Leone, Sergio (1929-1989)

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Leone, Sergio (1929-1989)

When his first western, A Fistful of Dollars, was released in 1964, Sergio Leone was forced to hide his Italian identity under the name of Bob Robertson by the widespread belief that only Americans could make successful westerns. The success of Leone's westerns as well as of his last movie, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which exploited the formula of the gangster movie, another typical American genre, was to prove this assumption wrong. Leone's choice of pseudonym was in fact deeply ironic: Bob Robertson is the English transposition of the Italian name ("Roberto Roberti") used by Leone's father, himself a film director. The choice points to Leone's lifelong commitment in reconciling his fascination for American culture and mythology with his Italian background, which he was seemingly trying to conceal. The same reconciliation is spelled out by the name given (at first disparagingly) to the genre of films with which Leone has come to be identified, spaghetti westerns.

Leone's reputation as a director was established by the popular success of the so-called "Dollars trilogy" which also helped Clint Eastwood to achieve star-status: A Fistful of Dollars (1964); For a Few Dollars More (1965); and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) ranked amongst the top grossing Italian movies at the international box office between 1956-71. These three movies were made outside the Hollywood production system and were not simple carbon copies of the traditional westerns. Perceptive critics have listed as sources for the trilogy as diverse works as (to mention but a few) Sicilian morality and puppet plays, Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters (first performed in 1746), Akira Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo (1961), Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), as well as George Stevens's Shane (1953), Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz (1954), and the unusual westerns by Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller. The traditional optimism of the genre is tempered in the "Dollars" trilogy by the violence pervading the environment in which the characters live without being able to trust each other and to which they conform without trying to change it. Money is of course the primary motivation for action. Yet, in Leone's early westerns, money is not to be invested or used to buy goods, as it was in traditional westerns; it is simply something to possess or worship.

Although by the end of the trilogy Leone felt he had exhausted the possibilities of the western and wanted to shoot a gangster movie, he was persuaded by Paramount to make another western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In Leone's words, the film was to be "a fresco on the birth of a great nation." Its all-star cast, including Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and Jason Robards, and its exploitation of the traditional western theme of the impact of technological progress (represented here by the railroads and by the building of the town of Sweet Waters) on the Western frontier made it, in theory, a more appealing movie to American audiences than the "Dollars" trilogy. Yet, the movie flopped badly in the U.S. where it was savagely cut by the distributors. Before finally being able to make the gangster movie he had been planning for so long, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Leone shot Duck, You Sucker (1972, aka For a Fistful of Dynamite). Entitled at first Once Upon a Time, the Revolution, the movie is a pessimistic post-western on the Mexican Revolution, which was strongly criticized by left-wing intellectuals for its supposedly conservative politics. The most-often quoted sentence from the movie is "Revolution is confusion" and Leone himself described it as being about the friendship between a naive Mexican and an Irish-Catholic intellectual: It is "the story of Pygmalion reversed. The simple one teaches the intellectual a lesson … finally the intellectual throws away his book of Bakunin's writings. You suspect damn well that this gesture is a symbolic reference to everything my generation has been told in the way of promises."

Once Upon a Time in America (1984) represents a change of genre (the western is substituted by the urban gangster movie) and of narrative technique (to the linear chronological narration with a flashback inserted at a topical moment characterizing the earlier films, Leone substitutes a story line that moves continuously between the 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s) but addresses the same themes and exploits similar situations of Leone's westerns. The plot is structured around the usual two-character confrontation, the problem of friendship and betrayal, the impact of money on human relationships, the entrapment of the villain at his own hands. The typical close-ups of the characters' eyes which are a distinctive feature of Leone's westerns (and usually precede a gunfight) are developed in Leone's last film in a veritable obsession with images of looking and of meeting glances.

As Robert C. Cumbow has pointed out, Once Upon a Time in America, like Leone's westerns, is a "buddy movie" with a clear homosexual subtext. The two male protagonists (whose first intercourse with the same woman is characterized by premature ejaculation and temporary impotence) have relationships with women that are "never more than a mirror of their relationship with each other." As in the westerns, the female figures of Once Upon a Time in America follow the Mary/Eve Catholic dichotomy: they are either sexual objects, prostitutes, or almost spiritual figures.

In spite of their fairy-tale titles and their superficial simplicity, Sergio Leone's movies are powerful and intense exploration of the mythic America he had created in his own mind and, most often than not, the myth has to come to terms with, in Cumbow's words, "a dark and complex vision of morality and the psyche." This apparent discrepancy is vividly echoed by Leone himself when he recounts the intrusion, experienced during World War II, of "real-life Americans" into his childhood and adolescent dreams of America: "They were no longer the Americans of the West. They were … victorious soldiers … who were materialist, possessive, keen on pleasures and earthly goods. [In them] I could see … nothing—or almost nothing—of the great prairies, or of the demi-gods of my childhood."

—Luca Prono