sergio leone.pdf

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Sergio Leone

Sergio Leone is a filmmaker who sits uneasily in the canon of ‘great’directors. As an Italian best known for making European Westerns,

American critics have generally regarded his contributions to the

genre with suspicion or outright contempt. Conversely, Leone was too

populist to ever be completely accepted, at least in English-speaking

countries, as an ‘art house’ figure. He directed only seven films, of

which six are generally considered ‘films by Sergio Leone’, his debut

being a straight forward studio product from the Cinecittà productionline. His most famous works are the films of the so-called ‘dollars-

trilogy’: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More(1965), and

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). All of these star Clint

Eastwood, are extremely violent, and enjoyed great box-office

success. None of his last three films were huge money-earners, and

his final work, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), was butchered

by his American backers when released in the United States. Despitethe fact that his stylistic flourishes have now become shorthand for

‘the West’ in countless television commercials and Hollywood movies,

his enormous influence on the Western has never been fully

recognised in America. To this day, European Westerns are rarely

even mentioned in English-language considerations of the genre. To

understand why this is so, it is necessary not only to understand

something of Leone’s background, but the particular manner in whichthis background coloured his inflection of American genre

conventions.

Leone came from a family with roots deep in the Italian film industry.

His mother, Edvige Valcarenghi (stage name Bice Walerian), was a

silent movie actress who gave up her profession when she married

Vincenzo Leone in 1916. Vincenzo (stage name Roberto Roberti)

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directed and acted in films during the silent era, but for reasons that

are not entirely clear he was prevented from working during the 1930s

by Italy’s Fascist regime. (1) He did manage to direct three films

between 1939 and 1945, although the last of these was not releaseduntil 1951. (2) Vincenzo tried to discourage his son from entering the

world of cinema, and Sergio briefly studied law before working as an

unpaid fifth assistant on Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief in 1948.

Sergio also appears fleetingly in the film, as part of a group of German

priests sheltering from the rain. (3)

Despite this beginning in the world of Neo-Realism, it was in the highlycommercial realm of Cinecittà studio production that Leone was to

receive his training over the next decade. By his own reckoning, he

worked on about 50 Italian and American films in the 1950s, mainly as

an assistant director. Hollywood productions flocked to Rome during

this period to utilise the cheap facilities and use up local profits from

American films, which Italian law demanded be spent within Italy.

Leone’s credits from this time include Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy(1955), William Wyler’s remake of Ben-Hur (1959) and Fred

Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story (1959).

Leone’s first directorial effort came in 1959, when he stepped in to

finish The Last Days of Pompeii for his aging mentor Mario Bonnard.

The film was released under Bonnard’s name, but its box-office

success in Italy allowed Leone to take his first directorial credit withThe Colossus of Rhodes in 1960. It seems Leone never regarded

these projects as anything more than workaday jobs, and he later

claimed he made The Colossus of Rhodes simply to pay for a

honeymoon in Spain. (4)

By 1963, the Italian industry was experiencing a sharp downturn as

ticket sales dropped and the Hollywood studios withdrew in the wake

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of such catastrophic financial failures asCleopatra (Joseph L.

Mankiewicz, 1963). Sergio Leone is often credited with starting the

European Western craze that saved Cinecittà at this time, and it’s true

that when Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo (1961) was released inRome, Leone immediately recognised the potential for a Western

remake. The idea did not, however, come from nowhere. Leone was

able to find backing for the project primarily due to the success of a

series of German Westerns based on Karl May’s pulp-fiction novels

about Winnetou, last of the Mescalero Apache, and his blood-brother,

‘Old Shatterhand’. The first of the Winnetou films, The Treasure of

Silver Lake (Harald Reinl, 1962), was a phenomenal success acrossEurope, and a further 11 Westerns based on May’s books were

produced between 1962 and 1968. (5) Several cheap Westerns came

out of Spain in the wake of the first Winnetou films, and Leone’s

Yojimboremake, A Fistful of Dollars, was actually made on the back of

another bigger-budget Western entitled Pistols Don’t Argue (Mario

Caiano, 1964), shot concurrently using the same Spanish locations.

