West of Italy

Sergio Leones Frontier Fables

Mar. 26, 2012

1:09 p.m.

The western was already slipping from the commanding heights it held over the world's imagination when A Fistful of Dollars startled moviegoers with a new vision of the Old West. The 1964 film by Sergio Leone stripped away the Norman Rockwell sheen by staging the American frontier as a surreal battleground where violence and corruption were checked only by a phlegmatic, unnamed stranger more annoyed than appalled by the denizens of this blighted land. The Man with No Name turned out to be a little-known bit player stateside, a fellow called Clint Eastwood. Leone is responsible for launching the actor toward stardom and for clearing the trail for Sam Peckinpah and other American directors whose westerns revealed a more brutal range than the one John Wayne once rode. Alas, within 10 years of Fistful of Dollars, the western, once the most reliable Hollywood product, had become as rare as the musical. Little has changed since. Sir Christopher Frayling was already writing insightfully about Leone in the '60s, a time when many critics derided the director for filming “spaghetti westerns.” Frayling understood that Leone wasn't making poor imitations of Stage Coach or Shane but was reinventing the genre for a more questioning epoch. Frayling's Sergio Leone: Something to Die For (published by University of Minnesota Press) is everything a bio should be but is seldom: critically astute, well documented and written in a style as pleasurable and invigorating as its subject. Fun to read, Something to Die For locates Leone within the context of the Italian culture that produced him and the global culture that embraced his work. Leone grew up in the movie business. His father Vincenzo was a pioneering Italian filmmaker who probably directed his country's first western (in 1913). Like many European kids growing up between the world wars, his imagination was colonized by American popular culture. At least until the U.S. and Italy went to war in 1942, he was able to devour Hollywood movies and American comic books. Some critics claim to see operatic influences in Leone's westerns, but the director denies this, telling Frayling that traditional Southern Italian culture shaped his movies only through puppet shows and their Punch-and-Judy street dramas. As a Roman, fatalism came to him almost with mother's milk in a city filled with the ruins of fallen emperors. Although entranced by the vigor of the America he glimpsed in movies and comics, Leone's early encounters with real Americans were disappointingboth the GIs who liberated Rome and the Hollywood producers who swarmed to the Eternal City during the '50s. His father's connections easily led to gopher work at Cineccita, the Hollywood on the Tiber, for Italian, American and all manner of hybrid productions taking advantage of cheap labor and government subsidies. By the time he directed his first movie, Leone had done everything from making coffee to directing short scenes, from ghostwriting to stage-managing an army of extras. It was the sort of thoroughgoing apprenticeship few first-time directors have experienced in recent decades and prepared him well by the time he turned to making his own westerns. Truly an international affair, A Fistful of Dollars was adapted from Akira Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo and shot in Spain with actors from across Europe. However, Leone was determined to cast an American as the Man With No Name. His first choice, Henry Fonda, didn't bother responding to the unknown Italian director; Charles Bronson disdainfully refused Leone's offer; finally, Clint Eastwood figured he had nothing to lose. The actor had little idea of what he was riding into. The dialogue would be laconic, as Leone hated the chatter of many westerns, and the director's striking use of close-ups to reveal his characters was more Sergei Eisenstein than John Ford. The film's lonesome sound had much to do with the spare, innovative music of Ennio Morricone, who had been inspired by John Cage. There would be no female lead to obstruct the male action. The violence was given little varnish. Leone kept distant from his much-acclaimed Italian art house contemporariesthe Viscontis, Pasolinis and Antonionis. They were northern Italians from where Leone sat and hence, snobs. He found neo-realism boring and was more interested in a highly stylized version of reality“fairytales for adults” he called them. With Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, he made fables of a trickster in the dusty Southwest of the imaginationa picaresque land without true heroes, a demystifying of myth that supplanted the Old West with a new set of legends for a more cynical age.