But I'll always remember Ferzetti for his wonderful performance in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Playing the crippled railroad boss Morton, he's a curiously European presence in this mythic Western, an aristocrat decaying from "tuberculosis of the bones" and driven to complete his railroad before death. Like an exile from a Visconti film, Ferzetti invests the film with an improbable sense of tragedy; though he's the villain, his rivalry with Henry Fonda's psychotic Frank and pitiful death scene command add unexpected grace notes to Leone's masterpiece.
But I'll always remember Ferzetti for his wonderful performance in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Playing the crippled railroad boss Morton, he's a curiously European presence in this mythic Western, an aristocrat decaying from "tuberculosis of the bones" and driven to complete his railroad before death. Like an exile from a Visconti film, Ferzetti invests the film with an improbable sense of tragedy; though he's the villain, his rivalry with Henry Fonda's psychotic Frank and pitiful death scene command add unexpected grace notes to Leone's masterpiece.