(6)

In contrast to the Euro-Westerns that preceded it however, it was clear

right from the opening credits of

A Fistful of Dollars that Leone wasn’t interested in simply imitating

American Western conventions. The film opens with a hazy white spoton a blood-red screen, creating an almost psychedelic effect and

immediately setting the tone for Leone’s fantasy vision, with one foot

in history and the other in Hollywood dreams. The title sequence

resounds to the sound of gun-shots and Ennio Morricone’s distinctive

music, strikingly different to the orchestral scores and hokey renditions

of folk songs that had characterised the soundtracks of American

Westerns up to that time. Ironically, Leone had initially resisted hiring

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Morricone, and only met with the composer at the behest of his

producers. Despite the fact that they had been at school together,

Leone considered Morricone’s score to an earlier Western, Gunfight at

Red Sands (Ricardo Blasco, 1963) to be boring and derivative.Morricone won him over by concurring with this opinion, claiming the

producers had commissioned a pale imitation of American scores. (7)

His collaboration with Leone was an altogether more fulfilling affair,

and Morricone went on to cement one of the most fruitful composer-

director partnerships in the history of cinema by scoring all of Leone’s

subsequent films. Drawing on sound-effect experiments he had been

conducting since attending a seminar run by the American avant-garde composer John Cage in 1958, Morricone incorporated

gunshots, cannon fire, whip-cracks, chanting, whistling and watch-

chimes into his soundtracks for Leone’s first three Westerns. The

attention-grabbing music proved an ideal complement to Leone’s

baroque imagery and playful use of genre iconography.

Several other distinctive elements of Leone’s approach are apparentfrom the opening scene of A Fistful of Dollars. The film begins with

Clint Eastwood’s character approaching a well in a sun-baked

landscape of harsh light and white-washed stone buildings. Whereas

many Spaghetti Westerns sought to make their Spanish locations look

as much like the American-Mexican border region as possible,

Leone’s expansive wide-screen vistas highlight the landscape’s

slightly alien feel, creating a setting that certainly doesn’t lookEuropean, but doesn’t quite look American either. Leone was a great

admirer of surrealist art, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the

Spanish locations of his Westerns are the same arid dreamscapes

Salvador Dali employed in many of his nightmarish images of the

1930s. Leone was to later comment that the cinematographer Tonino

Delli Colli filmed the desert sequence in The Good, the Bad and the

Ugly “in a way that was worthy of the great surrealist painters.” (8)

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In his first three Westerns, Leone introduced into this landscape an

array of grotesque characters with faces as weather-beaten as the

countryside they rode through. Leone played up the traditional

unshaven image of the Western villain, filling his films with an array ofbearded, over-the-top Italian actors who leered at the camera and

laughed with sweaty abandon at their frequent acts of sadistic

violence. Their histrionics formed the perfect counterpoint to the

restraint Leone elicited from his American actors such as Clint

Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, cultivating an icy screen presence in

the Americans that had only been hinted at in their previous roles.

Clint Eastwood was known mainly as a ‘TV cowboy’ from the Rawhide

series when Leone signed him up for $15,000 to star in the first

‘dollars’ film. His original choice had been Henry Fonda, followed by

Charles Bronson and James Coburn. Fonda and Bronson turned him

down flat, while Coburn proved too expensive for the low-budget

production. Leone reluctantly agreed to sign Eastwood after viewing

an episode of Rawhide in Rome. (9) A Fistful of Dollars madeEastwood an instant star in Europe, a status he was not to achieve for

several more years in America. Eastwood went on to co-star in

Leone’s next two features, developing a persona that by The Good,

the Bad and the Ugly was perfectly balanced between detached

ruthlessness and sardonic humour.

Leone’s films similarly made Lee Van Cleef a major star in Italy,resurrecting an acting career that had never risen above playing

villainous bit parts in American films of the 1950s. After appearing

alongside Eastwood in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the

Bad and the Ugly, Van Cleef went on to make another ten Italian

Westerns.(10)

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Leone’s most startling use of an American actor was in his fourth

Western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Financial backing

from Paramount allowed Leone to fulfil his long-held ambition to work

with Henry Fonda. Leone transformed the traditionally clean-shavenhero of American cinema into a blue-eyed child killer of ruthless

ambition.

