DUCK, YOU SUCKER Directed by Sergio Leone United Artists

Duck, You Sucker deserves a prize of some sort for having the least appetizing title of any major film released this year. In France, where I saw it, the film was called “Once Upon a Time There Was a Revolution,” a much more sensible title, and one which links the film to Sergio Leone’s previous film, Once Upon a Time in the West. If the two titles suggest a fairy tale quality, it’s not entirely inappropriate. Leone (he’s the Italian director who started the spaghetti western craze with his Clint Eastwood movies) creates an old West like none you’ve ever seen before: vistas so sprawling they’d make John Ford drool, hazy chiascuro hanging over his interiors, and some of the most shamelessly baroque camerawork since Max Ophul’sZo/a Montez. His plots resemble nothing less than opera — crammed as they are with sentimental flashbacks, cheap ironies, and twist endings — and his directorial conceptions are so outrageously oversized they make the word epic seem puny.