SCREEN RANT
By Ben Sherlock
6/19/202
Sergio Leone pioneered
the spaghetti western with the stylized violence, morally ambiguous antihero,
and Morricone music of the Dollars trilogy.
In any discussion of the greatest
western directors of all time, Sergio Leone’s name is bound to come up
alongside fellow icons like John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. With four bona fide
masterpieces (and three other very solid movies) under his belt, Leone is a filmmaking
legend. Leone has influenced countless filmmakers over the years, from Martin
Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino to his own go-to leading man, Clint Eastwood.
Leone was never recognized by the Academy, but he did receive a David di
Donatello Award for Duck, You Sucker!, as well as BAFTA and Golden
Globe nominations for Once
Upon a Time in America.
With the triple whammy of A
Fistful of Dollars, For
a Few Dollars More, and The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
Leone pioneered a brand-new vision of the Old West – a decidedly darker,
grislier, more violent vision than audiences were used to – and created the
spaghetti western subgenre. This trio of groundbreaking westerns (dubbed
the Dollars trilogy) exhibits many stylistic hallmarks of
Leone’s filmmaking, from blood-soaked violence to music by Ennio Morricone to
the juxtaposition of gorgeous wide shots against intense close-ups.
5 Stylized Violence
Hollywood westerns
like Shane and The
Searchers usually tone down
their violence with tame fist fights and bloodless gunshot wounds. Leone and
his spaghetti western cronies went the other way, dialing up the violence with
stylized bloodshed and relentless brutality.
That stylish, uncompromising
violence is on full display in all three Dollars movies.
In A Fistful of Dollars, a man is beaten and choked, and two guys
are crushed by a barrel. For a Few Dollars More has a man
being stabbed right through the abdomen and a mother and baby are implied to be
shot dead off-screen. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly has a
train robbery with death by rock-bashing and a gruesome interrogation scene
with torture by eye-gouging.
4 A Grisly Vision Of The Old West
With the Dollars trilogy (and a handful of
other westerns), Leone helped to pioneer the spaghetti western subgenre
alongside a fellow filmmaking Sergio, Corbucci. Technically, the term
“spaghetti western” refers to an Italian-made western, but the subgenre is
defined by Leone and Corbucci’s uniquely grisly vision of the Old West.
With movies like A Fistful
of Dollars and Django, the Sergios challenged Hollywood’s depiction of the West
with a much more gruesome vision of the era. Their protagonists weren’t noble
lawmen dedicated to protecting the peace; they were bounty hunters who killed
people for money.
3 Music By Ennio Morricone
From A Fistful of Dollars onward, Ennio
Morricone composed the score for
every single Sergio Leone movie. Morricone is one of the most renowned film
composers who ever lived, sitting comfortably alongside John Williams, Bernard
Herrmann, and Danny Elfman on the metaphorical Mount Rushmore of movie
musicians. His grand, operatic compositions revolutionized the music of the
western genre, which had traditionally been low-key and folksy, and paired
beautifully with Leone’s equally grand, equally operatic visuals.
Morricone’s music from the Dollars trilogy
– particularly his score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly –
contains some of the most iconic compositions in film history. Tracks like “The
Trio” and “The Ecstasy of Gold” are as universally recognizable as
Williams’ Star
Wars theme or Herrmann’s “The
Murder” from Psycho. Despite composing some of the greatest movie scores of all
time, Morricone didn’t win an
Oscar for Best Original Score until
he scored Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2015.
2 Contrasting Wide Shots With Extreme Close-Ups
One of the most
recognizable characteristics of Leone’s visual style is cutting between
glorious wide shots encompassing the entire scene and extreme close-ups of his
actors’ faces. In the hands of a filmmaker with less command of the craft,
these cuts could come off as jarring. But in Leone’s hands, there’s a real
sense of clarity. This juxtaposition encapsulates Leone’s storytelling:
large-scale epics with an intimate focus on character.
The most iconic example of this is
the climactic showdown in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The
titular trio arrives at the site of the buried Confederate gold. This
gun-toting standoff has been praised as one of the best-edited sequences in
cinema history. Leone and his editors Nino Baragli and Eugenio Alabiso
gradually cut closer and closer to the actors’ faces, getting tighter and
tighter, until they’re just on the icy stare in their eyes, before cutting back
to a wide shot when they all draw their weapons.
1 Antihero
Traditional
Hollywood westerns presented black-and-white morals with steadfastly
good-hearted heroes taking down irredeemably evil bad guys. Spaghetti westerns
shook up the genre by exploring an ethical gray area. Life in the Old West was
much darker and more complicated than the standard good-versus-evil westerns
would have audiences believe. Thanks
to Leone and Corbucci,
the whitewashing of frontier life on the big screen came to a swift end.
Movies
like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly –
as the title would suggest – presented audiences with characters that lie
somewhere between the categories of “hero” and “villain.” The Dollars trilogy’s softly
spoken “Man with No Name,” played with smoldering intensity by Clint
Eastwood, is one of the most iconic antiheroes in film history.