Adrian Martin has described all of Leone’s films as “odes to the

human face”, and the director delighted in alternating between

stunning wide-screen panoramas and extreme close-ups of his actors’

faces and eyes, often within the same shot. (11) The opening of TheGood, the Bad and the Ugly is a classic example of this effect, as an

apparently empty countryside is suddenly blocked out by a grimy,

wizened face swinging up into frame. Appropriately, the final image of

Leone’s last film is the face of Robert De

Niro filling the screen, shot through hazy black netting as he descendsinto opium bliss.

The unique style Leone displayed from the opening moments of A

Fistful of Dollars made an immediate impact on Italian audiences, and

his first three Westerns were huge hits across Europe. They were

released in quick succession between February 1967 and January

1968 in the United States, to box- office success and general criticalpanning. Many reviews echoed David McGillivray’s assessment in

Films and Filming, that the European Westerns were “nothing more

than cold-blooded attempts at sterile emulation.” (12) It was not until

the 1970s that any serious re-evaluation of Leone’s work occurred in

English-speaking countries. Christopher Frayling’s 1981 book

Spaghetti Westerns played a major part in this reassessment,

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although as already noted, European films are still largely ignored in

American discussions of the Western genre.

Frayling argues that Leone’s work should be considered in the contextof the ‘critical cinema’ produced by filmmakers such as Chabrol,

Bertolucci and Pasolini in the late 1960s and early ’70s. (13)Especially

in Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone self-consciously evokes the

themes, characters and settings of the American Western, divorcing

these elements from their ideological and historical base in order to

consider aspects of frontier history and mythology that Hollywood

studio products had evaded or ignored. Leone’s explicit employmentof reflexive genre clichés inOnce Upon a Time in the West, and again

in his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, would seem to cast him

as a trail-blazing post- modernist, but there is an important difference

between Leone’s referential system and the ‘blank irony’ that Frederic

Jameson identified as being cental to a post-modern aesthetic. (14)

Leone has a profound emotional and intellectual investment in the

cinematic mythologies he explores, however compromised andclichéd these mythologies may have become. Thus, as his films

become increasingly self- conscious about the ‘lost’ classical

American filmic tradition they are drawing on, they start to exhibit a

meditative, melancholic quality that is completely absent from the

energetic exuberance of the dollars trilogy. Adrian Martin admirably

summed up this aspect of Leone’s later work in his book on Once

Upon a Time in America:

It was as if, for Leone, such disembodied ‘quotations’ – if they could

be made to retain their mythic intensity and potency – might provide a

kind of catharsis or ecstasy for modern-day cinephiles pining over

their precious ‘lost object’. That is why, finally, form can never be ‘pure’

in Leone’s work: at stake in it is a psychic investment, a whole

elaborate machine of selfhood, culture and longing...(15)

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contact with American soldiers following the invasion of Italy from

1943 came as something of a shock. He later remarked:

In my childhood, America was like a religion...Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life – in jeeps – and upset all my

dreams...I found them very energetic, but also very deceptive. They

were no longer the Americans of the West. They were soldiers like any

others...materialists, possessive, keen on

pleasures and earthly goods. (17)

This disjunction between American mythology and the reality of

America crucially informs all Leone’s work. His films are essentially

about what America means to those who have never seen America

except through its cinema – for those millions in the world who grow

up with a displaced sense of being part of a nation that has no

consciousness of its part in them. Towards the end of his life Leonecommented; “I can’t see America any other way than with a

European’s eyes, obviously; it fascinates me and terrifies me at the

same time.” (18) For Europeans of Leone’s generation, growing up in

a post- war continent being rebuilt with US dollars and politically

determined by US foreign policy, the experience of dreaming

American dreams while resenting the reality of American domination

was particularly acute.

This divided relationship with the United States, equal parts derision

and longing, love and resentment, perhaps helps explain the difficulty

American critics have had in coming to terms with Leone’s work.

David Thomson’s perfunctory and dismissive entry on Leone in

hisBiographical Dictionary of Film is typical of the critical reaction to

Leone’s films since the 1960s: “I think Leone really despised the

Western...we never feel we’re in America or with people who think in9


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American. He makes fun of the very mythology and obsession that

underlie film art”. (19) At a Festival in 1981, one of Leone’s American

stars, James Coburn, defended the Italian against oft-repeated

charges of ‘disrespect’ for the Western genre with the motion “let’shear it for irreverence.” (20) Yet both these assessments miss the

deep sense of ambivalence that informs Leone’s relationship to

America and the mythology upon which that country is built.

