Sergio Leone on the directors who represent the “alternating petals of the American daisy”
He may have been born and raised a proud citizen of Italy, but Sergio Leone found his greatest cinematic successes coming when he applied his innovative and influential techniques to stories that were distinctly American in their conception and execution.
It goes without saying the western has always been closely associated with the wide-open plains of the United States and the lawless nature of its frontier years, but it was a European director shooting a trilogy in Spain that helped usher in a new era and evolution for the genre.
A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly turned Clint Eastwood into a star and helped launch the explosion of spaghetti westerns that dominated cinema in the years to come before his return to similar territory with Once Upon a Time in the West took a more classical approach that was every bit as effective.
His final feature took much the same approach but applied it to the sprawling crime saga, with Once Upon a Time in America exploring a period in the country’s history and the effect it had on the people who survived, thrived, or fell by the wayside during it through the lens of an outsider.
While the mythology of America didn’t transfix him as a whole, Leone nonetheless admitted that it was the perfect conduit with which to explore the stories he wanted to tell. “I am not fascinated, as you say, by the myth of the West or by the myth of the gangster,” he told Pete Hamill. “I am not hypnotized, like everyone east of New York and west of Los Angeles, by the mythical notions of America. I’m talking about the individual, and the endless horizon; El Dorado.”
From his perspective, Leone believed that cinema “has never done much to incorporate these ideas” that were so prevalent in his output, suggesting “America itself has never made much of an effort in that direction, either.” And yet, he appreciated two filmmakers who told distinctly and unequivocally American stories that couldn’t be more different from each other.
“Just consider Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, Scarface, or Rio Bravo,” he mused. “I love the vast spaces of John Ford and the metropolitan claustrophobia of Martin Scorsese, the alternating petals of the American daisy. America speaks like fairies in a fairy tale: ‘You desire the unconditional, then your wishes are granted. But in a form you will never recognise’.”
By his own acknowledgement, Leone’s work “plays games with these parables” and the so-called “fables” of what America is, was, and can be. Ford and Scorsese undeniably mastered it, too, but as the Dollars trilogy director showed, exploring the mythology of the country wasn’t exclusively restricted to the locals.
