A fistful of spaghetti

Some fifty years ago, a relatively unknown Italian filmmaker, Sergio Leone, was egged on by a well-meaning friend to go and see Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
Leone did so, and immediately recognised the potential for remaking it as a Western. He had his own good reasons. Leone had already been taken in by the success of German Westerns that had been running to packed houses across Europe, and believed that he too could make one. Yojimbo only made his resolve more resolute.

Leone first approached Milan-based writer Sergio Donati to write a script for his remake; Donati saw nothing in the idea since European Westerns were reckoned to be C-grade films; nothing to be proud of. Leone then turned to script writer Duccio Tessari, who worked on a draft with a youngster called Ferdinando Di Leo. This version ran into 350 pages and was more of a parody.

Both of them are uncredited, for the story was to go through many more drafts subsequently. The dialogues for the English version were scripted by Mark Lowell and Clint Eastwood; but that happened much later. Leone and his writers came up with a number of titles: Il Magnifico Straniero (The Magnificent Stranger), Texas Joe, Sputafuoco Joe (The Firespitting Joe). It was a titleless film about a nameless man. Not that it mattered at that stage.

The first choice of Leone for the central character was Henry Fonda. A copy of the script was duly mailed to him, but Fonda’s agent returned the script without even showing it to the Hollywood star. Charles Bronson summarily dismissed the project as “rubbish” and Jason Robards demanded $25,000, which Leone and his producers could not afford. Rory Calhoun refused since he hadn’t liked Yojimbo, and Richard Harrison didn’t develop any liking for Leone. The project just didn’t seem to take off.

But the good word came in from Harrison. There was this young lad in the American TV series called Rawhide. He was strapping, and could even ride a horse. The lean-and-mean machine’s name was Clint Eastwood, and was willing to act for peanuts (read: $15,000). Eastwood arrived in Rome in April 1964 and filming began. The cash-strapped crew shot in Rome studios, and later in the Almeria desert of Spain. What eventually was stitched together would go on to make history. The film got a title in A Fistful of Dollars three days before the release, and was premiered at a small theatre in Florence in September 1964.

Many other Westerns had earlier been made in Europe — in Spain, Italy and Germany, but Sergio Leone’s film did something that the earlier renditions had failed to — it established not just a sub-genre, but a distinct genre in itself — the Spaghetti Western. It achieved phenomenal box office success but ran into copyright issues with Kurosawa, so much so that the film could be released in the US only in 1967. In the first three months, the film made more than what The Magnificent Seven had ever earned in Italy.

But now that the world is observing the 50th year of the low-budget A Fistful Of Dollars, a flashback is merited. For, the contribution of the film to world cinema history is unquestionable.

Sergio Leone did to the Western what Jean Luc Godard had done to the crime genre earlier with A Bout De Souffle (1960) — he turned it on its head. The only difference was that crime/film noir genre that Godard tried to decimate was not rooted in the US alone; the Western, on the other hand, was home-grown for Hollywood. And when Leone turned the table upside down, it was sacrilege for Americans. 

One critic even went on to write, “The calculated sadism of the film would be offensive were it not for the neutralising laughter aroused by the ludicrousness of the whole exercise. If one didn’t know the actual provenance of the film, one would guess that it was a private movie made by a group of rich European Western fans at a dude ranch. And that their American guest was left to supply his own dialogue from familiar clichés of the genre while they stuck to talking about the plot.”

Not everyone was scandalised, though. New York Times columnist Bosley Crowther pointed out that nearly every Western cliché could be found in this “egregiously synthetic but engrossingly morbid, violent film”. Crowther lauded Eastwood’s depiction of the half-gangster/half-cowboy character, and realised that this man would do all that the John Wayne archetype, in John Ford films for  instance, wouldn’t dream of doing.

And this was evident from the opening sequence of A Fistful Of Dollars itself. The Man With No Name strides into this Mexican town on a mule, notices a boy being kicked by a bandit and a ravishing young woman looking imploringly at him. But the man doesn’t interfere. Eastwood didn’t do what Wayne would have. If a genre was about conventions, Leone broke every rule in the book.

The indispensable ingredients
Sergio Leone came with firm roots in the Neo-Realist Cinema of Italy. His mother had been a silent era actress and father a filmmaker, who had been silenced during the country’s Fascist regime. Leone had worked as an unpaid fifth assistant in Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948), and also as an assistant director in many Italian and Hollywood films that were shot in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. He helped finish The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) for Mario Bonnard and rode on its success to film The Colossus of Rhodes (1960). Then, of course, he saw Yojimbo.