Especially in the ‘dollars’ trilogy, Leone distilled Hollywood Western

mythology down to its most base and alluring elements, taking the

promise of total untrammelled freedom to its logical extreme. TheWest in his hands became a mythical landscape where a man could

reach beyond the pall of civilisation to a fantastical space where

enrichment depended on one’s skill with a gun and ability to deceive

an opponent. Hollywood Westerns had always invoked this dream of

pure freedom only to subsume it by film’s end under the sheen of

domestic white ‘civilisation’. Leone, in contrast, dared to embrace the

dream wholeheartedly, and in doing so reached into the dark heart ofthe American capitalist ethos, constructing a savage vision of the

West that American critics found largely unpalatable. Not because it

was false, but because it spoke a certain truth about American

mythology undiluted by the rhetorical tropes of ‘civilisation’, ‘justice’

and ‘manifest destiny’. Leone portrayed an America stripped of all

rhetoric beyond that of burning self-interest and murderous

individualism. For all their historical liberties, Leone’s films seem toembody certain essential truths regarding the illicit appeal of American

foundational mythology in a way that few, if any, American movies

have ever done. As Christopher Frayling noted in his ground-breaking

study of the Spaghetti Western phenomenon, “Leone’s films contain

no universal moral messages (as many Hollywood Westerns have

claimed to), and his heroes are not intended to set an example for

today.” (21) Instead, Leone’s camera celebrates the visceral energy of

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America’s mythology of violent individualism while remaining coolly

ambivalent about its morality. His West is the savagery of the frontier

without the posthumous, self-justifying liberal veneer with which

American films of the classic era liked to coat it.

Although ambivalent regarding American notions of freedom and

progress, Leone was equally suspicious of the left-wing politics

embraced by many European filmmakers of the late 1960s. His 1971

film Duck, You Sucker is set during the Mexican revolution, and can

be seen as a rejoinder to some of the more overtly left-wing Italian

Westerns of the period, such as A Bullet for the General (DamianoDamiani, 1966). While Leone’s film doesn’t condemn revolutionary

politics outright, it refrains from the unambiguous endorsement of

violent political activity seen in many Italian Westerns set in

revolutionary Mexico. Originally Leone had intended only to produce

Duck, You Sucker, and his decision to take over directing the film

several days after shooting had commenced possibly contributed to its

slightly uneven quality. Despite this, it does feature some of Leone’smost affecting set-pieces, especially in the scenes depicting mass

executions during the revolution.

Leone dedicated most of the 1970s to preparing Once Upon a Time in

America. The strain of shooting the film in 1982-83 worsened an

already serious heart condition, and the legal battle he endured with

the studio in trying to preserve the film’s 228 minute running timefurther eroded his health. Despite his efforts, the Ladd Company

excised 84 minutes from the film, and re-edited the carefully

constructed cross-cutting between three different time zones into a

nonsensical chronological narrative. Thankfully, Leone’s original cut is

available on video.

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Since his death in 1989, Leone’s films have become something of a

template for directors wishing to imbue their self-conscious use of

genre iconography with a sense of dream-like nostalgia for imaginary

lost times. But few filmmakers have matched Leone’s skill atdeconstructing Hollywood dreams while at the same time retaining a

melancholy longing for their revalidation. Although he remains a

controversial figure in critical circles, his stylistic influence is

everywhere in ’90s American cinema, from Back to the Future Part III

(Robert Zemeckis, 1990) to the work of Quentin Tarantino and his

associate Robert Rodriguez. Leone-like imagery and Morricone-

sounding scores have formed the basis of countless televisioncommercials – surely the final proof that his stylistic traits are now

firmly entrenched in the lexicon of cinematic clichés. His Spanish-

flavoured images of the Western frontier, dramatic flourishes and

prolonged pauses have become a thoroughly internalised part of the

Western genre’s iconography. The Leone style, some forty years after

he made his first Western, has become absorbed into the same

mythology of twentieth century cinema to which so much of his workwas devoted to exploring.

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Looking back at Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy

With Django Unchained out now in the UK, Paul looks back at Sergio

Leone's classic Dollars trilogy that helped inspire it...

