The most iconic opening scene of all time, according to the Coen brothers: “I’m ashamed not to be original”
If there’s one thing the Coen brothers hate doing, at least as a unit, it’s explaining what their films are about. Fortunately, they’ve always been less hesitant to talk about other people’s movies, even if there was a sense of shame in admitting that their pick for cinema’s most iconic opening scene was unoriginal.
There’s no rule that says you have to think outside of the box when asked a question like that, and as esoteric and idiosyncratic as their work has been, there was no need to pull out some obscure introduction that only a handful of ardent cinephiles would even be aware of. Greatness is greatness, whatever way you try and slice it.
Even bad films can have memorable opening sequences, as Dominic Senna’s Swordfish can attest, but history tends to remember the classics that kick off with a bang. From Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mean Streets, it’s hardly beholden to genre, either.
Jaws, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, Star Wars, Touch of Evil, and The Wild Bunch are some of the other masterpieces spanning decades that ignite with the biggest possible bang, but none of them tickled Joel and Ethan’s fancy quite like the elegiac opening moments of timeless, genre-defining great.
When pressed for their opinion at the Cannes Film Festival, Ethan didn’t hesitate. “I’m ashamed not to be original because everybody likes that,” he said. “But every once in a while, I think about Once Upon a Time in the West, by Sergio Leone.” In this case, there’s no shame in not being overly original.
After all, it deserves to be spoken about so reverentially as one of cinema’s all-time great openers. It’s remarkably simple, too, with a trio of hoodlums hanging around at a train station, water dripping ominously onto one of their hats, before Charles Bronson’s Harmonica arrives on the scene.
They stare at each other for a while, and because it’s a western, as soon as the guns are drawn, it’s the good guy left standing tall as the trio sent to kill him get nothing more than a body full of bullets for their troubles. It’s iconic, and it’s a mere taster of what’s to come in Leone’s epic.
It’s a picture that the Coens have a personal connection with, having previously shared that Once Upon a Time in the West was the first movie they ever saw that “blew our minds to a certain extent,” celebrating it as something that “you can’t help but sit up and take notice of” each and every time it catches your eye.
There’s no right or wrong answer in trying to name a single scene as the finest opener ever committed to celluloid, but you couldn’t definitely do a lot worse than Leone’s grandiose western.
