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 Cinecitt production
line. His most famous works are the films of the so-called dollarstrilogy: 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. Despite
the 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 Leones background, but the particular manner in which
this 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 Italys Fascist regime. (1) He did manage to direct three films
between 1939 and 1945, although the last of these was not released
until 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 Sicas 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 highly
commercial realm of Cinecitt 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.
Leones credits from this time include Robert Wises Helen of Troy
(1955), William Wylers remake of Ben-Hur (1959) and Fred
Zinnemanns The Nuns Story (1959).
Leones 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 Bonnards name, but its box-office
success in Italy allowed Leone to take his first directorial credit with
The 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 Cinecitt at this time, and its true
that when Kurosawas samurai film Yojimbo (1961) was released in
Rome, 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 Mays 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 across
Europe, and a further 11 Westerns based on Mays books were
produced between 1962 and 1968. (5) Several cheap Westerns came
out of Spain in the wake of the first Winnetou films, and Leones
Yojimboremake, A Fistful of Dollars, was actually made on the back of
another bigger-budget Western entitled Pistols Dont 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 wasnt interested in simply imitating
American Western conventions. The film opens with a hazy white spot
on a blood-red screen, creating an almost psychedelic effect and
immediately setting the tone for Leones 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 Morricones 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 Morricones 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 composerdirector partnerships in the history of cinema by scoring all of Leones
subsequent films. Drawing on sound-effect experiments he had been
conducting since attending a seminar run by the American avantgarde composer John Cage in 1958, Morricone incorporated
gunshots, cannon fire, whip-cracks, chanting, whistling and watchchimes into his soundtracks for Leones first three Westerns. The
attention-grabbing music proved an ideal complement to Leones
baroque imagery and playful use of genre iconography.
Several other distinctive elements of Leones approach are apparent
from the opening scene of A Fistful of Dollars. The film begins with
Clint Eastwoods 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,
Leones expansive wide-screen vistas highlight the landscapes
slightly alien feel, creating a setting that certainly doesnt look
European, but doesnt 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 of
bearded, 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 made
Eastwood 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
Leones next two features, developing a persona that by The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly was perfectly balanced between detached
ruthlessness and sardonic humour.
Leones 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)

Leones 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-shaven
hero of American cinema into a blue-eyed child killer of ruthless
ambition.
Adrian Martin has described all of Leones 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 The
Good, 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
Leones last film is the face of Robert De
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Niro filling the screen, shot through hazy black netting as he descends
into 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 critical
panning. Many reviews echoed David McGillivrays 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 Leones work occurred in
English-speaking countries. Christopher Fraylings 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 Leones work should be considered in the context
of 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. Leones explicit employment
of reflexive genre clichs 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 Leones 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 and
clichd 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 Leones 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 Leones work: at stake in it is a psychic investment, a whole
elaborate machine of selfhood, culture and longing...(15)
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In this sense, Leones films are above all about living with the image
of America, but never being American. His films form a small but
potent body of work that may be read as an extended celebration,
interrogation and finally mourning of the myths underlaying
20thcentury American cinema, as seen from afar. From his first
Western, Leones films revolved around a vision of America as a
ubiquitous cultural presence always seen from a distance, through the
image. An image that is thrilling, violent, extreme, repulsive, and often
ridiculous.
The source material for Once Upon a Time in America is indicative in
this regard. The film is based on The Hoods, a 1952 autobiographical
account of criminal life during Prohibition. The author, an ex- gangster
writing under the non de plum Harry Grey, had set out to counter the
glamorised Hollywood vision of the era. What fascinated Leone was
the fact that Greys writing was steeped in the very Hollywood clichs
he claimed to be combating, as if it were impossible for the writer to
separate his memories from the movies. (16)
In a similar (though obviously more reflexive) manner, Leone creates
a world in his films rooted in historical detail, but refracted through the
looking-glass of Hollywood movies. The closer Leones films came to
contemporary America, the more explicitly abstract they became, and
the more his vision appeared as a hallucination, dragged up from our
collective cinematic unconscious.
Leones investment in Hollywood dreams stretched back to his
childhood growing up in Mussolinis Rome. He was obsessed with
American movies and stars such as Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper, and
after the entry of America into the war in 1941, its cultural products
gained the added allure of forbidden fruit. In this context, Leones first
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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
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pleasures and earthly goods. (17)
This disjunction between American mythology and the reality of
America crucially informs all Leones 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 Leone
commented; I cant see America any other way than with a
Europeans eyes, obviously; it fascinates me and terrifies me at the
same time. (18) For Europeans of Leones 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 Leones work.
David Thomsons perfunctory and dismissive entry on Leone in
hisBiographical Dictionary of Film is typical of the critical reaction to
Leones films since the 1960s: I think Leone really despised the
Western...we never feel were in America or with people who think in
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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 Leones American
stars, James Coburn, defended the Italian against oft-repeated
charges of disrespect for the Western genre with the motion lets
hear it for irreverence. (20) Yet both these assessments miss the
deep sense of ambivalence that informs Leones 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. The
West 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 ones 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 films 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 of
the 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, Leones films seem to
embody 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, Leones 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, Leones camera celebrates the visceral energy of
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Americas 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 (Damiano
Damiani, 1966). While Leones film doesnt 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 Leones
most 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 films 228 minute running time
further 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, Leones original cut is
available on video.
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Since his death in 1989, Leones 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 Leones skill at
deconstructing 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 Morriconesounding scores have formed the basis of countless television
commercials surely the final proof that his stylistic traits are now
firmly entrenched in the lexicon of cinematic clichs. His Spanishflavoured images of the Western frontier, dramatic flourishes and
prolonged pauses have become a thoroughly internalised part of the
Western genres 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 work
was devoted to exploring.

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Looking back at Sergio Leones 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
Westerns 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 odd
masterpiece (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's
imagination 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 timely
convergence 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 at
home 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 simply
reacting 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 was
often 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 Volont,
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 strength
and 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 were 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 cant see America any other way than with a
Europeans 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 are
lifted 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 commit
until 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 a
stunned 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 Uglyand
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 Few
Dollars 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 as
a 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 were
beginning 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 newly
boosted 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 atrocities
in 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 a
fitting 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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