Howard Hawks, one of the most successful Western directors of all

time and a key influence on Sergio Leone, once said a great movie

can be defined as one with "three great scenes, and no bad ones."There can be few directors who understood the power of great scenes

quite as strongly as Leone, the director of the Dollarstrilogy and de

facto godfather of the spaghetti western.

Some might argue his emphasis on great individual moments was to

his detriment, as the MacGuffin-laden plots of his films seem to exist

mainly as devices on which he can hang his elaborate setpieces, and

were subsequently labeled as exercises in pure style. While the

artistic and intellectual merits of the three films are up for debate, their

influence on modern movies - particularly in the action genre - is not,

with legions of filmmakers in debt to Leone to this day.

Not least of these is Quentin Tarantino, who cites The Good, The Bad And The Ugly as his favourite film of all time, and with the recent

Django Unchained has crafted an unashamed love letter to a

spaghetti western genre that Leone popularized and arguably

invented with these films.

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The early 60s saw the American Western in a state of decline: Hawks,

along with John Ford, had been one of the key figures in the

Western’s golden age, the period that lasted between the 1930s to the

mid 50s and saw the release of classics such as Stagecoach, Red

River, My Darling Clementine, Shane and The Searchers. The pair

had managed to infuse the traditionally pulpy genre with a hitherto

unseen moral and psychological complexity, as well as providing a

deceptively rich social and cultural commentary on the period.

However, while these two still were capable of producing the oddmasterpiece (see Hawks's Rio Bravo in 1959 and Ford's The Man

Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962), the genre as a whole had

descended into self-parody and stagnated, and had largely been

written off both by critics and as reliable box office performers.

By the early 60s, the western had been replaced in the public'simagination by big-budget historical epics such as Ben-Hur, The Ten

Commandments, and Spartacus, and the Italian genre-film industry -

never ones to let a trend escape unexploited - cashed in with a

succession of sword-and-sandals pictures, starring a rag-tag bunch

American B-movie actors and bodybuilders.

Leone had directed an unremarkable entry in this genre - The Last

Days Of Pompeii, starring Steve Reeves – but as a history buff with a

lifelong obsession with the American West, he longed to make his own

Western. He believed that there was still an audience for them,

certainly in Europe - the first European Westerns had already been

produced by German backers, and had enjoyed a modest if

unremarkable success. However, Leone realised that latter period

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American Westerns had suffered from being too glossy, cliched and

overly preachy: his idea for A Fistful Of Dollars was to try and marry

the tropes and iconography of the American Western to the more

immediate, unvarnished style of Italian filmmaking of the period.

That Leone not only succeeded but also managed to create a true pop

cultural milestone in the process was of course largely down to his

phenomenal abilities as filmmaker: however, it must be noted that he

also got very lucky. Fistful - and, by proxy, the subsequent popularity

of the Spaghetti Western genre - was also borne out of a timelyconvergence of talents, all of whom were operating at the very top of

their game.

Leone's first masterstroke was to hire Clint Eastwood, at that point a

TV star in Rawhide but yet to make any movies of note. Frustrated by

Hollywood's reluctance to cast an actor who "people could see athome for free", Eastwood went to Europe for the same reasons

American actors travelled there for the sword-and-sandals films and

the later polizioschetti (police-action) movies: the US had all but given

up on him. He was paid just $15,000 for the job, but the journey also

afforded him a bona fide starring role and, as Eastwood later put it, "at

least I got a trip to Spain" (the films were produced by Italians but

filmed in the Spanish desert, which cost a fraction of the price).

Eastwood's approach to acting was a perfect match for the style

Leone had in mind for his new Western. A phlegmatic presence,

Eastwood relied on an economy of movement that also extended to

his dialogue: the actor reportedly frequently petitioned Leone for fewer

lines in the films. The actor was also responsible for creating his

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character's iconic costume from scratch, combining his own wardrobe

with props liberated from the set of Rawhide and the famous poncho,

which was discovered in a Spanish shop. Then there was that face:

craggy and weary even at 34, it was the ideal subject for Leone's

regular extreme close-ups. What it lacked in expressiveness (Leone

later said Eastwood had only two expressions: with the hat and

without) it made up for in gravitas and quiet menace.

