificent for not making virtue look easy or straightforward. It speaks to the tensions between idealism and realism. GPs and health professionals might find some balm in it for moral distress.
Featured movie: “Once Upon a Time in the West,” dir. Sergio Leone (1968), Paramount Pictures.
Featured image by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash
