WHAT IS IT with John Milius? You can hardly watch ...

T with John Milius? You can hardly watch a DVD featurette these days-especially if it concerns a western-without his fat face popping up on the screen, puffing away on a stinky black cigar and pontificating about some crap or another. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised to see him here again, but it's always such a disappointment.

Sadly, there's much to be disappointed with on this DVD. Not the film itself certainly, or the way it's presented-just everything that comes along with it.

Leone's sprawling, operatic, over-the-top and often simply ridiculous western mixed a great script (by Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento) with a surprising cast (Henry Fonda playing a ruthless killer), unparalleled cinematography and one of the greatest scores ever written. At once an homage to every great western ever made, a commentary on the western as a genre and an exercise in turning every cowboy movie cliche on its head, Once Upon a Time in the West, almost by accident, became one of the greatest westerns ever made. It's The Odyssey of westerns, filled with mythical characters who loom as large and wide as the landscape itself.

Audiences in 1968 were bored by the film. Even with the cuts demanded by the studio, it ran close to three hours. There's no denying it can move awfully slowly (albeit deliberately) at times. But seeing it again now in this beautiful transfer, I don't remember a single boring moment. In every scene, something interesting is going on-whether it's a camera angle, or dialogue that's too clever for its own good, or watching Leone dismantle and rebuild everything he'd done with Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy.

The disappointment here is with Paramount's presentation. The commentary track, which features close to a dozen people (and John Milius), feels like it was snipped together from the interviews done for the featurette. And that featurette? Paramount tries to make you think it's "three new documentaries," when in reality it's just one hour-long documentary, senselessly and sloppily hacked into three separate parts. They're fooling nobody! Along with interviewing people who actually had something to do with the film (including archival footage of Fonda and Leone, but oddly enough none of Morricone, whose score was the foundation upon which the film was built), they also talk to Alex Cox (what's with that camera angle?), John Carpenter and, of course, the obligatory John Milius, who spends five minutes at one point trying to light his cigar. It's neither insightful nor terribly interesting. There's also cast and crew bios, a couple of still galleries and an additional doc about railroad history, too.

JIM KNIPFEL

LILIOM

DIRECTED BY FRITZ LANG

KINO INTERNATIONAL