Sergio Leone: MESA VERDE HáROES and Mexican censorship

Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia

By Rafael Aviña

3/6/2025

The Italian Sergio Leone (1929-1989) was upset in the greatest creator of a subgenre that gained enormous popularity in the 1960s and 1970s: the so-called western spaguetti. Leone conceived a fabulous trilogy of masterpieces in its most ironic, disapply and cruel phase composed by: For a handful of dollars (1964), For a few more dollars (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), starring all Clint Eastwood, an actor who had to emigrate to Italy to become a star. Fundamental films within the current of western spaghetti in which Leone, leaning on a striking photograph, a skilful assembly and, above all, in the masterful and characteristic music of Ennio Morricone, his usual collaborator, obtained a crude portrait of the Old West and the American Civil War.

[For a handful of dollars (1964, dir. Sergio Leone)]

Indeed, one of the greatest renovations to a genre that seemed to have died in the early 1970s was provided by the talented Leone with her stories plagued by cynicism, action and black humor. Characters of a delusional amorality and constant turns of the nut, in plots where ambition and sadism reigns. Anthological scenes, such as that virtuous circular travel around some tombs while listening to the theme "The Ecstasy of Gold," by Morricone, the sequence of the final duel in the cemetery, or the mistake between Confederate and Union soldiers because of the dust in their uniforms in The Good, the Bad and the ugly.

With those, Leone turned the quintessential Hollywood genre around and would confirm it with that masterpiece that is once in the west (1968), with a spectacular cast that included Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Charles Bronson and Gabrielle Ferzetti and a script written by Bernardo Bertolucci, Darío Argento, Leone and Sergio Donat i. A film of enormous violence and beauty and a metaphor about civilization with the arrival of the railway, filmed in the Italian Studios of Cineccita, Almería, La Calahorra, near Granada, Spain, and in the same American scenarios where the great John Ford (The diligence, More Heart I Hate) shot most of his films.

[Sergio Leone]

Something similar happens with Once upon a time the Revolution, called in turn Green Table Heroes (1971) also known as: Gia la testa / A Fistful of Dynamite / Duck, You Sucker. And "give yourself cursed," filmed in Italy, Spain and Ireland, although set in Mexico and Dublin during the period of the dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta; a project that Leone avoided as far as he could, because he would originally only produce it. The film is centered on a bandit upset in a random hero and father of several children of different women who befriends an Irish revolutionary who reads Bakunin and carries a bitter experience of betrayal in his home country.

Sam Peckinpah refused to direct it for economic reasons, then the United Artist producer recommended Peter Bogdanovich; however, they never got it with him. Later, Leone's assistant, Giancarlo Santi, took over the direction, despite the film's stars: James Coburn and Rod Steiger refused to go on if was not led by Sergio Leone, who by then was trying to raise his dream project: Once in America (1984).

[Green table heroes (1971, dir. Sergio Leone)]

Leone obtained a count in short entertaining and brutal: a vision of the Mexican Revolution as extravagant as it is excessive, and Morricone composed one of his most exceptional soundtracks as well as a beautiful musical theme: "Dopo l.esplosion," used in the impressive sequence of the explosion with dynamite. The film was censored in our country for almost 10 years - it premiered in 1979 in the original Cineteca Nacional, the reason: the treatment that Leone and his screenwriters made of the country and the Revolution, by the way, not far from the films starring Pedro Armendáriz and María Felix.

Rod Steiger embodies Mexican bandit Juan Miranda who relates to James Coburn in the role of John H. Mallory or Sean, a member of the Irish Republican Army, betrayed by a friend and arriving in Mexico to support the Revolution. Juan comments that the Revolution is planned by the rich as they eat opparaciously and are executed by the poor, he also clarifies that it is very well gifted as is Pancho Villa, in a film where a reality arises: all social outbursts end in massacres where the masses are manipulated and end in misery, and a small group holing power and wealth by betraying everything ideal.