L'Italo-Americano
THURSDAY, MAY 16, 2019
www.italoamericano.org
4
GENEROSO D'AGNESE
NEWS & FEATURES
TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS
T
he years between
1950 and 1960 were
difficult
for the great
Hollywood film
industry. A sentence
of the Supreme Court of the
United States decreed the end of
the
studios' productive and dis-
tributive oligopoly and, at the
same time, TV began to become
very popular. The significant
drop in films produced created
problems
for the programming of
many movie theaters, which had
also been seeing the number of
spectators go down. The cinema
crisis touched all genres, includ-
ing
western that, for decades, had
represented the most popular
soul of the offers on large
screens. But the story had not
come to terms with a director
destined
to enter the celluloid
world as a protagonist: Sergio
Leone.
An
icon of Italian cinema,
and even more than that, whom
we want to remember in the thir-
tieth anniversary of his death.
Leone was born in Rome on
the 3rd of January 1929, son of
Roberto Roberti (né Vincenzo
Leone), director and actor from
Torella dei Lombardi (Avellino),
and Bice Waleran, a Roman
actress of Milanese origins. Of
course, Sergio's first steps in the
world of employment took place
within the cinema industry: he
was a seminarist in the cult Ital-
ian Neorealism movie Bicycle
Thieves, by Vittorio de Sica.
Sergio understood immediate-
ly that acting wasn't his thing, so
he began working behind the
camera, as an assistant director in
Hollywood's Quo Vadis and Ben
Hur, both shot in Cinecittà .
But the occasion of a lifetime
came in the shape of an illness.
In 1959, director Mario Bon-
nard was forced to abandon the
set of The Last Days of Pompeii,
leaving his chair to Leone, who
had worked on the screenplay for
the movie. This was the golden
era of the sword-and-sandal
genre (historical movies in cos-
tumes), but Leone officially
debuted as a director with The
Colossus of Rhodes, a flick he
managed to produce with a very
low budget while keeping intact
all the spectacularity typical of
Hollywood's historical movies.
Once the genre ran its course,
Sergio invested it all in westerns,
creating his very own particular
sub-genre: spaghetti-western.
For a Fistful of Dollars
(1964), one of the most famous
in the history of the genre, costed
him a plagiarism lawsuit from
Akira Kurosawa, who won in
Sergio Leone: 30 years without his genius
Continued to page 6
Sergio Leone left us 30 years ago, on the 30th of April 1989. MARKA / Alamy Stock Photo
