LEONE, Sergio

(1929–1989)

   Born in 1929 in Rome, the son of a film director from the silent era, Sergio Leone superseded John Ford as the dominant maker of Westerns in the 1960s. His rise to fame and influence was completely unexpected. In Italy in the 1950s, Leone was making what were known as “sword and sandal epics,” films like The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) and The Colossus of Rhodes(1961). Aturning point in his creative life evidently occurred when he discovered the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and decided to adapt Yojimbo(1961) as a Western. His first Western, Per un pugno di dollari(1964) —released in the United States as A Fistful of Dollars (1967) —owes not only its plot to Kurosawa but much of its cinematic style as well. But with this film as well as the others of the Dollars Trilogy, Leone gave the spaghetti Western respectability and started the trend in which Westerns question the underlying myths upon which John Ford, Howard Hawks, and others had based their classic Westerns.

   Perhaps Leone’s most doctrinaire Western questioning classic values is Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), filmed partly in the United States, featured Henry Fonda in the lead, a star associated with John Ford and classic Westerns. In this film, Fonda, who had played Wyatt Earpin My Darling Clementine(1946), played an enraged, cruel killer who takes pleasure at one point in killing a child. Much of the appeal of Leone’s Westerns came from his new style of filmmaking adapted for Westerns. First, he collaborated with Ennio Morricone to combine music and visuals in revolutionary ways to emphasize dramatic camera movements, extreme close-ups of the eyes of characters, and slow-building tension that increases to intense emotional peaks. Some of Leone’s techniques had not been used since the days of silent films.

   Perhaps the single element of Westerns that Leone changed most was the concept of violence and its purpose in relation to the Western myth. When Lee Van Cleef’s character inBuono,il brutto,il cattivo, Il (1966) —released in the United States as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly(1967) —kills, he enjoys it. When we look into his eyes through the extreme camera close-up at the moment of the killing, we see no questioning, no thought that killing is necessary but distasteful. Instead, we see pleasure and we see evil. Though the other characters do not have the same evil look while killing, there is little distinction between the way Van Cleef kills and the way Eli Wallach (the Ugly) or the way Clint Eastwood (the Good) kills. Violence serves no social purpose in Leone. It is only an assertion of the existential self. There are no heroes in Leone Westerns because for there to be a hero there would have to be some concept of external good and external evil based on its value to society. For Leone, only the existential self matters. Good may differ from evil but only in relation to self. Whether for this reason or others, it is notable that the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir may have been a fan of Leone’s Westerns. Writing in Tout compte fait, (1972), she said, “Some adventure films have kept me in suspense—some westerns, for example, including films made by the Italians such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (Frayling 1981, 129).