Looking back, it's hard to say how much of Leone's signature style

was deliberately engineered by him, and how much was him simplyreacting to his resources and his environment. For example, his

much-celebrated technique of using music, facial close-ups and

extended periods of silence to tell a story rather than dialogue may

have actually been a result of the unique conditions of an Italian film

set: as the multi-lingual dialogue of the actors would all be dubbed

over in post-production anyway, shooting on spaghetti westerns wasoften accompanied by the sound of the crew chatting and banging on

equipment (ironically, given Leone's use of silence), much to the

consternation of American actors used to the quiet respectfulness of

film sets in Hollywood.

The director's focus on ambient sound, music and violent action to tell

a story led to many critics to label Leone's style as 'operatic'; it also

proved a superb technique for engineering tension, as well as

sustaining the atmosphere of grizzled, monosyllabic machismo that

Leone was striving for. He neatly and perhaps inadvertently summed

up his attitude to storytelling with Tuco's famous line inThe Good, The

Bad And The Ugly : "If you're going to shoot, shoot. Don't talk."

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It's also unsurprising that music plays such a key role in the Dollars

trilogy when you consider that Leone had one the best film composers

of all time at his disposal in Ennio Morricone. His innovative, surreal

music was also borne out of restraints - unable to afford a full

orchestra, he would have been unable to replicate the grandiose

sweep of the classic western scores even if he

wanted to. Instead, the scores for the Dollars trilogy are a psychedelic

mix of whistling, whip cracks, trumpets, wailing, gunshots and,

crucially, the newly invented Fender guitar.

The anachronistic guitar is not only brilliantly used, but also served to

dislocate Leone's vision of the West from those that had preceded it,

firmly placing it in an exhilarating, pop-influenced, alternate- universe

America entirely of Leone's imagination. Morricone's music is integral

to all three films in the trilogy - at points, it acts as wry punctuation,such as the way the iconic "Ay-iy-ay-iy-ah!" cuts off Eli Wallach's final

curse of Blondie in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. At other points,

it becomes a key part of the narrative, such as the mournful motif of

the pocket-watch chimes in For A Few Dollars More. The importance

of Morricone's compositions is highlighted by the fact Leone, starting

with For A Few Dollars More, would ask Morricone to write the music

before shooting and would then direct to his music on-set.

His obsession with faces, also, is understandable given his access to

some of cinema's most remarkable visages - with the distinctive

features of Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Gian Maria Volonté,

and even Klaus Kinski on hand, it's no wonder he presents them in

such loving detail. Leone's close-ups are more than just reaction

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shots: the combination of the faces, his unusual use of space within

the frame and the backdrop of the alien-looking Spanish landscape

lend his images a surreal, painterly quality that just serves to add to

the otherworldy atmosphere.

One of the most notorious aspects of the trilogy is the violence: a

reaction if not an outright parody of the Polyanna-ish Westerns of the

late fifties, Leone transformed the stereotype of the clean-cut cowboy

into a dirty, unshaven, morally ambiguous loner. He argued: "The

West was made by violent, uncomplicated men, and it is this strengthand simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures.” The Western

landscape was re-imagined as a savage battleground where the only

rules were to get rich and be more devious than your opponent,

exploding the myth of the noble frontier in a hail of blood and bullets

that was also undercut with (sometimes literally) gallows humour.

Many objected to this interpretation of recent American history, with

David Thomson saying: "I think Leone really despised the

Western...we never feel we’re in America or with people who think in

American. He makes fun of the very mythology and obsession that

underlie film art,” but Leone argued later in his life that the films were

not intended as arch but a genuine reflection of his feelings towards

the country, arguing: “I can’t see America any other way than with a

European’s eyes, obviously; it fascinates me and terrifies me at the

same time.”

It must be said that while Leone was an innovator in many respects,

he did start the ball rolling with a shameless rip-off: A Fistful Of Dollars

wasn't so much an 'unofficial remake' of Akira Kurosawa's samurai

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action movie Yojimbo, as a re-skinned version of the same film,

replacing warring clans in feudal Japan with warring families in a

Mexican border town. Leone waved away accusations of cinematic

plagiarism by saying that Yojimbo had been influenced by Dashiell

Hammet's noir novelRed Harvest, and that Red Harvest in turn had

been influenced by the Italian play A Servant Of Two Masters.

