By

Grace

Dead Rebel Of The Week

~ Sergio Leone ~

I always loved Western movies. First of all for all the same obvious reasons that all little boys (and some girls perhaps) love Western movies; the hero, the guns, the damsel in distress and the shoot out in the end. Westerns were always basically old classic romantic knight’s tales, set in the 1800’s America instead of in King Arthur’s England. The hero was chivalrous, the lady was pure and the crooks were down right evil. It was all very easy to sort out and likewise easy to know who to root for. Westerns were one of the few fairytales you could keep consuming and believing in as a grown up. You know it… You can’t sleep, you roll out of bed and flip the channels… Hello, what do we have here? “My Darling Clementine” with good old John Wayne? Serve it up, and the sleepless night at least has a saving grace. Sometimes you can crack out on a lucky streak with the star spangled “The Magnificent Seven” and its older Anti Christ, the more humorous, but highly underrated, “Silverado” following suit. They're all good.

If you are a latecomer to the genre, and have started to work your way back in time, you have probably noticed that there is a distinct difference between modern Westerns and the old John Wayne ones. Today they have a rustier, complex, more realistic and less naïve theme – whereas back then the hero was a white teethed swashbuckler fighting of shoe polished Indian savages with a shiny revolver.

The missing link between the two genres was a little Italian man by the name of Sergio Leone.

Sergio Leone was born in 1929 in Rome, Italy. He early developed an interest for film and storytelling, and honed his talents by writing historical screenplays of guts and glory. He helped put together many small Italian movies that quickly earned him some local fame, but Leone dreamed bigger… he wanted to tell epic stories of his own making – with him in charge of everything. His problem was, unfortunately, that he was Italian. It was hard to catch a break on bigger productions that were all only being produced overseas, in the big land of dreams in the west. His luck changed for the better when he managed to nag his way into being the assistant director of the epic "Ben Hur". Since the movie was shot in Italy he was better equipped to deal with the locals and the sets than the movie’s head director William Wyler. The way Sergio Leone took charge of the filming, and the way he steered the actors right under difficult circumstances, caught the attention of some of the right Hollywood people. After finishing the movie he felt encouraged to follow his own vision instead of working for other people’s dreams.

When the demand for historical epics tanked in the late 50’s Sergio Leone had already put his own plan into action. He had always been a great fan of the classic American Western movies, but had on the other hand always found them lacking in depth and narration. He set out to breathe some life into a dying art form, before the demand for any kind of Western movies would be dead in the water as well.

To make something truly spectacular in style and story, but still scale it down to the grass roots of simple men and women in a gritty setting, he wrote a screenplay directly based on Kurosawa’s magnificent and contemporary Japanese samurai saga “Yojimbo” (which in turn, ironically enough, had been inspired by John Ford’s classic western movies). In Sergio Leone’s version, “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), we are introduced to a few new features that forever changed the world of westerns:

•The hero / villain conflict

Here it was not as typically pronounced - two opposing sides of the fence between Good and Evil - as in other Western movies. The bad guys and the good guys looked pretty much the same, talked the same and shot each other up the same. Morals were not an issue and the lone wolf main character wasn’t the people’s hero, appointed to set things right. He was there solely for selfish reasons, partly shrouded in mystery throughout the movie.

•The score

Not only was Sergio Leone the first director to emphasize the music in his Western movies, but he also pioneered a whole new type of cinematographical atmosphere by shooting his scenes while the score was blasting on the set, so the mood of the music would translate into the performance of the actors and subsequently into the images of the final product. From the beginning he worked with Italian composer Ennio Morricone, whose dramatic and slightly diabolical music perfectly accompanied the naked and raw scenes between hard men of few words (no, not like "Brokeback Mountain", ye people of filthy minds). Even the perfectly timed absence of music in certain scenes made for dramatic counterpoints where the audience was holding its breath while protagonist and antagonist were eyeing each other carefully. No action movie had really told the story through such an interaction between background score and forefront action like this before. This type of storytelling catered to Sergio Leone’s Italian blood, born and raised in a country that invented opera, and was something he developed further in later movies.

•The action

The scenes were slower than in contemporary action movies, building up a tension that preceded the inevitable violence, rather than focusing on the actual violence itself. When you watch a Leone movie it is painfully or beautifully obvious (depending on personal preference) that he shines a light on people’s reasons for their actions, rather than on their actions as primitive responses to the drop of a hat. He made it seem more dramatic to be shot, than what other movies had done thus far. He made it look like it fucking hurt - like it really ended your life. Watching a Leone movie is sometimes like sitting at the museum staring at that certain painting that has sparked your interest, but that you can’t figure out why it did to begin with until you have spent an hour or so gazing upon it. Then it all comes into place, as the artist’s vision in some twisted way finally corresponds to your own interpretation. A lot of people are similarly turned off by Leone’s slow motion narration, but at the second or third watch most film aficionados come to appreciate it for the master class storytelling it really is.

