C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West)

Sholay's makers took the look and pace of its revenge story from Leone. The massacre of the Thakur's family, shot in silence with the killers walking up to a boy, is staged after the McBain massacre that opens Once Upon a Time in the West, and the film's long wordless standoffs and wide rocky landscapes come from the same source.

Tarantino has called Sergio Leone his favourite director and described Inglourious Basterds as a western, and the film opens by saying so: the first title card reads "Once upon a time... in Nazi-occupied France". What is Leone's:

• The opening sequence. A long, almost silent scene at an isolated farmhouse, built out of waiting, tiny gestures and a threat that stays conversational far past the point of comfort, which is Once Upon a Time in the West's opening restaged
• Extreme close-ups on eyes cut against wide landscape, held longer than the information requires
• Duration as the weapon. Leone's scenes are long because the length is what hurts, and the tavern scene and the strudel scene use exactly that
• Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, in cues written for Leone's westerns and reused here

Filed MEDIUM because it is a register and a method rather than a story: Basterds borrows how Leone films a scene, not what happens in one.

Tarantino's debt to Leone is the most openly stated thing about him, and Kill Bill is where it is most visible outside a western.

• The revenge plot built as a list, with each name a set piece
• Extreme close-ups on eyes held past comfort, cut against very wide frames
• A musical cue that announces a character before they act, used as Leone used Morricone's harmonica
• The long wordless stand-off, where the tension is entirely in duration

Filed MEDIUM. Kill Bill is assembled from a dozen traditions at once, chiefly Japanese chanbara and Hong Kong martial arts; the spaghetti western supplies its grammar of waiting rather than its content.