Until the legions of imitators came along in Quentin Tarantino's wake, I'm not sure anyone ever made movies the way Sergio Leone did. Now it sometimes seems like everyone does, but the original remains the best. His forte was visuals, cunningly edited—giant Cinemascope images of vast empty landscapes alternating with close-ups of craggy faces, equally vast and empty, and as imposing as mountains. Dialogue is at a minimum; long sections could probably get away with intertitles. But he was no throwback to silent movies, as his sound designs are integral to his storytelling, whether it's a windmill in need of oil, the whining echoes of gunfire, or the fly buzzing that Emily Dickinson knew. His collaborations with composer Ennio Morricone—particularly in Once Upon a Time in the West, where each of four characters arrive with individualized musical themes, which interact and develop as they do—are uniquely memorable and perhaps his single greatest achievement.
In fact, it was the theme song that drew me in the first place to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which seems to be the one I return to most. As a junior high kid I was lost in the glacial pace of this nearly three-hour picture (the back end of a trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), but my interest picked up considerably whenever the theme started playing again. The scene that's most striking to me now (not available that I could find on YouTube) involves a group of POWs ordered to play music to mask the sounds of torture. The song they play, "La historia de un soldado," is immeasurably sad, and even as they play it they are immeasurably sad too. The way it's staged and cut is absurd and moving all at once, a trick Leone manages to play over and over again in his pictures.
Most of them are westerns, but they function like superhero movies filtered through a European art film sensibility—Dreyer, maybe, or Bresson. His characters are ridiculously gifted, forever doing things like moving a hat aside by shooting it or rescuing people about to be hanged several football fields away by snapping the rope with a bullet. The plots amount to little more than slow-wheeling confrontations between these figures, gradually ratcheting up tension until it's almost unbearable. It's always a struggle to the death, taking its most essential cues from the Hobbesian view that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Leone made an interesting gangster picture in the '80s, Once Upon a Time in America, and was in the planning stages for a movie on the Russian Revolution when he died in 1989. That's one I would have loved to see.
"See, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns. Those who dig. You dig."
La historia de un soldado
Phil #18: Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998) (scroll down)
Steven #18: The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
This was originally supposed to be Once Upon a Time in America, which I recalled (and even confirmed just a few years ago) as a flawed but powerful gangster picture. But seeing it again for this countdown it hit me all wrong ways, as incoherent and self-indulgent. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in between but I didn't feel myself in a good position to talk it up. I decided to make things easy for myself by sticking with Leone, and it could just as well have been (and probably would be another time) Once Upon a Time in the West. But The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the one I had seen most recently and remembered better.
I guess this is my opportunity to make fun of Clint Eastwood for that cretinous stunt with the empty chair, which I haven't been able to bring myself to even look at yet. What a bunch of empty-headed blowhards this pathetic hypocritical rump-end of the Republican party is (and will continue to be, win or lose—if we know anything about them we know how true that is). Everything that comes out of their mouths is a vile condemnation of everything they claim to believe—a bunch of wannabe deficit hawks, for just one example, who ran up the deficit with the following unfunded items: two tax cuts for millionaires, two wars, and one Medicare boondoggle. It would be funny if things weren't so dire. For God's sake. These people spent four years obstructing every last thing that might have done Obama a shred of credit, and now they have the temerity to stand up on their hind legs and say he didn't get things done. It's disgusting. After 30 years of slow-motion failure by these nitwits, their time is done, or should be in any sane universe.
Forever catching up dept.: I recently watched both A Better Tomorrow (Steven's #29) and Bullet in the Head, two early John Woo pictures. I had seen Bullet in the Head before, in one of the flushes of interest in Hong Kong movies in the mid-'90s, and liked it quite a bit. This time not as much. I think I might have seen a longer cut back then (there are a number of versions), but it seemed much more incoherent and monotonously unpleasant this time, though not without its appeals. I thought A Better Tomorrow, which I was seeing for the first time, was better. The various Woo trademarks were mostly present, notably the themes of loyalties among friends and family, swelling emotional music, and blazing two-fisted gun fights. These elements are not yet as fully under control as Woo would get them, but it's probably a great way to start with him. Then on to The Killer and Hard Boiled. (I still need to see A Better Tomorrow II.)
The Killer and Hard-Boiled are the apex, at least until Red Cliff came along. Bullet in the Head is indeed unrelentingly unpleasant, and I don't often recommend it to people for that reason.
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