Sergio Leone: Italy’s Cinematic Maestro Didn’t Idolize America, He Challenged It

ROME — “I am vast, I contain multitudes…”

In the most famous verses of the most American of poets, Walt Whitman provides the perfect synthesis of the life and work of Sergio Leone, born in 1929, son of early Italian cinema notables — his father Vincenzo Leone was an actor and then a director, his mother Edvige Valcarenghi, an actress; together, in 1913, they made one of the first ever Westerns, in Turin, called The Indian Vampire.

The son grew up on the sets of Cinecittà, the vast Roman movie studio, was an extra on the 1948 classic Vittorio De Sica film Bicycle Thieves, and assistant to other notable Italian filmmakers before becoming the accidental inventor of the most successful film genre ever born in Italy, the Spaghetti Western. At least three of his works regularly appear on the lists of all-time best movies: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America.

Leone died in 1989 at the age of 60, a venerated master without ever having passed into the “usual asshole” category.

The conquest of a storyteller

He was a maestro who loved money, beautiful and expensive cars, diamonds and silverware, and yet he could be very generous. When they told him that only a heart transplant could save him, he kept postponing the operation until he died. Still his fatal condition also helped him overcome a lifelong fear of flying, and Leone flew around the world without any more problems in his final years. 

Despite his mastery of the American Western, Leone never learned English.

He was a great inventor of stories, plots and characters, without ever physically writing a single word of his screenplays. He was considered a fan of American cinema and Westerns, while his points of reference, more than John Ford, who he considered Irish, were actually England’s Charlie Chaplin, for subject matter, and the German-born Ernst Lubitsch, for style. Leone spoke French well and had a home in Paris. Despite his mastery of the American Western, Leone never learned English.

With Sergio Leone – Il Romanzo Di Una Vita (“Sergio Leone: The novel of a life”), I thought I would be writing a biography about the imaginary relationship between Italy and the American myth, which for many of us, perhaps for anyone born in these parts in the 20th century, was mediated by cinema. 

Instead I found a very different story. For Leone, America was not a myth, but an adversary. It is no coincidence that Once Upon a Time in America should have that title. That is the place where they imagined a plan — as his father Vincenzo wrote in 1930, when discussing the crisis of Italian cinema — “that aims at the full, absolute, unchallenged conquest, not only of our market, but also of our spirit.”

The crisis of Italian cinema was a very concrete fact in the Leone household: Vincenzo, who had been Francesca Bertini’s favorite director, worked very little after 1930. Only when he shot La bocca sulla strada in 1941 could his 12-year-old son finally see him in action. Many years later, in interviews he would recall that magical and decisive summer, later noting that his father hadn’t seen any of his films: Vincenzo Leone died in 1959, The Colossus of Rhodes, his son’s first film, was released in 1961. They would ask him how he classified such a twist? “As revenge.”

Defying the Hollywood machine

Leone would then see the Hollywood system up close at the time of the mythological or historical-epic blockbusters known as “sword-and-sandal” or peplum, where America brings its movie stars and organizational machine to Rome — and inevitably reveals its limits. 

In Cinecittà we are poorer, but much more flexible and creative.

“In Cinecittà we are poorer,” Leone reasoned, “but much more flexible and creative. We can challenge them and beat them on their own turf.” Thus he arrives at his first Western, A Fistful of Dollars, via a tortuous and interesting path. He cultivates for a while the idea of ​​bringing the Magnificent Seven of the film of the same name, inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, to ancient Rome. Then he discovers another film by Kurosawa, Yojimbo, released in Italy in 1963, and is struck by it.

He will wind up transporting the solitary samurai of Toshiro Mifune to the West, on the border with Mexico and transforms him into the silent gunslinger of Clint Eastwood. 

A Fistful of Dollars was released on September 12, 1964 in a single theater in Florence: after a week, the lines to get in blocked traffic. All sentimentality was abolished, the inevitable love story was erased, all false moralism was disregarded, in Leone’s western all that remained was action, what the new audience wanted. Italian director Mario Soldati wrote that the film was “repugnant” and that he couldn’t explain why his children wanted to see it again and again.

“Cinema cinema”

One of the reasons certainly lies in the music that accompanies — or rather, in this case, sustains — the images. The author is a young composer, Ennio Morricone, who until that moment had mostly worked as an arranger at the RCA record company. 

Morricone and Leone had been schoolmates in third grade in the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere, at the Lasallian Fathers’ institute, they had lost touch before meeting by chance 25 years later. They immediately discovered a perfect harmony: for A Fistful of Dollars Morricone reused old arrangements, adapted other people’s ideas.

One wrote music that had never been heard before. The other learned to build stories that rode on the soundtrack.

But from then on, both would go beyond: one wrote music that had never been heard before, not at the cinema, or anywhere else. The director learned to build stories that rode on the soundtrack, which would no longer have a decorative purpose, but rather become a narrative tool, the voice of the characters, “cinema cinema,” to use an expression dear to Leone. 

The revolution would thus be complete. Quentin Tarantino said: “Sergio changed the vocabulary of cinema. Once that genie got out of the bottle it was never put back in again.”