If it weren’t the beginning of another crazy week at Behavior (where we’re looking to hire freelance designers, by the way), I’d spend some time writing extensive praise for Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” I watched it for the first time this past weekend on a newly minted DVD version, and it was magnificent. Perhaps a very brief outlining of my thoughts are in order anyway because, at heart, this is a ninety minute film stretched out to a very long two hours and forty-odd minutes.

Leone needed all of this extra time to cram every frame with signifiers and meticulously placed allusions to other westerns; the entire enterprise is an attempt to essay the archetypal western movie, a statement of self-awareness from the father of the spaghetti western. Making films about films is an approach that sometimes makes for fascinating movies — and often it doesn’t — but the results are almost always clinical or sloppy or both. This isn’t the case with “Once Upon a Time;” the movie succeeds both as treatise and as fairy tale. It is remarkably alluring and warm even though it’s essentially a methodical rather than an emotional narrative. And it even manages to seem pretty well buttoned-up even as it manages to somehow completely lose its own plot towards the end of its second act; one manages to forgive the transgression fairly easily, which is a testament to Leone’s amazingly confident directorial hand.