58 Years Later, This 15-Minute Opener Is Still Better Than Every Western Since

Few directors have mastered the art of the opening scene like Sergio Leone, the filmmaker behind the classic “Dollars” trilogy. While A Fistful of Dollars’ opening sequence of a stranger in a divided village largely borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, of which it was an unauthorized remake, the films that followed upped the ante considerably. For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (the director’s final outing with Clint Eastwood) gave viewers richly atmospheric openings with title cards and minimal dialogue, brief episodes in the characters’ violent lives that suggested the movie they were about to be in. But his greatest opening sequence and film came afterwards, with 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West.