Per un pugno di dollari

Director: Sergio Leone

By Roderick Heath

In the early 1960s, the Hollywood Western genre was beginning its long decline. The genre’s most iconic stars, like John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, aged, the directors who had fostered in its greatest years were themselves fading, the “adult” westerns of the ’50s had begun an antimythic trend that corroded the traditional mores of the horse opera, and television, with dozens of Western-themed shows on the schedule, was sapping the remnant vitality of the form. And yet, Westerns were still hugely popular worldwide, including in Europe, where, with the decline in American-produced fare, some producers wanted to get some of that sweet legal tender that oatsers could still generate. The late ’50s and early ’60s saw a smattering of attempts to make Westerns outside of the traditional American milieu, and a template was defined when Hammer Studios honcho Michael Carreras had the bright idea of shooting the 1961 Anglo-Spanish coproduction Terrain Brutal (Savage Guns) in Almeria, Spain. After a couple more multinational follow-ups, the first Italian-produced Western, Duello nel Texas, debuted; the historical musclemen sagas or “peplum” movies that formed much of Italy’s genre cinema was running out of steam, and something else had to fill the void.

This experiment in international genre resuscitation might have finished up as an ignominious pop-kitsch footnote if not for one Sergio Leone, an experienced screenwriter and assistant director who had recently graduated to official directing credits with the 1961 peplum pic The Colossus of Rhodes and wanted to tackle the genre. Leone, the son of early film director Roberto Roberti (birth name Vincenzo Leone) and actress Edvige Valcarenghi, claimed great affinity with the West as a subject of private enthusiasm, and disliked the more psychological, moralistic variety of Western that had arisen in the late ’50s, of which the likes of The Fastest Gun in the West (1956) or The Hanging Tree (1959) might serve as good examples. Leone resolved to toss out the psychological and metaphoric weight and get down and dirty. He began looking for a star, first trying Henry Fonda and then others, like Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and even Duello nel Texas’ star Richard Harrison. He finally found a taker in Clint Eastwood, the slender, stone-faced young actor known for the TV series Rawhide, and soon produced a huge hit that defined the Spaghetti Western in the short term and had no small impact on cinema in general.

Leone battered together a script with the help of Víctor Andrés Catena and Jaime Comas Gil, and had English dialogue written by Mark Lowell, but the film was structured to lessen the reliance on dialogue, with actors in smaller roles mostly dubbed. Leone’s ideal of the Western translated into an Italian visual style became the priority, offering up ebullient widescreen compositions that reproduce lighting and colour effects and arrangement of elements that call to mind the finest effects of Renaissance painting. The difficulty in taking A Fistful of Dollars seriously in and of itself is the immediately obvious fact that Leone and his collaborators egregiously ripped off Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), taking a cue from the successful Western adaptation of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) — The Magnificent Seven (1960). Leone later tried to defend himself by claiming he’d taken as much inspiration from the classic Italian play Servant of Two Masters, something which film writer Christopher Frayling emphasises. But this seems like blather, considering A Fistful of Dollars follows Yojimbo practically scene for scene: the same subplots, characters, narrative gimmicks, and even similar shots. Kurosawa successfully sued for a share of the profits, but it’s arguably only fair that he was hoist by his own petard, considering the debt his film owed Dashiell Hammett and the fact that it was a tribute to the Western traditions of John Ford.

In many ways, however, the closeness of the template and its unofficial, on-the-sly status, makes for a revelatory creation. The contrast of Kurosawa’s vision and Leone’s, differing takes by two cinematic titans on a simple and wittily brutal genre tale, is one of the few opportunities the cinema has ever offered for such clear comparison of disparate creative impulses. Kurosawa’s film is cool, crisply etched, his camera usually standing far back, the framing as sharp and refined as the edge of Toshiro Mifune’s katana blade; Leone’s frames jostle with detail, colossal close-ups, and multi-hued lighting that work in a symphonic fashion. Another difference is temperamental. Kurosawa doesn’t introduce the subplot of a woman who’s been forced to become a concubine by evil men, separating her from her husband and son, until halfway through Yojimbo. Leone makes one of the first images of his more operatic film that of the enslaved woman’s son trying to sneak into the house where she’s kept, from which he’s chased by sleazy thugs, who then beat up his father when he tries to protect the lad. This occurs in the casually observant eyeline of Joe (Eastwood), the wandering, poncho-clad mercenary who arrives in the tiny Mexican town of San Miguel, and right from that moment, it’s certain he knows not to give a damn about what chaos he starts.

