Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone (January 3, 1929 - April 30, 1989) was an Italian film director. Born in Rome, he was the son of the cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone and the actress Francesca Bertini, and started working in the film industry himself at the age of eighteen.
Biography
He began writing screenplays in the 1950s, primarily for the so-called "sword and sandal" or "peplum" historical epics which were popular at the time. He also worked as an assistant director on several large-scale, high-profile Hollywood productions filmed at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, notably Quo Vadis (1951), and Ben Hur (1959). As a result, when the time came to make his solo directoral debut with The Colossus of Rhodes (Il Colosso di Rodi) 1961, he was well equipped to produce low-budget films which looked and felt like Hollywood spectaculars.
In the early 1960s, demand for historical epics collapsed, and Leone was fortunate enough to be at the forefront of the genre which replaced it in the public's affections - the Western. His A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari) (1964) was an early trend-setter in a genre which came to be known as the Spaghetti Western. Based closely enough on Akira Kurosawa's Samurai adventure Yojimbo (movie)|Yojimbo(1961) to elicit a legal challenge from the Japanese director, the film is notable for it's establishment of Clint Eastwood as a star. Until that time, he had been an American television actor with few roles to his name.
The look of the film was established partly by it's budget, and partly by its Spanish locations, and it presented a gritty, violent, morally complex vision of the American West which paid tribute to more traditional American Westerns, but departed from them in tone. Leone deservedly gets credit for one great breakthrough in the Western genre that is still followed today: in traditional Westerns, heroes and villains alike looked like they had just stepped out of the beauty parlor. Leone's characters were more "realistic": they rarely shaved, looked dirty, and there was a strong suggestion of body odour. This sense of realism continues to affect Western movies today, and has also been influential outside the genre.
His next two films - For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - completed what has come to be known as "The Dollars Trilogy", with each film being more financially successful and more technically proficient than it's predecessor. All three films featured remarkable scores by the prolific composer Ennio Morricone.
Based on these successes, in 1967 he was invited to America to direct what he hoped would be his masterwork, Once Upon a Time in the West (C'Era una Volta il West) for Paramount. Filmed in Monument Valley, Spain and Italy, it emerged as a long, violent, dreamlike meditation upon the mythology of the West. It was scripted by Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, both of whom went on to have significant careers as directors. Prior to release, however, the film was edited by the studio, which perhaps contributed to it's poor box-office results, although it was a huge hit amongst film students, and has come to be regarded by many as Leone's best film.
After the relative failure of Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone directed A Fistful of Dynamite (1971), a quick money-making project starring James Coburn. He turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather, but spent the next ten years building up to another epic work, this time centred on American gangsters. Once Upon a Time in America was a project he had conceived before Once Upon a Time in the West, and like that film, it was too long and stately for the studio to stomach. They cut it's four hour running time drastically, losing much of the sense of the complex narrative. It too flopped. At the time of his death, Leone was part way through planning yet another epic, this time on the Second World War battle for Leningrad.
Filmography
