Sergio Leone: Something to do with Death
Christopher frayling
Faber £20, pp570
Buy it at BOL
The first Italian western, La Vampira Indiana, was directed in 1913 by a film-maker who styled himself Roberto Roberti and starred his wife, Bice Walerian, in the title role. It is a minor milestone of the silent era but, more importantly, its director and star were the parents of Sergio Leone, who in 1964 was to honour his father and conceal his Italian identity by signing himself 'Bob Robertson' on his seminal spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars.
Leone was not, however, born until 1929, long after his mother had retired from the screen and at a point when his father was ostracised by the movie industry for his anti-fascist sentiments.
Christopher Frayling, cultural historian and Rector of the Royal College of Art, was one of the earliest apologists for the spaghetti western and his fascinating, long-awaited biography of Leone is an informative history of Italian popular cinema, a perceptive essay on changing tastes, and a minute examination of Leone's small, highly influential oeuvre.
The strictly biographical strand is in some ways the least significant aspect. Happily married by his late twenties to a ballet dancer, who, like their three children, became involved in the family business, Leone seems to have had little life outside the cinema. We hear of his passion for art and antiques, for good food and wine (eating and drinking feature significantly in his work). But only incidentally do we learn, in connection with his funeral in 1989 at the age of 60, that he was 'a friend and golfing companion' of the Minister of Tourism and Entertainment.
Mussolini's educational system and its propagandistic view of history produced a generation of cynics, Leone among them. As a lonely, only child, he spent much of his time in movie houses, finding in American films a social and moral security absent from the chaos of fascist Italy.
Then real Americans turned up as liberators to challenge these verities, and they were neither the knights of comic books nor the modern embodiment of the heroes of Leone's beloved Homer. As a reluctant postwar law student, Leone hung round film studios during the golden age of neorealism, appearing as one of the seminarians sheltering from the rain alongside the sad Roman bill-poster and his son on De Sica's Bicycle Thief. But neorealism didn't attract Leone, who never made a movie set in the present.
When Cinecittà became Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, Leone's dedication and competence made him a sought-after assistant to visiting Americans and he worked with Mervyn LeRoy (Quo Vadis), Robert Wise (Helen of Troy), William Wyler (Ben Hur), Fred Zinnemann (The Nun's Story) and Robert Aldrich (Sodom and Gomorrah).
The expensive US costume pictures were accompanied by the low-budget Italian 'peplums' (the title coming from the term for the brief tunics worn by the heroes and heroines), and it was on one such local epic, The Colossus of Rhodes, that Leone got his first directorial credit and ended his apprenticeship. The fashion for peplum pictures rapidly faded in the early 1960s, producing a crisis in the Italian industry.
Salvation came in the form of the spaghetti western, largely through the sensational success of Leone's Dollar trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars drew on Leone's childhood love of Neapolitan puppet theatre, his encylopedic knowledge of Hollywood westerns, and his deep ambivalence about American culture. He breathed new life into a dying genre and made a world star of the minor TV actor Clint Eastwood.
Observers called his pictures cynical and brutal, as well as baroque, rococo, mannerist and postmodern. Coining verbs, his brother-in-law believed that Leone 'spectacularised', while his most famous creation, Eastwood, thought he 'operacised'. With the grandiose, pessimistic Once Upon a Time in the West, an anthology of scenes from 30-odd classical westerns, he challenged Hollywood's synoptic, mindlessly affirmative How the West Was Won.
Having refused an invitation to direct The Godfather, he spent years setting up and producing the Proustian crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, which he conceived as a homage to the gangster movie and a demolition of its mythology. His 'fairy tales for adults' were melancholic, elegiac, obsessed with death.
When he became a widely interviewed guru in the early 1970s, the stocky, bearded, bespectacled Leone resembled in appearance and language Italy's most renowned cultural commentator, Umberto Eco. This provoked various embittered associates to challenge his intellectual credentials. While admitting he had a great visual sense, they claimed he was a stumbling, ill-read peasant, who appropriated other people's ideas. 'Arrogant and uncultured,' according to the screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni, though Henry Fonda found him 'the best director I've ever worked with in my life'.
One clue to an understanding of Leone's career, Frayling suggests, resides in his attitude to the English language. Mussolini's regime insisted on all foreign films being dubbed into Italian, so Leone grew up with American images divorced from their soundtracks. Despite the fact that nearly every picture he assisted on and all those he directed had English-speaking actors in the central roles, he never learnt to speak English. Moreover, he disliked English and communicated with his performers through translators and by acting out the effects he required. Dislocation became a component of his art, as did his insistence that to learn about life and to make movies, you don't need to step outside a cinema.
He also points to parallels with David Lean. Both concealed a fundamental insecurity beneath a cloak of arrogance. They emerged from years of labouring in cinematic vineyards to become obsessive perfectionists, working in Europe with American money on increasingly lengthy projects. Both made only two movies in the last 20 years of their lives and each died shortly before embarking on films they thought would be the apex of their careers - Lean's Nostromo, Leone's Leningrad.
