L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, MAY 16, 2019 www.italoamericano.org L'Italo-Americano 2 " Is this your revenge?" "No, just the way I see things." Perhaps, the essence of Sergio Leone is all here, in these two sentences. It's the last scene of Once Upon a Time in America, when Noodles meets his old friend Max, whom he had believed death for 35 years, but in truth had been hiding all the time under the fake identity of the man who was to become Senator Bailey. It's been thirty years since the sudden death, at the end of April 1989, because of a heart attack, of Sergio Leone: a man who was first and foremost himself. It may seem a given, but not in a world like that of movies, that feeds on influences and citations. Romano de Roma — a true Roman, and there couldn't be any doubt about it —- son of a documentary maker from Campania who changed his name to Roberto Roberti in the 1920s, Leone brought his spontaneousness to the cinema of Italy first, and then the world. He began as a movie extra in Neorealist movies, then found himself working as an assistant director for Hollywood's Ben Hur and Quo Vadis, sword-and-sandal classics shot in Rome, but also in many 1950s costume productions, where he developed his own taste for epics. Not many know that his first movie was1961's The Colossus of Rhodes, a flick belonging to that already mentioned sword-and-sandal genre that was to be so denigrated in later years. More or less aware of the risk, Leone decided to transform Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in something unprecedented: a western imbued with quintessentially Italian irony and sarcasm. Later, they called those movies Spaghetti Western, and he really didn't like that. Just as he didn't like those who believed to be stars. He picked Clint Eastwood for his A Fistful of Dollars because his salary was 5000 dollars lower than the actor chosen initially, and because he liked "his indolence, his looking so lazy." Eastwood tried to get some more cash and, as he hated that smelly cigar Leone wanted him to keep in his mouth all the time, he demanded more lines in For a Few Dollars More. Leone answered that, for what he was concerned, the cigar was the actor, not him. A dig similar to another one Leone made a few years later, when the two mutually sent each other to hell: "Eastwood has two expressions, one with the hat and one without." When people remember you for the anecdotes you told, it means one of two things: either you're a joke or a myth. Ennio Morricone, who wrote the soundtrack for his six "famous movies" (only six, yes: from 1964 to 1984), says that his mantra was When Sergio Leone conquered American cinema: and you call it Spaghetti Western From the director "energy, space and time." And that he was maniacal, which is so strange in a person that seems so instinctive. But only his answers were: quick- witted, just like his movies' lines. And then, there was the anxiety related to his audience's opinion. It's Morricone again that tells us how, during a private screening of Duck, you Sucker!, his brother in law left 5 minutes before the end of the movie. Leone thought he didn't like it, so he cut those last 5 minutes out from the Italian edition, which is still like that today. Only six movies, we were saying, seven, if we count The Colossus of Rhodes. Leone managed to turn talented Italian actors in very credible cowboys, an immense talent of our cinema like Gian Maria Volonté in one (actually, two) of the most ruthless villains in the history of western movies. He created Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach, molding on them iconic figures who, thanks to For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, fathers and sons still cite today ("Hey Blondie, you know what you are?"). He introduced Claudia Cardinale, along with Peter Fonda and Charles Bronson, in the first of those Once Upon a Time tales that rose his homegrown epics to higher levels. He allowed an almost subversive streak to show in Duck, You Sucker!, a fact that made the movie unpopular in Italy, as tormented as it was, then, because of the Anni di Piombo. And, possibly, this is why for more than 10 years Leone ended up being a producer for lighthearted comedies, such as those of Carlo Verdone, and easy westerns, even if he wasn't a fan of the Bud Spencer-Terence Hills genre. On the background remained his greatest dream, that of narrating, one day, love and friendship. The thin line between good and evil, his true reinterpretation of classic American cinema. It took him 12 years, spent between rewriting screenplays and choosing actors. But then, he finally gave birth to his second tale. Since 1984, Once Upon a Time in America is a corner stone of cinema, that may not have won an Oscar (the Academy ignored the movie entirely, even though Leone was well appreciated in Hollywood), but everyone considers the highest example of a whole genre and, certainly, the film that created Robert De Niro's myth. The rest is like an unexpressed fragment, just like Napoleon for Stanley Kubrick. The epic about the siege of Leningrad Leone dedicated so much of his life before dying, was stranded by endless talks with the Soviet régime and characterized by a sense of utter desperation, because Russian cooks could not even "make a couple of fried eggs." Whatever you think about it, Leone's immense talent has been that of eating, chewing and digesting American cinema, bringing back out a version of it that, today, is considered one of the highest examples of the Seventh Art. Cinema made by an Italian with a broken English who, with his unique language, created a way to immortalize his own stories. And to make them ours forever. Simone Schiavinato, Director NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS

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