A mysterious stranger with a harmonica joins forces with
a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin
working for the railroad.
By Remy Dean
November 26, 2018
The Western genre has always dealt in mythologies. Some
Westerns could be accurately labelled as revisionist propaganda — a nation
trying to get to grips with shameful episodes from its own history by
pretending things were different. There was a time when good Christian settlers
were brutally victimised by the heathen redskins, the sheriff was always
righteous, the good guys had square jaws and wore white hats, and the bad guys
sported stubble and preferred black Stetsons. It was a history to be proud of,
but that was just the movies. Perhaps that’s why it was down to European
filmmakers to re-invent and reinvigorate the genre just as it was falling from
grace in the mid-1960s.
Sergio Leone is certainly one of the most important film
directors. I was just about to qualify that statement by adding “to come out of
Italian cinema of the 1960s” but I realise that would only be a disservice to
his standing! His mother, Edvige Maria Valcarenghi, was a popular actress of
the silent age, best-known by her stage name Bice Valerian. His father,
Vincenzo Leone (usually credited as Roberto Roberti), was an actor and writer
who’d directed around 50 films and a baker’s dozen of shorts before 1930. So,
young Sergio grew up against a cinematic backdrop of movie sets and matinees.
He said it was film, above all else, that “nourished” him as a child, and most
of his favourites were American Westerns.
Growing up in wartime Italy, there was a huge cultural
disconnect with what he saw on the silver screen. To him it must have seemed an
almost fantastical world of fabled heroes and stereotypical evil. Perhaps he
would have recognised some parallels with the Wild West as the pre-war order
crumbled around him, and the post-war rise of Mafia rule replaced the
dictatorial fascism of Benito Mussolini. But as he grew wiser, he understood
that these idealistic Westerns were more akin to fairy tales. They were ‘Once
Upon a Time’ stories…
As a 10-year-old, Sergio Leone had appeared in one of his
father’s films, Man on the Street / La Bocca Sulla Strada (1941). By the time
he was 18, he’d dropped out of law school to work with Vittorio de Sica as an
assistant director on The Bicycle Thieves (1948), in which he also made a brief
appearance. He then penned a few screenplays for ‘sword and sandal’ epics, or
‘Pepla’, the most popular Italian genre in his native land during the 1950s. He
then found work as a resident assistant director at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios,
which he’d long-frequented with his father. There, he got to work on some major
international productions, including Quo Vadis (1951), Helen of Troy (1954) and
Ben-Hur (1959), and finally fell into the director’s chair on The Last Days of
Pompeii (1959) when Mario Bonnard was taken ill.
His true directorial debut was The Colossus of Rhodes
(1961), but it was with his second feature that he would innovate the visual
language of cinema and re-invent the genre he had loved as a child. A Fistful
of Dollars (1964) was one of a handful of films (along with Duccio Tessari’s
Ringo films) that defined the emergent ‘Spaghetti Western’ genre, and the first
of its kind to break the international market with distribution in the US,
three years later.
Introducing Clint Eastwood’s now iconic super-cool,
poncho-clad character of ‘The Man With No Name’, A Fistful of Dollars was
unlike any Western America had seen, and ditched the Cowboys and Indians cliché
in favour of a more timeless Shakespearian fable. Leone deliberately treated
landscape in the familiar expansive style of a classic John Ford Western but
looked to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film, Yojimbo (1961), for its narrative pace
and gestural approach. It was a box office hit, made Eastwood a superstar, and
became the first of the three classic films we now know as ‘The Dollar
Trilogy’, continuing over the next two consecutive years with A Few Dollars
More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966). Leone made a huge
stylistic impact on cinema, in general, and upon the Western genre in
particular. In some respects, he became a victim of his own success and found
he had no shortage of film projects coming his way from Hollywood, but they
were all Westerns, a genre he wanted to step away from.
Leone changed his mind when Paramount waved a substantial
budget in front of him, along with an offer that included the veteran actor
Henry Fonda in the package. Well, that was enough to tempt the director back!
Leone had dreamed of working with Fonda, one of his childhood idols from those
classic westerns he’d been so captivated by. Consequently, late in 1966, he
hired two fellow cinema aficionados to work on writing a Western that would
hark back to those films and yet put a new twist on the outmoded all-American
ideology they represented. Those two film buff buddies were Dario Argento and
Bernardo Bertolucci, who both became great filmmakers in their own right. After
being handed the title and some guidelines by Leone, they spent days watching
classic Westerns, including John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), Fred Zinnemann’s
High Noon (1952) and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954). They were joined in
the writing task by Sergio Donati, who had a hand in A Few Dollars More, and
later contributed to the screenplay for Duck, You Sucker (1971).
They deliberately dissected these shared favourites,
devising an elaborate post-modern collage of their iconography. Part of the fun
in watching Once Upon a Time in the West is spotting all those interwoven
references — some explicit, others more covert or even the reversal of the
familiar tropes. It’s a masterpiece of what Leone termed “cinema-cinema”, by
which he meant films that consciously draw upon film history to create a
meta-layer of meaning, built-up from visual quotes and a clever reworking of
established themes. The deliberate deployment of clichés. That’s something
Quentin Tarantino later built his career on in the 1990s. Of course, this
approach enabled Leone to be self-referential, quoting the startling stylistic
innovations that typified his Dollar Trilogy: extreme close-ups and vast depth
of field.
Henry Fonda was known as a good guy and had become the
Western’s archetypal ‘white-hat’, so when he read their script, he turned down
the part of Frank. He didn’t think he was the right choice to play such a
cold-blooded villain, but after some convincing from actor friend Eli Wallach
(who’d enjoyed his experience of working on The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) and
after Leone himself flew over from Rome to talk him round, he changed his mind
and decided it was time to do something that would challenge the preconceptions
of casting directors.
When Fonda turned up to test for the part, he’d hidden
his famous baby-blue eyes beneath dark brown contact lenses to give himself a
more brooding look, and had grown a moustache to appear more rugged. He didn’t
realise that Leone wanted to play with the conflict of that clean-cut boyish
exterior and the cold sadistic character that would lurk beneath the surface.
He knew this would contradict the audience’s expectations and be all the more
shocking. It turned out to be a perfect piece of (mis)casting…
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