I watched Once Upon a Time in the West on DVD again yesterday. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m kind of in awe of that film.

I have two options when I watch a film on DVD. I can play it on my computer monitor, which has higher resolution, but the speakers aren’t so great. Or I can watch it on my regular TV, where I run the sound through my stereo. (I haven’t sprung for HDTV yet.) This gives me the choice of good visuals or good sound, but not both at once.

This time I watched it on the computer, paying attention to the shapes and colors and people. And I noticed something I thought I could cobble into a couple posts. Tonight I’ll talk about movies and acting, and tomorrow I’ll stretch the point, in the manner of the Inquisition and the rack, and try to apply the principle to storytelling.

What impressed me on this viewing was what the actors did with their eyes. Director Sergio Leone made long close-ups of actors’ faces a major part of his narrative style. It’s a kind of moviemaking you don’t see in Hollywood nowadays, for several reasons (some of which I’ll pick up on later).

Take Claudia Cardinale, the female lead. Being a semi-normal adult male, my reflexive response to her arrival on screen is to note that she’s a cosmic uber-babe. But as I watched the film, I noticed (eventually) that she’s also a very good actress (I say “she’s” because, unlike most of the cast, she’s still alive). Looking into those soft brown eyes, you can see the whole story of her character’s (Jill the prostitute’s) life. She tells you—just with her eyes—that she’s tough and cynical and disillusioned, and yet from time to time, in the presence of the right man, there’s yearning there, a glimmering of vulnerability and a hunger for love and trust.

If they made the movie today, they wouldn’t trust the actress to convey all this with just a close-up. They’d have to write a big, histrionic scene in which she’d yell and wave her arms and denounce the abuse and exploitation that led her to sell herself. The moviemakers would do it that way for two reasons. One is that it’s more like action, and today’s movies are all quick cuts and things smashing into each other and blowing up (whether physically or emotionally).

The second reason is that most actors today aren’t capable of telling that kind of story with just their eyes. Remember Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard? “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” She was talking about the difference between silent movies and sound, but there’s as big a difference, in that regard, between Golden Age movies and the ones we get today.

If you watch a silent movie from a contemporary perspective, the acting looks extremely odd. That’s because we’re used to naturalistic acting. But silent acting wasn’t about naturalism. It was about the conveyance of emotion through the human face. It was, in its way, almost as stylized as kabuki.

And that tradition continued, I would argue, about as long as there were people from the silent era still involved in film. Which was a very long time. Sergio Leone’s grainy close-ups are, I think, tied by a direct line to D. W. Griffth.

That line is broken now. It’s broken in part because movies got faster, leaving no time for leisurely pan shots across human landscape, and also because most of the actors can’t do it anymore.

The younger actors (generally) can’t do it because they’re young, and they never paid their dues the way movie actors did in the past.

The older actors (generally) can’t do it because they’re botoxed.

One week ago tonight I was watching the FOX series “Bones,” which I find fairly entertaining. Ryan O’Neill was on in his recurring role as a main character’s father. O’Neill used to be a pretty passable actor, so I kept wondering why he was doing such strange things with his face. It finally dawned on me (duh) that he was making the best of what he could use. He couldn’t bring his eyes into the act because he was dead from the eyebrows up.

And that’s the story of pretty much every actor in Hollywood today. I’ve read that once an actor gets over about 25, they come under pressure to put their foreheads to sleep.

This is madness. Acting on film (it’s different in the theater because of the distance) without being able to use the eyes is an oxymoron. It’s like asking us to watch boxers with one hand tied behind their backs, or NASCAR with a 55 mph speed limit.

Which is one reason most movies today are lousy.

Tomorrow—what this implies for fiction, at least according to my fevered brain (which resides behind a wrinkled brow).