There is no denying that Clint Eastwood is the master of the Spaghetti Western. With his distinct features, his mysterious demeanor, and dead eye, Eastwood has been the longtime champion of the Old West. Even when he was still on Rawhide, there was something about this cowboy that couldn’t quite be beat.
And yet, there is another Western star who managed to “out-line” the infamous Man With No Name: Charles Bronson. That’s right, the same action star who first blazed the trail in The Magnificent Seven later pushed the genre to its limits in the Sergio Leone epic Once Upon a Time in the West, where he nailed what is perhaps the greatest line there ever was in a classic Western.
Charles Bronson Commands the Screen As Harmonica in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. In the 1968 epic Once Upon a Time in the West, Charles Bronson stars as a mysterious drifter known only as “Harmonica.” After a 10-minute opening where three men —Snaky (Jack Elam), Stony (Woody Strode), and Knuckles (Al Mulock) — take over a train depot, waiting patiently for the next arrival, he appears almost like a ghost.
After Harmonica hops off a train, he meets these three outlaws, despite expecting to meet Henry Fonda’s Frank. However, the drifter doesn’t appear terribly surprised, and instead asks Snaky, Stony, and Knuckles if they brought a horse for him, too. Snaky replies that they’re shy of just one, and then things get heated. “You brought two too many,” Harmonica replies cooly before opening fire on the three gunslingers. While Stony manages to hit Harmonica, the stranger gets up from his wounds — and is all the more impressive for it.
It would be one thing if Harmonica threatened these goons straight-up. Reciting lines like, “You’ll soon be dead” or “You won’t be getting too far,” would be standard Western fair. Instead, Bronson, quite calmly, states that there are too many horses for the number of men who will walk out of there, and then he fires. It’s a brilliant scene, and clearly sets the stage for the rest of the picture.
It emphasizes the lines of violence that many of the characters are willing to cross. More than that, it presents Harmonica as a clear and present threat to whomever stands in his way, all while noting that the Old West is a far more dangerous and grisly place than what audiences may be used to on more pacified shows like Gunsmoke. (Ironically, Jack Elam appeared on the Western program on over a dozen occasions.)