Sergio Leone was an Italian film director known for his epic and bloody Spaghetti Westerns. His style relies on sweeping vistas, sudden dramatic close-ups, good guys who turn out to be bad, bad guys who turn out to be good, some truly terrible dubbing, and some of the best film music ever.
His first film A Fistful of Dollars (64) was remake of Akira Kurosawa's samurai adventure Yojimbo (61), and plucked an obscure American TV actor from obscurity: Clint Eastwood. Eastwood and Leone would go on to make some of the best and most troubling Westerns ever made. Leone, an Italian who had never seen the American West, would single-handedly redefine America's notion of that most beloved genre, the Western.
The follow-ups, For a Few Dollars More (65) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (66) are savage and operatic movies, setting epic stories of good and evil against a grand canvas and with dramatic scores from Ennio Morricone. After the massive success of these films, Leone began work o...
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director known for his epic and bloody Spaghetti Westerns. His style relies on sweeping vistas, sudden dramatic close-ups, good guys who turn out to be bad, bad guys who turn out to be good, some truly terrible dubbing, and some of the best film music ever.
His first film A Fistful of Dollars (64) was remake of Akira Kurosawa's samurai adventure Yojimbo (61), and plucked an obscure American TV actor from obscurity: Clint Eastwood. Eastwood and Leone would go on to make some of the best and most troubling Westerns ever made. Leone, an Italian who had never seen the American West, would single-handedly redefine America's notion of that most beloved genre, the Western.
The follow-ups, For a Few Dollars More (65) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (66) are savage and operatic movies, setting epic stories of good and evil against a grand canvas and with dramatic scores from Ennio Morricone. After the massive success of these films, Leone began work on what would prove to be his greatest movie. Once Upon A Time in the West (67) was filmed mostly in Spain and Italy and starred Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. Shockingly, Fonda, of the angelic blue eyes, played the sadistic villain Frank. The movie is a long and dreamlike hymn to the era.
His last great movie followed a quartet of New York City Jewish gangsters in the 20s and 30s. Once Upon a Time in America (1984), starred Robert De Niro and James Woods, was another meditation on American mythology, and like its Western predecessor, was too long and slow for the studio to swallow. The studio cut was a flop in America, but the film has since been restored to its four-hour complexity, and is recognised for the masterpiece it undoubtedly is.
M
MA15+
