C.‘It was once a boy from Trastevere who watched western movies. Later, as an adult, Sergio Leone liked to play cowboys. “How many years has it been since he’s gone? Thirty-three … And I’m still moved, “he says Raffaella Leone in the beautiful documentary about her father entitled Sergio Leone: the Italian who invented America. After the preview at the Venice Film Festival, the 20 October in cinemas (later on Sky). Sergio Leone speaks at length in archive footage, with his little Buddha aspect, sometimes in front of a plate of pasta: «My cinema is the world told by children, it is an immense show where masked facts of life are re-proposed. It is a vehicle for bringing out one’s own historical and psychological experiences through the fable ».
The beginnings on dad’s sets
Raffaella is now 60 years old and is an important producer. At 20, she started working for her her father: «You must be the first to enter the set and the last to leave». First job: labor in tailoring. Nothing pays. “Then I pitied the organizer who put me on the payroll and with that money for the purchase of a moped I bought a dog.” Growing up, her advice that her father gave her was: “You have to think big“.
Director Francesco Zippel makes Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino, De Niro, Connelly, Verdone, Tornatore, Morricone speak, Farinelli of the Cineteca di Bologna, now the new president of the Rome Film Festival, and others. And all of them manage to convey that sense of magic to us, the beauty of nostalgia for those films that seem to have been made yesterday, fed with love for America and the Americans that he saw, kidenter the Rome liberated by the Nazi-Fascists.
Leone refused The Godfather
Sergio Leone in a photo of the Angelo Novi Fund of the Cineteca di Bologna.
Here is Leone and his extraordinary artistic vision, a world of his own, a unique style of narrating through images which influenced the interviewed sacred monsters of American cinema. The close-ups; the characters almost like cartoons; humor; the melodies of Ennio Morricone which are like other phrases and other words, sounds that “speak” to the audience; time suspended, expanded, multiplied, the art of waiting at the cinema, as if nothing could happen; the iconic phrases: “When a man with a gun meets a man with a gun, the man with the gun is dead.” But it wasn’t a walk in the park.
Eli Wallach, when he was offered the spaghetti western, replied: “It’s like making pizza with pineapple.” And then the revelations. Like when Leo turned down The Godfather to pursue a 13-year dream: Once upon a time in America. The applause and the fiasco for one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema, the triumph in Cannes, the disappointment in the USA, when the producers, Warner and Ladd Company who had the last word, massacred him: they canceled the preview in Boston, had it reassembled and cut an hour from the three and 45 hours. “Dad never wanted to see that version, he said it wasn’t his movie anymore.” Robert De Niro says: “The new version bothered me.” Finally, the last dream, which has remained the same: the film about the siege of Leningradwithout a script but everything in the director’s head, frame by frame.
I Leone a dynasty in cinema
He was the son of Vincenzo Leone, who worked in silent cinema under the pseudonym of Roberto Roberti. In the mid-1960s, the son also chose an invented name, Bob Robertson (aka Roberto Roberti’s son), for his western trilogy starring a then unknown Clint Eastwood who in America was a golf teacher and appeared in the western series. And now he says: “I didn’t speak Italian, Sergio didn’t speak English, we communicated with gestures”. Leone was conquered by his “Trastevere” indolence, that sly air, smart, the slouching walk and yet the speed when it was time to pull the trigger.
A little girl among the extras
Raffaella and Francesca Leone with their father Sergio and Clint Eastwood on the set of The Good, the Ugly, the Bad (1966).
Nobody believed in the western genre anymore. For a bunch of dollars (title changed in post production: it had to be called The magnificent stranger) came out in Florence: on Friday he collected 600 thousand lire, on Monday, a limp day, with word of mouth he reached 1 million and a half.
There is a terrific anecdote. In a scene from the good, the bad and the ugly, a bridge had to blow up; in the filming in Almeria the Spanish soldiers anticipated the firing of the dynamite, the scene was not filmed, Leone fell with bloodshot eyes, “I’ll kill you!”. The bridge had to be rebuilt and a second fuse went off. Raffaella went to the sets with her brother Andrea: «They were deserted, dusty lands, with only adults. We had to be silent. For a child it was boring. But also great when they put on the costume and we were part of the extras. They were different holidays from my friends, who had a more peaceful and normal life ».
The western reimagined
Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Sergio Leone, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards on the set of Once upon a time in the West. (Photo by Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images)
Leo’s is a European Far West, mythological, never existed until that momentwhich at first, disorienting him, infuriated Martin Scorsese, before he was conquered by Once Upon a Time in the West. The US western was the myth: here is the mythization of the myth. And then he the women. Before having Claudia Cardinale, Leone had never worked with female figures, the screenwriters of the time were not used to it. So Sergio turned to two young people, Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci. And then the transformation of Henry Fonda, from the best actor in Hollywood cinema to a rogue (not nice). “He arrived on set with sideburns, hair as black as contact lenses. I let it cook in his broth. Postponing his entrance on the scene, days later I convinced him to remove that masquerade. You have these wonderfully expressive blue eyes… ».
And politics. The left, the only “party” in the cinema, did not like Leone. Those were the years of commitment, of the “hands on the city” … down the head is a counter-revolutionary film about Mexican uprisings, the director stigmatizes the bad teachers who stay in the living rooms drinking tequila, sending the poor to die. The intellectuals did not understand that the massacre of civilians in a cave evokes the Fosse Ardeatine. Sergio Leone’s adventure began with a reverse Oedipal sense. «When my father retired from the cinema out of frustration» says Sergio «I wanted to continue the job of dad. As an obligation“. And here The Colossus of Rhodeson the epic hero portrayed as a playboy offering a flower, “to dispel the archetype.”
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