21The real Italian rock'n'roll? It was the spaghetti western

And Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone our rock stars. To make this unprecedented parallel between cinema and music is Piero Blacks Scaglione, who returns to bookstores with the biography 'Sergio Leone – The novel of a life'. We met him

Rolling Stone

By Maurizio Zoja

June 14, 2025

[Ennio Morricone & Sergio Leones at Cannes during a presentation of “Once Upon a Time in America” in 1984]

The real Italian rock'n'roll? It was the spaghetti western, and Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone our rock stars. This is what Piero Blacks Scaglione told Rolling Stone, who after having ventured into a beautiful monographic book on Once Upon a Time in America, returns to bookstores with Sergio Leone – The Novel of a Life (Sperling & Kupfer), a biography in which he expresses unprecedented points of view on the director's work. Just as unprecedented is the parallel between his cinema and rock'n'roll. And on this we cannot ignore the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone, who starting with A Fistful of Dollars (1964) has been in charge of the music of all Leone's films.

"The spaghetti western was the expression closest to the rock of the Sixties and Seventies," says Blacks, "but in an originally Italian version, with a very Italian flavor and origin. Italian music, even that similar to rock, derives from an Anglo-Saxon model. Starting from an example like Celentano's, there is a declared Italianization of a language that comes from outside. Leone's greatness, on the other hand, consists in having triggered a contrary process: he does not make films about the American myth to celebrate it, as many Italian musicians have done with Anglo-Saxon rock, but to criticize and dismantle it."

A Fistful of Dollars, the film that kicked off the spaghetti western season, was released in 1964, the same year the Beatles conquered America.

At that time, the Beatles made rock a hegemonic language. Leone came from Italian popular cinema, which was partly a cinema of old directors such as Mario Camerini, to whom he was an assistant. At a certain point he came up with a bizarre idea. He saw John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven, which is a remake of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, and then he saw Kurosawa’s The Samurai’s Challenge. And he decides to bring the samurai protagonist of the film to the West, and to make him become what Clint Eastwood’s character will be. For me it’s a process very similar to what happens in the rock of those years there, which takes certain elements of the blues and takes them to another dimension.

In your opinion, can it be said that, in the context of the western, yours was a new cinema as the Beatles were new to America?

The last phase of classic westerns was made up of very sentimental and very moralistic films. An example is The Conquest of the West of 1962, in which there are John Wayne and other stars of the genre. With films like these, America tries to give itself its own founding myth in which the Native Americans are not exterminated. But the real conquest of the West was a massacre from every point of view, and in the gold rush there were those who stole the land from those who were already there. The cinema of the last western phase, on the other hand, idealized and hidden. Leone arrives and his hero is a loner, who apparently only looks for money, who kills people and arrives astride a donkey. Leone's critical operation is this, and you can see it in these very big differences: there is a great cynicism and the destruction of an idealism that sounds false.

Meanwhile, to conquer America in 1964 are four long-haired men with music that seems deafening to the fathers' generation.

Violence was for Leone what the alleged noise of guitars was for the Beatles. Something that the fathers did not understand and indeed stigmatised. The classic "where are we going to end up?". In Italy, an almost sixty-year-old Mario Soldati sees A Fistful of Dollars and writes that it is a "repulsive" film full of violence. But he also writes that his three children have returned to see it. The film appears to him morally reprehensible and devoid of morals. Leone breaks with the language of previous cinema, like the Beatles with respect to the music that the fathers of their fans liked.

Leone's success, then, is disruptive, even in America. Just like the music of those years, his cinema is also a tool used by young people to say to their fathers: we are different from you.

In his cinema there is cynicism and the desire to get rid of a certain rhetoric of good feelings and so-called values that many no longer felt. In America they saw Leone's cinema as a kind of allegory of Vietnam. His films were criticized for being too violent, but in the meantime hundreds of American boys were sent to die. Even Robert Kennedy at a certain point, shortly before he was killed, took the title The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and made it a kind of slogan of his election campaign. This is to say that Leone had entered the common language of politics and of a new world that accused the old of being hypocritical. Leone's impact on American culture was very strong, so much so that at some point many great American actors want to work with him. Even Mick Jagger at one point said that it would be his dream.

Remaining in the Beatles-Leone parallel, do you also see an evolution in your cinema?

Certainly there is an evolution. For my book I interviewed Sergio Donati, the screenwriter who worked with Leone the longest. He says that, with the editing of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone stops having fun and feels he is successful enough to dictate the times. At a certain point the Beatles live no longer have fun, and indeed they had become a kind of machine, and so they become a studio band. Leone, for his part, pushes even more on the editing aspect, focuses on post-production, which was the part in which he felt strongest in my opinion, and makes increasingly complex films.

If we talk about Leone and rock'n'roll, it is inevitable to ask you about the role of Ennio Morricone.

I am sure that in a hundred years, even more, the music of the twentieth century that will be remembered is that of Morricone, perhaps that of John Williams, but not that of academic composers. For their first film together, Morricone does a very rock'n'roll operation because, for the theme that everyone knows, he uses an arrangement of a piece by Woody Guthrie that he had already done for RCA, Pastures of Plenty, to which Leone asks to remove all the words. The rock'n'roll connection, probably involuntary, consists in the fact that before the Leone-Morricone meeting, music was, as they said, sound commentary. With the two of them it becomes the structure of the film. Leone was the son of a silent film director, and he was born in 1929, that is, exactly in the years in which there was the transition between silent and sound. His father was one of the victims of this transition, one of those who did not adapt to the novelty. Leone's favorite director was Chaplin, who continued to make silent films even when there was already sound, because he liked silent films: his challenge was to make people laugh, to entertain, to tell stories without sound. And in the end it is the same thing that Leone wants to do.

What are the main reasons behind this goal?

Perhaps out of a kind of bond with his father, perhaps because it was precisely cinema that he liked, Leone aims to make films in which dialogue is just the bare minimum. But there was music. In Tornatore's documentary on Morricone, Bruce Springsteen says that when he went to see Leone's films he saw films he had never seen before, with music he had never heard before. Leone therefore gives him a feeling of absolute novelty. It is the only occasion of his life when, after leaving the cinema, he goes to buy the soundtrack disc. Especially to the Americans, therefore, there is an incredible double novelty: stories and images that had never been seen before and music that had never been heard before. The paradoxical thing, very funny, is that this bringing novelty was the last thing Morricone had in mind. He liked Monteverdi.

But he becomes a rock star, both for his success and for his influence on other musicians. The same thing happens to Leone.

Marco Morricone, his son, says that as a teenager – it was therefore the seventies – he was prevented from turning on the radio or playing the records he liked at home, because his father was afraid of being influenced, that a melody could remain in his head. But he was the one who influenced others.

How do you explain Morricone's great success with the musicians who came after?

The explanation he gave me when I interviewed him lies in the use of unconventional sounds and instruments that had never been heard before. In For a Few Dollars More, which is the first real soundtrack he writes for Leone and it's beautiful, there's the harp which is crazy, isn't it? And then there are the noises: the cricket, the coyote's cry... Morricone always tries to arrive at an essentiality of sound: there are almost never overlapping levels of sound. His is not music for orchestra: it is music that could be played with guitar, bass and drums. He worked with the orchestra but then stripped away the result of this work. In the end they were all themes that perhaps in his head started as orchestral, but became very essential. He could play like an orchestra, but with few basic instruments. There are "Morriconian" musicians like Metallica who have tried to be orchestral starting from rock instruments. Morricone, however, did the opposite: he started from the orchestra to get to something very similar to rock.