Leone’s intentions were clear — he wanted to transpose the grammar and Spartanness of Italian Neo-Realist cinema to a Western setting. He had long been an admirer of surrealist art and it was only natural that the lifeless, stark landscapes of the Spanish deserts would in some ways resemble the dreamscapes that Salvador Dali had painted a decade or two earlier. And it was in this weather-beaten, barren landscape that Leone would introduce his seemingly unfeeling prime characters.

In doing this, Leone established a distinctive visual style — one that would be emulated shamelessly by others over time. He wanted an operatic feel to the film — this he did with his extreme close-ups. This was a radical departure from the traditional Western where the close-up was only a reaction. For Leone, these were portraits. Just as stark as the landscape that the characters were entrenched  in.

Critic Adrian Martin has described Leone’s films as “odes to the human face”.
The Italian revelled in this, particularly during duel sequences. Extreme close-ups would alternate with wide-screen panoramas, backed by the haunting scores of Ennio Morricone. There would be moments of calm during conversations, and sound effects would be heightened. Not the traditional Western, at all. And Americans had difficulty in lapping up a Western divorced from its ideological and historical moorings.

There were other contributing factors, many of them being Eastwood’s own innovations.

Eastwood, whose trademark squint in this film was a result of the combination of the sun and high-wattage arc lamps on the set, created his own character’s image: from the black jeans that was picked up from a sports shop on Hollywood Boulevard to the hat that came from Santa Monica. Eastwood, himself a non-smoker, cut the cigars into shorter pieces and chewed on them.

But there was more. In linear-narrative Hollywood, whenever a person was shot, one camera focused on the gunman who fired the weapon, and a split second later, was cut to the victim who could be seen being hit. Eastwood knew this Hollywood convention, but kept it away from Leone. Leone shot the first violent scene of the film with the camera shooting from over Eastwood’s shoulder, giving the audience a kind of point-of-view shot. This too went on to becoming another cinematic trademark.

The box office success that A Fistful of Dollars experienced firmly established the Spaghetti Western. Over 600 European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1980 (see box); Leone himself went on to complete this The Man With No Name trilogy with For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966). Though the Spaghetti Western remained a dismissive term, Hollywood had to chew on its own words when Paramount invited Leone to make Once Upon A Time In The West (1968).

The casting was a de facto coup — it featured Bronson, Robards and Fonda. In fact, Fonda did for Leone that he wouldn’t do for anyone else — he played the ice-cold villain. Fonda was unwilling to accept the role till Leone told him this: “Picture this: the camera shows a gunman from the waist down pulling his gun and shooting a running child. The camera tilts up to the gunman’s face and... it’s Henry Fonda.”

The biggest compliment, albeit backhanded, would however come from Kurosawa himself. The Japanese legend argued that Leone had made “a fine movie, but it was MY movie.” The resultant lawsuit was settled out of court, and Leone had to part with 15% of the film’s international earnings besides giving the Asian rights for the film to Kurosawa’s producers. Later, of course, the Yojimbo filmmaker was to admit that he had made more money as royalty off Leone than he had for his own film.

This is what often happens with many a path-breaking film — people first don’t take the idea itself seriously, and then act as a doubting Thomas over its possible success. At the end of the day, history is made. And this, A Fistful Of Dollars had possibly predicted too in its own way. The film, after all, had been advertised as “This is the first film of its kind. It won’t be the last.”
One will agree.

The Spaghetti Westerns
The Spaghetti Western is a broad sub-genre of Western films that emerged in the mid-60s, following Sergio Leone’s filmmaking style and international box office success.

The term was used by detractors in the US because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians. The phrase ‘Spaghetti Western’, however, was coined by Italian journalist Alfonso Sancha.

Usually, these films were originally released in Italian, but as most featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, they did not have an official dominant language.

The typical Spaghetti Western team comprised an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, German and American actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star.

Over 600 European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1980.

The best-known Spaghetti Westerns were directed by Sergio Leone and scored by Ennio Morricone: the “Dollars Trilogy” (A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966)) and Once Upon A Time In The West (1968).

Use of pathos received a boost with Sergio Corbucci’s Django. However, in the later years use of cunning and irony became prominent. This was seen in Leone’s next two Westerns, with their emphasis on unstable partnerships. In the last phase of the Spaghetti Western, with the Trinity films, the Leone legacy had been transformed almost beyond recognition, as terror and deadly violence gave way to harmless brawling and low comedy.

Leone’s films and other “core” Spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, criticised or even “demythologised” many of the conventions of traditional US Westerns.
(Adapted from Wikipedia)