To watch both films is to realise that Leone was being more than a

little mischievous and disingenrous here - while there are clear

similarities between all three, whole scenes and beats inFistful arelifted from Yojimbo. Kurosawa later quipped that Leone had "made a

great movie, but it was my movie." However, Kurosawa freely

admitted that Yojimbo had been influenced by classic Westerns, so

perhaps there was something to Leone's claim he was bringing the

story back "home", even he was referring to Hammett's novel and not

the Western genre as a whole.

Using Yojimbo as a starting block, Leone found that the addition of the

widescreen landscapes from his beloved John Ford Westerns, as well

as Morricone's music and Eastwood's face resulted in a potent

mixture that proved a big hit with audiences. Fistful is comfortably the

leanest of the trilogy, the most stripped-down straightforward action

movie of the bunch, but nearly all of Leone's most recognisable

trademarks - the close-ups, the violence, the silence - are already

present and correct here, and more than any of the other three films,

traces of Fistful's DNA can be found in just about every action film

made since.

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The film proved hugely successful in Europe upon release,

immediately standing out as something special by looking a million

miles away from the 'cheap' westerns that had come to characterise

the genre, particularly outside of America. While it was still made for a

shoestring budget ($200,000), Leone's artful adoption of Kurosawa's

directorial style and his eye for using the Spanish countryside to its full

potential made the film feel like an epic despite its limited resources.

Eager to quickly make a sequel, Leone tried to get Eastwood on board

immediately after production finished on Fistful ; reluctant to commituntil he had seen the finished film, Leone arranged for a screening of

an Italian-language print to Eastwood and a group of his friends, to

whom he attempted to downplay the merits of the film in an attempt to

manage their expectations. However, the screening was a huge

success: despite the audience not speaking Italian, Leone's stylistic,

low- dialogue, heavy-action approach rendered that irrelevant, with astunned Eastwood remarking that the audience "had enjoyed it just as

much as if it had been in English". Shortly after the screening

Eastwood got hold of his agent and told him he'd "like to work with

that director again".

For A Few Dollars More is often overlooked in the trilogy, awkwardly

sandwiched between both the original film and the best-known, but it's

a stunning film in its own right - director Alex Cox, one of the world's

foremost experts on the genre, calls it his favourite spaghetti western

of all. It packs probably the most effective emotional punch of all the

films, and introduces a more elegiac, mournful tone that the director

would then sustain throughout The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and

Once Upon A Time In The West. The plot sees The Man With No

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Name (this was actually a marketing gimmick - Eastwood's character

has a name in all three movies. Here it's Manco) actually takes a back

seat for much of the film to Lee Van Cleef, as the straight-edged

bounty hunter on a mission for revenge that proves genuinely

affecting.

Even better than Van Cleef and Eastwood is Gian Maria Volente, who

as in Fistful, plays the repulsive villain brilliantly, but this time adds an

unmistakable air of tragedy that balances out his scenery-chewing.

Volente was offered a variety of high-profile film work after For A FewDollars More, including the Wallach role in The Good, The Bad And

The Ugly, but would come to refuse any role that didn't chime with his

openly-Communist political views, and chose to star in the more

radical Bullet For The General instead.

For A Few Dollars More also sees Leone really grow in confidence asa filmmaker - while there's a sense that he was standing on

Kurosawa's shoulders with Fistful , here he refines his style into

something that is more recognisable as his own - more close-ups,

stunning composition, one of the best uses of music in the trilogy with

the pocket-watch motif, and some of his best set-pieces: Van Cleef

and Eastwood's first meeting, where they prove their worth to one

another by elaborately and repeatedly shooting each other's hats off is

one of Leone's best and funniest scenes.

However, Leone's best-known film remains The Good, The Bad And

The Ugly, the tale of a hunt for stolen Confederate gold set against the

backdrop of the American Civil War. The film was a global

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phenomenon upon release in 1966, largely thanks to Ennio

Morricone's all-conquering theme

music, which topped the charts worldwide and quickly became one of

the most instantly recognisable pieces of music in any genre. It was

also released as the spaghetti western genre was to reach height of

his success, with other directors taking Leone's template and runnning

with it: 1966 also saw the release of seminal films such Sergio

Corbucci's Django and Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown. Critics

who had been notoriously sniffy towards the spaghetti westerns werebeginning to sit up and take notice, and Leone's film was certainly one

that proved difficult to ignore.