Two clans are competing for the lucrative border-smuggling trade in weapons and liquor for which San Miguel is an ideal operating base. The Baxter cadres, led by the nominal sheriff John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy), face off against the three Rojos brothers—Ramón (Gian Maria Volonté), Esteban (Sieghardt Rupp), and Don Miguel (Antonio Prieto)—and their hired guns. Joe is harassed by the Baxters’ heavies and advised by tavern owner Silvanito (José Calvo) to hurry away after explaining the calamity that’s engulfed the town. Joe, however, seems to see opportunity—exterminating four of the Baxters’ gunmen with his own phenomenally fast draw—and tries to sell his services, in turn, to both the Baxters and the Rojos. But neither are exactly comfortable outfits to work for: Baxter’s Lady Macbeth of a wife, Consuelo (Margarita Lozano), wants to have him killed off quickly, and the Rojos are driven along by Machiavellian bastard Ramón, who contrives a successful ambush of a federale unit to rob them of the gold they’re transporting. So Joe sets up a battle between the two sides by arranging two of the dead soldiers’ bodies in a graveyard and sells information to each band, making the Rojos think the corpses are still-living survivors of the massacre they’ll have to finish off, and then tipping the Baxters to the advantage they might have in capturing the soldiers alive.

This last flourish, the impudence toward propriety and a purely makeshift sense of existence where even the dead are props to be used in the mean business of staying alive, is pure, original Leone, one of the touches that helped define his style. Leone was making films about the Wild West, but his thinking always seemed even more ancient. At the very least, he tapped into something mostly latent in the genre that had always been tidied over by American Western filmmakers seeking a veneer of relevance to contemporary society. Leone saw that it was precisely the wildness, the often barely discernible patina of civilisation reduced and reveling in animalistic behaviours that was the greater part of the genre’s pleasure. Men are hairy, sweaty, dirty, horny, greedy, and often ruthless in his movies. Basic opposites are always functioning in Leone’s films, in spite of the refinement of the style: life, death, earth, sky, rich, poor, man, woman. Personalities are present, ethics hazily visible, certain codes certainly dominant, but defined only by direct and basic force. The reduction is signaled by the animated cut-outs that form the credit sequence, and this also introduces the new note of pop-art to the proceedings.

The simultaneously deepening tactile and moral realism in Leone’s films and the unrealism, the borderline-mythic touches and the distancing from historical context, is one of the great contradictions in cinema. Emblems are important. The Baxter house, a roughly carpentered, but still recognisable approximation of a classic Yankee manor, and the Rojos house, with its lustrous Spanish white and columns, present not merely the abodes of warring gangs, but also warring civilisations and the contrast of Old World elegance versus American solidity. Joe himself, with his regulation cowboy gear and swathing poncho, blends cultural tropes in a suggestive fashion. In between the buildings, the no-man’s-land of San Miguel’s main street, is the first of Leone’s bullrings for warrior confrontation, which Leone’s widescreen lens describes in patient intimacy, often using the terraces of the Rojo house to further force the lens of perspective. Joe finds helpmates in grouchy, but fascinated Silvanito and the local coffin maker, and his only true nemesis is soon identified in Ramón, the man who gleefully machine-gunned the federales, the only one canny and brutal enough to present a real challenge. Facades are important in Leone’s films (just look at how often the image of a man hidden behind a screen spying or aiming a gun at someone appears in his films), and so is the alternation of identities; Ramón kills the federales wearing U.S. uniforms. However, no one’s better at muddying the waters than Joe. In the absence of real things to stir up trouble about, Joe provides illusions, like those two dead Mexicans, to leaven his divide-and-exploit strategy. There’s always some bullshit, Leone constantly suggests, hiding a real motive.

