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I haven't seen Once a Upon a Time in the West in many years. Is it true many of the lines were taken from various American westerns...as a kind of homage? So I've heard. Leone and his writers (supposedly Bertolucci among them) were dovotees of the American western.

Leone and a couple of them spent weeks watching anywhere from a few dozen up through a 100 westerns before they sat down to write OUATITW (depending on which writer/film crew you ask the number varied). Leone was already a huge fan of John Ford, but going through all of these other films, they basically wrote down all of the things they didn't like (the bad cliches, etc.), and tried to stay away from those. He also did try to use some things that he really liked in other movies, but OUATITW wandered away from what they were originally writing about.

From what was said by the writers/crew that are still living, Leone was treating this as his last western, and wanted to insure that he didn't make any mistakes or have any of the bad cliches that most westerns seemed to be full of.

The opening to OUATITW is an homage to High Noon, one of Leone's favorite movies, by the way.