Leone directs The Good... like it's the last film he will ever make

(although Once Upon A Time In The West is still arguably his defining

statement on the Western), and takes advantage of a budget newlyboosted by American investors to create a true big screen epic. Once

again building on the progress he had made with his previous films,

The Good... is bigger and better than everything that preceded it:

Eastwood and Van Cleef, both now more than comfortable in Leone's

universe, both return as 'The Good' and 'The Bad' respectively, and Eli

Wallach adds a welcome burst of comic, manic energy to proceedings

as Tuco ('The Ugly').

'The Man with No Name' (Blondie) is more complex and interesting

here than at any other point in the trilogy: while he's happy to

repeatedly abandon and abuse the admittedly untrustworthy Tuco,

he's also arguably at his most compassionate, particularly in the

extended Civil War sequence where he stops to spend time with a

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dying Confederate soldier. Blondie even uncharacteristically sees fit to

openly philosophise at one point, wearily sighing: "I've never seen so

many men wasted so badly," while watching a battle play out. Even

someone as accustomed to the brutality of the West as Eastwood's

outlaw, a figure who actively thrived from it, is shown to balk at the

sheer scale of death involved in warfare on this kind of scale.

Leone conceived the film as one that would show the "imbecility" and

"absurdity" of war, and angered critics by depicting deaths in a Union

camp, as opposed to more politically acceptable accounts of atrocitiesin Southern camps. Once again, Leone was rebelling against received

wisdom, more than conscious that the history books are written by the

victors. Despite his reputation for contorting the history of the West to

his own ends, The Good... is now regarded by experts as one of the

most historically accurate depictions of the conflict ever seen on

screen.

The reason that the film remains so popular (it is consistently in the

top five-rated movies of all time on the IMDB top 250) comes back to

those incredible setpieces: it's the shortest three-hour film ever made,

with scene after incredible scene, scenes that remain etched into the

memory of everyone who has seen them but remain thrilling after

endless viewings. There's the pitch-perfect introductions of all three

main players, Tuco and the gun-seller, Blondie's trial in the desert, the

click-clack of spurs tipping off Blondie to Tuco's attempted hit, and the

whole Civil War sequence, which as Roger Ebert notes is "practically

a movie unto itself".

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Everything culminates with the definitive Leone setpiece, a three-way

Mexican stand-off that acts as a the culmination of the film, the trilogy,

Leone's career, and the Spaghetti Western genre up to that point. It's

all here: Morricone's untouchable music, the stunning landscape

photography, those amazing faces, the perfectly judged editing,

Leone's obsessive attention to detail and his unparalleled ability to

use every inch of the frame. It's the best scene from a director who

specialised in great scenes, 10 minutes of sheer cinematic perfection.

If it had been the last word by Leone in the genre it would have been afitting end, but the director would also go on to direct his most critically

acclaimed film Once Upon A Time In The West and the underrated

Duck You Sucker! aka A Fistful Of Dynamite. Once Upon A Time...

may have even forced us to consider the films as a quadrilogy, had

Eastwood agreed to play Charles Bronson's role

of Harmonica as originally planned, but the actor was worn out by

Leone's endless perfectionism onThe Good... and his reportedly

somewhat brusque personality, and so settled back into a long career

as one of Hollywood's most enduring icons instead.

However, Once Upon a Time... feels much more blatant and pointed in

its echoing of classic American westerns, and as a result the Dollars

trilogy still feels very much like its own thing. It stands as one of the

most important pieces of pop culture of the last century, an astounding

body of work that in its jumble of influences feels timeless, placeless,

ageless: they're films set in the American West in the 1800s, shot in

Spain in the 1960s by an Italian ripping off the Japanese.

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This maybe why they don't feel at all dated, although it's also possibly

because so many films have learnt and borrowed from their rhythms

in subsequent years. It unquestionably one of the greatest trilogies of

all time, and while Howard Hawks never went on the record with his

thoughts on Leone's work, according to his own maxim you would

have thought that ultimately he would have approved of the Dollars

movies: three great films, and no bad ones.

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