This stage-managed graveyard battle gives Joe the chance to search for the stolen gold, but he ends up taking an accidental hostage, Marisol (Marianne Koch), mother of the boy, now Ramón’s squaw, whom the Baxters eagerly use as a trading piece to get back their own useless son Antonio (Bruno Carotenuto). The discovery of Marisol’s history motivates Joe to win her freedom even though he’ll endanger his own life, because he “knew someone like you once. There was no one there to help,” as he tells her and her family before driving them away. Finally, real feeling has intervened in proceedings as a true motive, but it’s almost fatal for Joe, who’s captured and relentlessly beaten by the Rojos and their thugs. He turns the tables by crushing two of his torturers by rolling a gigantic barrel of gunpowder down on them—a gleefully nasty comeuppance—and then covers his escape by setting that powder alight. He literally and figuratively kindles an eruption, because the outraged Rojos assault the Baxters’ house and massacre all the inhabitants.

Kurosawa treated the story as both amusingly and harshly Darwinian, one of a wolf contending mostly with insects that cannibalise each other in thrilling but essentially pathetic ways. Leone wrings a different, more imperative flavour out of the action, and though still humorous, his possesses a darker lustre. Consuela Baxter’s death—the black-clad matriarch shouting defiance and a primal curse at the Rojos before being shot down in a wreath of smoke bellowing from her house—is exultant in its grotesquery and melodramatic scale; indeed, the whole sequence sports a remarkably, infernal vividness. So, too, is the little opera of gestures and glances on display when Marisol is briefly reunited with her family in the street during the prisoner swap. Leone, in spite of the great ease with which people die and the contempt with which they’re often treated in his work, always makes something almost transcendent out of the moments before dying.

Joe, the first incarnation of the character dubbed “The Man with No Name” (that was essentially a United Artists marketing gimmick), is only guided by a moral compass based in personal empathy, and there’s not much of that. We don’t hold it against him he uses people he loathes to make some money: most of us do that. That he proves to be a proper good guy isn’t in question, but he is definitely one of those Leone protagonists who has “something to do with death”, who, even if they don’t realise it, in essence, bring apocalypse wherever they tread. Joe even poses as a knight-errant or a risen, vengeful angel. Still playing games of truth and illusion, letting off explosives so that he steps out of the smoke like a spook after, having survived torture and eluded the hunting Rojos, he recuperates and returns strapping wearing body armour culled from the iron of a boiler to fend off the rifle blasts he knows Ramón will loose at him.

Joe finally confronts the Rojos when they turn their vicious attentions to Silvanito, and doesn’t leave the town until all his foes are decimated. The irony here is that Joe mythologises himself to scare his enemies into irrational decisions, just as Leone mythologises the proceedings with a self-conscious smoke-and-mirrors style. A Fistful of Dollars is usually described as a warm-up for the grander calisthenics of Leone’s career, but in viewing it after a very long interlude, and for all Leone’s debts and still-developing talents, I recognized it as great filmmaking indeed. Perhaps its very lack of pretension makes it a better, tauter film than the awkward intermediary sequel For A Few Dollars More (1966). It’s a wonder that with all the production problems of working with actors and technicians from four countries, Leone still managed to craft such a strong drama; this is the film that proved Leone was born to be directing motion pictures.

Eastwood’s properly terse performance, of course, made him the international film star he still is, and much of his appeal as presented here is as much about the quiet, sly good-humour he lets through Joe’s otherwise taciturn and unremitting exterior. He looks on the world much like a science experiment he’s running, sometimes a bit wryly disconcerted at how the experiment is proceeding, at least until it turns real, and then…you better run, boy. A Fistful of Dollars also sports the first of Leone’s immortally styled gun duels, defined by the rapid, rhythmic cutting between expectant faces, humour, and macho swagger slowly fading at the realisation that someone’s about to die, and then the concussive simplicity of the moment when the gunfire actually comes, with four or five men at a time dropping dead on the spot in a single, encompassing shot. Life is never more amazingly intense for Leone as in the few moments before it ends.