•Clint Eastwood

Not only was Clint the perfect man for the role as the outsider in this particular movie, but he was also the model from which Hollywood would mold a whole new generation of main characters for decades to come. Clint was a John Wayne, but without the smiles, the morals or the benevolence of the classic champion for truth and justice. Clint personified the new dark age of subtle heroism better than anybody has ever done since. (Clint dedicated his own vision of a Western, “The Unforgiven”, to Sergio Leone as thanks for kick starting his career, despite a mutual fallout that had persisted for decades between them.)

Sergio Leone followed his own formula successfully in the two free-standing sequels that followed, completing what was named his Dollar Trilogy; “For a Few Dollars More” and the classic “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” with its haunting musical signature melody – all starring Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name.

The latter, especially, relied more than ever before on Sergio Leone’s typical blurred lines between hero and villain, making the audience pick their own favorite of the cast, but still he managed to subtly shine a more favorable light on one character more than on the others.

Think about it. In “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” Clint’s character, “Blondie”, is just as morally bankrupt as Angel Eyes and Tuco but still we remember him as the absolute hero of the story. Sergio Leone was a very smart director and knew exactly which buttons to secretly push for us to see his point, by gently sweeping us along the undercurrents of his vision. There is never really a doubt in our minds who the hero of the tale actually is, but we’ll be damned if we can really say why. The hero is on the wrong side of the law, he is directly disrespectful and even harsh to women, he doesn’t think twice to leave the innocent to die and he doesn’t even smile once throughout the movie. You probably sit there saying “So?”, but then also fail to realize that up until this point this was the very opposite of big screen heroism. This was the hero for a new generation, a punch to the gut of old standards and values.

All three movies in the classic Dollar Trilogy were shot in Spain and Italy, with Spanish and Italian extras, and thus Sergio Leone’s creations were labeled “Spaghetti Westerns” – an epithet he wasn’t exactly thrilled with as he felt it took away from what he was trying to accomplish with his story telling.

He got his chance to speak directly to an American audience when he was offered, by Paramount Pictures, to shoot a movie on authentic soil in the great big land of dreams in the west. He set out to create his masterpiece, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, based on a story by Bertolucci and Argento and featuring stars like Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and the infinitely sexy Claudia Cardinale – the hottest chick on the screen of any Western movie ever. The end result was the epitome of a Leone movie; epic, dramatic and textured - but still harsh and raw with enough twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat. The complicated relationship between the main characters and the damsel in distress left a bitter taste in your mouth and, of course, didn’t end the way a classic love story “should” end. Romance was never really an issue in Leone’s movies. The movie was also loaded with references to classic Western movies and famous actors or classic scenes, and served as Leone’s ultimate tribute to the genre that had put food on his table – even though he broke all rules to put his own spin on it.

Realizing the state of mind of the American audience, and to Leone’s utter dismay, Paramount brutally cut up “Once Upon a Time in the West” like Jack the Ripper going to town on a London prostitute, leaving only shreds of Leone’s original design – all to make it more commercially viable. The movie still went over like a lead balloon in American theaters, but became a huge success in Europe. Sergio Leone’s style was too complex and slow for the ADD addled mind of Joe Schmoe and his Hollywood-conditioned expectations of an all-American “God honest hero”.

Despite commercial failures, Leone still didn’t change for no man. To complete his American Trilogy he also made “A Fistful of Dynamite” (about the Mexican revolution) and “Once Upon a Time in America” (about Jewish gangsters in NYC), turning down the offer to direct “The Godfather” in the process so he could realize his own vision of film making. He wanted to tell his stories, not somebody else’s. He never regretted his choice.

At the time of his death in 1989 Leone was still not an acclaimed director by any means. To this day he is mentioned in passing for his quirky contributions to the art of Westerns, but not for his innovative and ingenious directing skills. That’s a shame. Sergio Leone was an excellent director, period, who went against the grain of a highly established formula of one of the most popular genres ever put on a screen, the classic American Western. It’s kind of ironic how such a testament to American mythology was perfected on the plains around the Mediterranean by a little Italian man who barely spoke English. To me, Sergio Leone is one of the greatest directors that ever lived, and a man truly deserving of the title rebel, as he created his own legacy with no regard to what would sell to the masses.

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