Once Upon a Time was Sergio Leone, the man who invented America

Translated by Giulia Maffeis

Last April 30th was the thirty-fifth anniversary of Sergio Leone's death. A few days later, I happened to rewatch Once Upon a Time in America (1984), but I'll get back to this movie in a second. 

Sergio Leone, born in Rome on January 3rd, 1929, began his career in the film industry as an extra in Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), playing a foreign seminary student in the scene where the protagonists seek refuge from the rain. It was only in 1961 that he directed his first film: The Colossus of Rhodes. This low-budget film was born from Leone's interest in peplums, a sub-genre of historical films that narrate heroic actions in classical antiquity. This has been his only experience with this genre of film.

 A Fistful of Dollars was released in 1964, and from now on, the idea of Western films will change forever. The film presents a violent and morally complex vision of the American Wild West. A genre, the Western, linked to the idea of the American director John Ford, who through his films conveyed a vision of the world of a people who in those years were still lost and in search of the American dream. With Leone's arrival, things would transform, because Leone was not American. The protagonist - played by Clint Eastwood - has no name and is an anti-hero, and the duality between good and evil is missing. The protagonist is a bounty killer who only thinks about his gain. In the following films that, together with this one, create the Dollars Trilogy (For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), all starring Clint Eastwood), this individualism is further accentuated. A fitting example can be found in the final part of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in the iconic race in the cemetery to find the buried gold, the scene before the famous Mexican standoff, also known as the triello.

Leone infused his films with repeated and highly personal directorial choices that, over time, have become part of school textbooks, such as an extreme close-up, creating an ultra-close shot of the eyes. A framing technique that will also be used in the future by directors like Quentin Tarantino. Leone was also the first to stage the Mexican standoff in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and he was also the first to show in the same frame a gun firing its shot and the target being hit and falling to the ground. But Leone's genius in modifying and subverting American cinema doesn't end there. In Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the first of the Time Trilogy, Leone took Henry Fonda - who until then was regarded as the quintessential good guy - and transformed him into a ruthless killer. He does this with a camera movement that starts from behind and reveals Fonda's face just before he, pulling out his gun, kills a child, astonishing the audience of the time, who didn't expect to see Henry Fonda in such a role.

A Fistful of Dynamite, the second film of the Time Trilogy was released in 1971, set during the Mexican Revolution. This film marked the end of Leone's career in directing westerns (so much so that initially he wanted to give the direction to Sam Peckinpah) to fully devote himself to what he had long dreamed of directing: Once Upon a Time in America.


So, as I said before, we've now come to Once Upon a Time in America. This film is pure art from its unmistakable and evocative soundtrack realised by Ennio Morricone, schoolmate and trusted collaborator since 1964. On a directorial level, some scenes are engraved in the history of cinema. One memorable scene, for example, pictures a group of friends walking with the Manhattan Bridge in the background. Once Upon a Time in America tells the story of Noodles (played by Robert De Niro), an elderly criminal who reminisces about his life and looks for lost time. When Noodles' friend, the bartender, asks him what he has been doing for the past thirty years, he outlines his life by saying, "I went to bed early" (one of the most famous lines in cinema), which, besides being a Proustian reference, highlights the theme of nostalgia for something lost. We come to understand throughout the film that Noodles, much like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, persistently seeks to live a life that no longer belongs to him, to pursue love with a woman, Deborah, who once belonged to him but is now with his best friend. However, Leone, in the final temporal sequence, takes us back to the opium den seen at the beginning and shows us a close-up of Robert De Niro smiling, dazed and detached from the surrounding world, leaving us in doubt whether the story is real or a long opium-induced dream.

Just like Plato's demiurge who invents a world from existing components and sets it in motion, Sergio Leone shaped and moulded a new cinema. If you want to rewatch Leone's films, they are now available on Amazon Prime thanks to Leone Film Group. There's a channel called "Once Upon a Time..." Subscribing gives you access to a catalogue containing not only Leone's films but also internationally acclaimed Italian cinematic classics such as Bertolucci's 1900.

Mondo Internazionale APS - All Rights Reserved ® 2024