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C’era una volta il West

Director: Sergio Leone

By Roderick Heath

Sergio Leone’s colossal reputation amongst cineastes is, considered objectively, rather odd, considering that he was only credited with directing seven films, with nearly all of them certifiable greats: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1966), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967), Duck, You Sucker (1972), Once Upon a Time in the West, and Once Upon a Time in America (1984). The ironies stack up when considering that apart from his credited debut, The Colossus of Rhodes, Leone, who could barely speak English, set all of his films in the United States. Most of them were essayed in a genre, the western, that was beginning to die out, and worse yet, defined a subgenre that generally was derided and considered absurd at the time they glutted the world’s fleapit movie theatres.

To actually watch a Leone film is to erase all concerns about his reputation; love his style or loathe it, it is unmistakeable. The vastness of his widescreen compositions clashing with ultra-close-ups of leathery faces and staring eyes, the spacious narratives and eccentrically shaped scenes, the slow-burn structures and bullfight-like climaxes, the taciturn heroes, tarty heroines, and incessantly zany Ennio Morricone scores, burnt themselves very quickly into the pop-cultural imagination, even if they actually took some time to be recognised as something rare and wonderful and not mere Euro-eccentricity and cheap imitation run amok. I first encountered Once Upon a Time in the West through a send-up of it on a children’s television program in the early 1980s in which, as in the film’s immortally weird opening, a swarthy gunman is harassed by a fly. The parody gunman kept trying to shoot the damn thing when it rested on his face, only to reappear later with new plasters over the missing pieces of his steadily decreasing physiognomy.

The real opening sustains nearly 10 minutes of silence, as three gunmen (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, and Frank Wolff) wait for a train, contending with pesky insects, dripping water and nerve-fraying ambient sounds, before the haunting refrain of a harmonica announces the arrival of the man known only by his instrument of choice. Within a blink, the three gunmen are dead. Long waits for rapid displays of violence are the key Leone trait, but usually they had Morricone’s swirling orchestrations to fill them out. This sequence dispenses with the music and proves that it’s the pure thrill of genius film construction that is so hypnotic.

Leone’s feel for mise-en-scène, conjuring a rough-hewn western landscape possessed of a deep, tactile reality, was something remarkable. Every frame in his films drip with sensuousness—you feel the heat, taste the dust, smell the sweat. Even Once Upon a Time in the West’s interiors, shot at the Cinecitta studio, look for all the world like structures battered together by frontier carpenters.

Leone made Italian baroque and American grit mesh so easily one could hardly imagine how absurd the idea is on the face of it. The phrase “cultural appropriation” gets tossed around a lot, whilst the concept of cultural affinity never gets much airtime, but Leone seemed to find real affinity with American subjects. And yet he and Sam Peckinpah radically reshaped the western, to the point where they removed the supporting props from the western mythology,by substituting for its ironclad moral laws and essential innocence an altogether darker sensibility that was both more psychologically realistic and intrinsically brutal.

But where Peckinpah was fond of exploring the ambiguities of modern morality and character in a rugged setting, Leone’s fellow ’60s Italian director Vittorio Cotofavi called spaghetti westerns “neo-mythologism”—the reshaping of the western along the lines of Roman and Greek mythology, the mainstays of an Italian cinema had produced endless Hercules and Maciste films during the ’50s and ’60s. The western had largely been, in its classical form, endless variations on St. George and the Dragon, the traditional heroes idealised as defenders of social values in rough and rude realms. Leone’s own early work was in the Italian cinema’s mythological genres with pre-modern roots, and he carried something of their less easily defined morality over to the western. What that boiled down to was that Leone’s heroes were hard to distinguish from his villains, differentiated less by attitude or ethical codes than by motives and to whom, rather than why, they dealt out brute force.

Of course, Leone’s films don’t exactly lack heroes or villains, but the distance between Clint Eastwood’s The Man with No Name or Charles Bronson’s Harmonica, and Alan Ladd’s Shane and Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp is obvious. Leone’s are always outside of society, and bound to codes more defined by loyalty and desire for revenge. The very title of this film shows Leone’s hand. An epic, in strict poetic definition, is defined as a tale involving the founding of a nation, a precept Once Upon a Time in the West certainly fulfills as its plot sees the encroaching railway sweep out the last of the macho titans, but not without its own distinct level of pseudo-Marxist criticality. Nearly unique amongst Leone’s films, it had input from other major creative forces, story cowriters Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, and in particular, the former’s politics and the latter’s fondness for female central characters inflected the film. Leone never did a straight love story, and a recurring gag of Once Upon a Time in the West is that Harmonica continually engages in sexually charged situations with heroine Jill (Claudia Cardinale) whilst never actually engaging with her; only villain Frank (Henry Fonda) actually beds her.

