Background
Sergio Leone was born on 3 January 1921 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
director producer screenwriter
Sergio Leone was born on 3 January 1921 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
Once Upon a Time in the West is his best film: a mess of double-crossing stars, manic close-ups, and Rothko-like masses of color and space. Leone really despised the Western, and let the smart mockery exploit his remarkable eye. Despite Monument Valley and the stars, we never feel we’re in America or with people who think in American. He makes fun of the very mythology and obsession that underlie film art, and he knows too much about his tricks to be persuasive. Leones films force you back from the screen with hieratic compositions and sly contempt for "il West. Those who honor Leone should study Anthony Mann’s Man of the West, but those who cherish CinemaScope will always luxuriate in Leone's inscrutable spaces.
Once Upon a Time in America was so long, and so obscure, that it had to be released first in a short version. But not even the restored cut made everything clear. Its would-be Jewish gangsters seemed very Italian; the attitude to women was horrendous—the two rape scenes are among the screen’s nastiest. The leading actors do not seem at ease. But there are wonderful sequences, especially those involving the gangsters as kids in New York.
Leone has been tossed back and forth as camp amusement and spacey visionary. This enigma was enhanced by the gaps between films—reason enough for those who scorned him to be confirmed in the opinion that he was an opportunist who simply yoked samurai gestures to Western iconography and was helped alike by the deco solitariness of Clint Eastwood in a poncho and the inability of that actor to understand what the director was saying. The “dollars" trilogy are less silent films than studies of face masks looming up, gross and hysterical with detail, in sunblanched CinemaScope frames and drugged revenge plots. Leone also had the eerie fatalism of Ennio Morri-cone’s music menace dropped in a deep well and echoing back.
The films made Eastwood: they gave him box-office authority and an excuse for minimal acting. Impassivity went with the poncho, and cheroots kept the face still. But Leone himself came to America without conquering.