I almost used the word 'genius,' but I think that's overused. Still, he was pretty darned close.
Lately I've watched a few of his films again:
Once Upon A Time In The West,
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, and
For A Few Dollars More. I bought the first two -- I'd never before seen
Once Upon A Time In The West but it seemed like a safe bet -- and got the other one from the library (though I'll probably add it to my DVD collection at some point). I haven't seen any of his other films, other than perhaps
A Fistful Of Dollars way back in my youth (another one I'll pick up at the library today, if it's not checked out), but these ones are a great start.
I'd seen
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly back when I was 19 or so, and liked it, but I don't think I ever really fully appreciated it. The theme tune was a favorite from childhood, but the movie didn't really make a huge impact on me when I finally saw it, other than being well done and perhaps striking me as more or less a more serious version of the
Trinity films and the like. This time around, though, it blew me away.
For A Few Dollars More perhaps made even more strong an impact and
Once Upon A Time In The West arguably tops them all.
I suspect many -- fans and detractors alike -- see these Leone-helmed 'spaghetti' westerns as not much more than a lot of macho posing and brief bursts of intense violence and generally bad behavior by characters who almost universally are neither fully good nor fully bad (nor fully ugly). American and other critics back in the era of their release certainly didn't seem to see them as particularly noteworthy. The grittiness and sheer grottiness of the settings and the characters were a big change from the way westerns had been done before, for the most part, and the films' violence was not so much confined to discrete events but was an undercurrent that ran through the films, brilliantly sustained by excellent cinematography, Ennio Morricone's phenomenal soundtrack work, and the interplay of the characters. More than this, though, I think the real beauty and brilliance of these films very obviously transcends the western genre and has nothing to do with violence: these films are just absolutely
beautifully shot and edited. Trademark Leone camera use, such as juxtaposing
extreme close-ups of faces with stunning Cinemascope wide shots of the broader vista combines with his apparent fascination for interesting (some REALLY 'interesting') faces to tell a story that's far more eloquent than the typically sparse dialog.
By usual Hollywood standards, then and now, Leone's films are excruciatingly slow and ponderous. I'm no fan of movies that really drag, but in Leone's work this kind of languid pace is what makes it all work so well. Here you have Clint and Lee Van Cleef, or Henry Fonda (in a truly despicable role, totally against type, that he plays the hell out of) and Chucky Bronson (who I normally find pretty much a nonevent but who was probably never better than in
Once Upon A Time In The West) basically staring at each other for several endless minutes before a brief burst of gunfire, or not, and it's as compelling as anything you'll ever see and far more so than most more frenetic celluloid confrontations. There's often a good dose of humor apparent in these films, too, often in such tense scenes where the real context is finally revealed as a kind of punchline.
Take the start of
Once Upon A Time In The West, for example. It's pretty much like watching paint dry, in terms of pace, if you're watching paint dry while being bothered by a fly and listening to an infernal goddamned windmill that badly needs oiling. But it's perfect. The first time I saw it, when all I saw of the film was that precredits and credits sequence and a few minutes of the main body of the film, I wondered what the hell kind of snoozefest I had stumbled upon but, even then, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.
Here's a snippet from it, for anyone who is not familiar with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHZpO6aNLwEThat's only a
part of the opening, the latter part...there's a lot more before it that sets up this frantic piece of nonstop action. :D
Leone's work was highly personal and stylized. But it didn't come from nowhere. I just watched
Once Upon A Time In The West again (all 165 leisurely minutes of it), this time with DVD commentary provided by some really knowledgeable British film historians, the always-interesting John Carpenter (watching one of his films with him and Kurt Russell sharing commentary duties is great fun and very educational), a barely-coherent John Milius, and others. Listening to these experts talk over the film is something else...I feel like I've just taken a graduate-level course in film production. These people also highlight just how densely packed this film -- and presumably his others -- is with references both incredibly subtle and more overt to other films, notably classic Hollywood westerns by the likes of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and others of Leone's heroes. And one particularly insightful comment that struck my fancy was that directors like Sam Peckinpah, with his famous slow-motion death scenes, were interested in the moment of violence whereas Leone was more interested in the moments
preceding the violence, to which the actual action was usually more like a rapid punctuation mark.
Speaking of influences, I read that
A Fistful Of Dollars was a retelling of Akira Kurosawa's
Yojimbo (itself an uncredited take on book by Dashiell Hammet, compounding the irony of Kurosawa suing Leone for plagiarism) so I requested that film from my trusty library and watched it. I'd always heard Kurosawa also referred to as some kind of genius and I have to agree that he did a good job. He really knew how to create atmosphere and, really,
Yojimbo may feature samurai fashions and Japanese dialog but it is very plainly a straight western, just as much so as
High Noon in any real sense. And, like Leone's western films that followed, it celebrated the antihero and featured somewhat drawn-out scenes where the typical American director of the day would cover the same action ground with a series of quick cuts. The most excellent Toshiro Mifune is mesmerizing in this film and, like Clint Eastwood's laconic 'good guys' to follow, found himself brutalized almost as much as he won. I've got
Ran and
Rashomon waiting at my library for me to pick up today and I think I'll go for
The Seven Samurai after that -- it's no coincidence, either, that this latter film was remade in the USA as a western. John Ford giveth, Kurosawa taketh it away to Japan and giveth it back to the world as shared mythology.
The fun thing, for me, is that Kurosawa was an ardent fan of American directors, especially in the western genre, and was such a John Ford fanboy that he even dressed like him when on the set. There's something just perfect about a Japanese director having as his prime influences American directors and in turn influencing an Italian director (who shot much of his Old West in southern Spain) who not only taught younger American directors how to make westerns and other morality tales but who, with his Japanese hero, went on to heavily influence some of the greatest of the new wave of American directors in a more general way, including Scorsese and the other '70s icons.
So there you have it: I think it's easy enough to see these films as mere shallow horse operas that gave the world Clint's squint, or as iconic pop-culture reference embodied by the ponchoed figure of the Man With No Name, but it's also pretty plain to see that they're visual masterpieces and hugely influential. More than anything else, I think, Leone was a director's director. Same with Kurosawa. It's not actors who tend to rave over his films, or laud his work, but directors (film's a director's and editor's medium, for sure) and their tributes are undoubtedly more ubiquitous than most of us realize. I think film directors get more from these guys' films than do the rest of us. Some of these references and tributes show up in the most unlikely places: the rising crane shot that gives us our first view of the 1885 iteration of Hill Valley in
Back To The Future III, for example, is a direct reference to the same exact shot in
Once Upon A Time In The West. And supposedly the Kurosawa film
Hidden Fortress was the template for
Star Wars, and Lucas certainly used Kurosawa's trademark wipe as a transition in that film.
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