Sergio Leone

Critically ignored if not outright derided in his day, Sergio Leone is one of cinema’s distinctive stylists.  The godfather - though not inventor - of the spaghetti western, he made comparatively few films in his 23 year output but all but one of them were epics.  Unfortunately this counted against his reputation, leading to a recurring pattern of American distributors butchering his work for stateside release.  He could not be properly appraised because the nuances and detailed plotting of his masterpieces were lost in the process.

It is difficult to talk about Leone without mentioning his childhood schoolmate and closest artistic collaborator.  Ennio Morricone’s music is so much a part of Leone’s cinema that it is impossible to imagine either man’s career without the other.  So specifically did Leone plan his films around Morricone’s scores that he often had him compose beforehand, using the playback to choreograph sequences during shooting in the manner of a musical or silent film.

The Leone westerns comprise the ‘Dollars’ trilogy of “A Fistful of Dollars”, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as well as “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “Duck, You Sucker!” They revolutionised a genre in decline, their baroque style, framing and editing, languid pacing and amoral tone at odds with all established conventions of the form.

Morricone’s idiosyncratic music, mixing coral singing with bizarre sounds and orchestrations could not be further removed from that of studio Hollywood.  Characters look dishevelled, dirty, and sweaty, a reflection of an ambiguity in behaviour that clearly abandons or at least blurs the demarcation line between hero and villain.  Clint Eastwood’s Dollars character is  first and foremost a mercenary, interested in personal profit rather than any high cause or principle.

Leone’s greatest film is arguably his last.  A gangster epic, “Once Upon a Time in America” is like all his best work a tale of friendship, betrayal and revenge.  Memory and desire are what interested Leone most; for all the violence he is known for he was the most romantic of directors.