Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time trilogy
Created | Updated Sep 3, 2008
<P>After completing his Dollars Trilogy, which had won him worldwide fame, the legendary Italian director Sergio Leone moved to America to produce his next set of films. Though they widely differ in location, character and time periods, the recurrent themes of time and memory <FOOTNOTE>the plots of these films often hinges on flashbacks</FOOTNOTE> mean that these films form a loose trilogy of sorts. They certainly did to Sergio Leone.</P>
<P>Are these films Spaghetti Westerns? The first of them, Once Upon a Time in the West, can certainly be read as Leone's farewell to the genre that made him famous, and it is mostly filmed in Italy. But the film was made with American money, and for the first time Leone went to America, to shoot the sequence in Momument Valley, a well known stomping ground for the classic westerns. Duck, you Sucker, set in the Mexican civil war, comes across as a strange twist on the Western genre, where nothing is quite as it seems. Once Upon a Time in America is clearly a gangster movie.</P>
<P>Sergio Leone's later work is often neglected by comparison to his famous dollar trilogy, particularly the last two films. It is true his style alters sharply from the mythic, crowd pleasing quality of his spaghetti westerns to the ponderous, arthouse feel of the Once Upon a Time trilogy, but these films are nontheless immensely entertaining, thought provoking and watchable.</P>
<HEADER>Once Upon a Time in the West</HEADER>
<P>Hailed by the philospher Umberto Eco as the first post modern film, Once Upon a Time in the West doesn't have a plot as such - more a collection of Western archetypes flung into a pot and shaken around. To get a story together Sergio Leone, Bernando Bertolucci and one other guy were sat in a cinema for months, watching their favourite westerns and slowly hacking out an outline that included the best elements of every Western they saw. The films opening credit sequence (the longest in cinematic history) references High Noon; the lead character, known only as Harmonica, refers to the epyphmous Johnny Guitar and the choice of Monument Valley as a location is a references to the works of John Ford, who used it in no less than nine of his films.</P>
<P>Are these films Spaghetti Westerns? The first of them, Once Upon a Time in the West, can certainly be read as Leone's farewell to the genre that made him famous, and it is mostly filmed in Italy. But the film was made with American money, and for the first time Leone went to America, to shoot the sequence in Momument Valley, a well known stomping ground for the classic westerns. Duck, you Sucker, set in the Mexican civil war, comes across as a strange twist on the Western genre, where nothing is quite as it seems. Once Upon a Time in America is clearly a gangster movie.</P>
<P>Sergio Leone's later work is often neglected by comparison to his famous dollar trilogy, particularly the last two films. It is true his style alters sharply from the mythic, crowd pleasing quality of his spaghetti westerns to the ponderous, arthouse feel of the Once Upon a Time trilogy, but these films are nontheless immensely entertaining, thought provoking and watchable.</P>
<HEADER>Once Upon a Time in the West</HEADER>
<P>Hailed by the philospher Umberto Eco as the first post modern film, Once Upon a Time in the West doesn't have a plot as such - more a collection of Western archetypes flung into a pot and shaken around. To get a story together Sergio Leone, Bernando Bertolucci and one other guy were sat in a cinema for months, watching their favourite westerns and slowly hacking out an outline that included the best elements of every Western they saw. The films opening credit sequence (the longest in cinematic history) references High Noon; the lead character, known only as Harmonica, refers to the epyphmous Johnny Guitar and the choice of Monument Valley as a location is a references to the works of John Ford, who used it in no less than nine of his films.</P>
