Yes, we’re talking about Henry Fonda as Frank.
For over three decades leading up to Once Upon A Time In The West, Henry Fonda had been playing the strong, stately American hero on screen. In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, and Drums Along The Mohawk, he played stern, stoic, but nevertheless principled Western protagonists.
Outside of the Western, he also portrayed Abraham Lincoln and Tom Joad in Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes Of Wrath, respectively, as well as the sole voice of reasonable dissent in Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men.
While John Wayne could sometimes come off as a maverick cowboy and Jimmy Stewart a simplistic everyman, Fonda was a consistent force of assertive, yet benevolent righteousness.
The opportunity to work with Fonda was allegedly one of the biggest draws for Leone to do a fourth Western. According to the film’s behind-the-scenes documentary, An Opera Of Violence, Leone came to Hollywood after his Euopean-shot Dollars films with the hopes of developing what would eventually become Once Upon a Time in America. However, Paramount convinced him to do at least one more Western first, with a large budget and the chance to direct Fonda as irresistible bait.
Leone had no intention of casting Fonda as the protagonist, though. Instead, he gave Fonda the part of Frank, a ruthless, gunslinging assassin, who enters the film by leading a group of bandits in the slaughter of an innocent family.
When just the family’s youngest son remains, the aggressors emerge from the sagebrush and the camera slowly wraps around the group’s obvious leader standing in the middle, eventually revealing it to be Fonda — clean-shaven face, baby-blue eyes, and all.
He kills the unarmed boy point-blank. This unforgettable introduction likely wowed audiences back in 1968, who had nary seen Fonda play anything but a respectable figure. It let the audience know that this was not a typical Henry Fonda role, and by extension, Once Upon A Time was not going to be a typical American Western.
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