Leone, Sergio

(1929–1989)

   The inventor of the “spaghetti Western,” Sergio Leone was uniquely able to make films that were both a critical and a box office success. Born in Rome, Leone was what Italians call a figlio d’arte insofar as both his father and mother were prominent figures in the Italian silent cinema. After a lengthy apprenticeship in Hollywood (he made more than 50 films as an assistant director), in 1964, Leone directed the seminal Western A Fistful of Dollars under the pseudonym “Bob Robertson.” This film, which starred Clint Eastwood as “the man with no name,” cost less than $200,000 to make but revived the Western genre in a new, more brutally realistic, form. The film’s sequel, For a Few Dollars More (1965), was equally successful.

   Leone, by now internationally famous, was able to make the two big-budget Westerns that permanently established his reputation as one of the great contemporary film directors: The Good, the Bad ,and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Complex, violent, and philosophical, these movies combined art and entertainment with outstanding skill. The same is true of Leone’s last film, the epic gangster movie Once Upon a Time in America (1984). This saga of a band of Jewish gangsters was a lengthy and complicated study in themes of friendship and betrayal. Drastically cut by its American distributors, the film, when seen in its entirety, can only be described as an intellectual and visual triumph. Leone died in Rome in 1989.

   See also Cinema.