Despite the often raw encounters between men and women that punctuate many of Peckinpah’s and Leone’s films, they were both perfervidly romantic directors, always inflecting their machismo with an ironically intense feel for the complexities and fleeting pleasures of femininity. Unlike Peckinpah, who was exploring his cynicism over the state of modern male-female relations, Leone presents overt, extraordinarily romantic qualities with Morricone’s soaring choruses, the charged close-ups and longing eyes of Cardinale here or the gauzy flashbacks that riddle For a Few Dollars More and Duck, You Sucker evoking lost loves and sorry betrayal, conceive romance as something lovely and utterly impossible, leading finally to the rudest of romantic shocks in Once Upon a Time in America.

By all accounts Leone was initially reluctant to do a film with a female central character here, but you’d never know it, in light of the film’s rich conceptualisation of Jill, a plaything of the supermen about her, and yet utterly self-contained and dedicated to self-preservation through wiles and guile. Her transition from whore to empress, predicted by Jason Robard’s scruffily noble brigand Cheyenne when he suggests she reminds him of his mother (“the biggest whore and the finest lady”), entwined with the transformation from wilderness to civilisation, is the theme that ties the tale together. The men in the film either die or ride away to nothingness.

Famously, Leone cast Fonda as Frank, inverting the actor’s image as the pillar of decency, but the role recalls how well he played charged aggression in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and destructive remoteness in Fort Apache (1948). Introduced committing mass murder, shooting a child in the face for the sake of saving the railway company of Morton (Gabrielle Ferzetti) a few thousand dollars, Frank threatens to unite the evils of modern capitalism and the classical strong man. He is kept in check finally by the vengeful progress of Harmonica, but also by his own weird ethics that remained tied to the ideals of the “ancient race,” as Harmonica calls their breed of super-warrior, explicating the mythological concept. Fonda’s restraint was always his hallmark, and though he clearly relishes the villainous role, tackling it with a virility he rarely got to display, he resists any temptation to go broad.

Like that opening sequence, other scenes in the film are like perfect units, virtual short films in themselves, especially the final confrontation of Harmonica and Frank, which is so precise in its staging, dialogue, and use of a flashback that it could stand entirely alone as a summary of the genre—the greatest gunfight of them all. Harmonica’s recollections of a younger Frank walking out of a desert haze recur throughout the film, until the final revelation of the cruelty that has set Harmonica in his relentless quest is revealed, in a crane shot that’s damn near miraculous in its composition and conception. Harmonica, tucking his instrument, the totem of his history and vengeance, between the dying Frank’s teeth, delivers the most pitiless and deserved of comeuppances. The whole film is littered with such brilliant little flourishes, from, say, the sound of waves that accompanies Morton’s fantasias of manifest destiny in studying a painting of the sea, and then his ignominious fate, expiring by a muddy pool, to Cheyenne trying to stay alive long enough to fight off Frank if Harmonica can’t defeat him, all while only seeming to shave and drink Jill’s coffee. And that, really, is why Leone is such a remarkable figure—he represents the filmmaker as virtual god in full command, playing out sequences entirely according to his own feel for cinematic cause and effect.

Which is not to ignore the dramatic qualities of the film. The sparse dialogue by Mickey Knox is often funny and memorable, and the acting from the key leads impeccable. The always wonderful Cardinale is as luscious as ever, and Bronson, who could be a good actor on the few occasions it was required of him, plays Harmonica with concise authority, his stout, stony physique and petrified glare suggesting some living piece of the landscape having torn itself free to mete out hard justice. But for me, Robards steals the film with his droll, droning performance as a warrior passing his prime: his final demand that Harmonica leave him because he doesn’t want Harmonica to see him die is Leone’s most affecting scene. Once Upon a Time in the West is still one of the highpoints of cinema.