•
Rating:
It's not about writing a piece or reviewing a work, nor about outlining a thought more or less in detail or sharing your own opinions. It's not about that. Not now.
Here, I come to terms with myself.
It's about summing up something that has been fundamental in my existence, something that is difficult to describe, an emotion too large and too intense, which I wouldn't even want to experience again, for I might not be able to bear it.
A primal sensation that flows relentlessly over an endless film.
Can you make a book your life, an entire life? Or a film? Or a painting, or a sculpture, or a poem? Can a yellowed book of poems count as an entire life? I wouldn’t know...
I know that when the earth began to shake that night, when the walls began to sway and my insides twisted within me in a primitive jolt, my immediate and only action, before the ferocity subsided, was to grab Baudelaire’s "The Flowers of Evil" and clutch it to my chest.
What would you take with you?
Not the wallet, not the car, not the clothes. I might decide on medicine (for those who, unfortunately, can't do without it), books, and films. And cigarettes, of course...
And if you could choose only one thing?
Maybe a book. Probably McCarthy. Conscious of losing everything else, including dozens and dozens of films, some of which are unforgettable masterpieces.
It can be a refuge. A golden cave. Before life disintegrated, even before absorbing failure and descending. Because, deep down, you already knew. You didn’t grow up on bread and television. Sure, all those afternoons spent watching old westerns on Rete4 and RaiMovie, which were the same films your father loved and you had already watched as a child. No, you didn’t grow up that way. But time moved on just the same, and on those Saturday nights when you would smoke your stuff while "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" played on TV, in the end, you were fine. You had found your dimension. There is much more truth in westerns than in everyday life. You had read about Martin Scorsese, who had seen all possible films at the age of ten. Or Quentin Tarantino, who, at sixteen, had watched a century of cinema. I also wanted to be a director: when I was little, I would write incredible films, shoot them, and then review them. I would even improvise long, clueless interviews with an already exhausted director. From time to time, I played the roles of actors, journalists, screenwriters, childhood friends. I gathered and selected dream material to create colossal film works, lasting entire afternoons. I constructed suburban mythologies, destroyed careers, concocted news cases out of thin air, created scandalous reports capable of ruining the rise of a promising actor. The lead in my new film.
It was just another game. Over time, cinema became a place of dreams. A small dark paradise. "I will live for the stories of books and films!" thought twelve-year-old Ivo, who organized evenings so that his classmates would get passionate about "Platoon," "The Longest Day," "Saving Private Ryan," or "Full Metal Jacket." There's nothing more beautiful than inventing stories and telling them. And directors, besides this, created worlds and men, so that everyone, in awe, would listen and watch their stories. We are children of Homer. Deviant children.
If I could, I would have wanted to write "For a Few Dollars More." Write it and, above all, shoot it, just as Sergio Leone did. The same story, the same setting, the same atmospheres, and the same characters. The colors. The nuances. The smell. The dust. I would have wanted to make "For a Few Dollars More."
The cinema dictionaries are filled with memorable anecdotes about Leone and the construction of his work, each film a masterpiece (like Stanley Kubrick, who also praised our master's sumptuous grandeur), yet very few genuine testimonies remain, as always happens, on the pharaonic dream of a man who wanted to make himself King, and he succeeded.
Rumors abound, multiplying into tales and factoids, urban legends and jokes, but if you want to understand a film you need to ask the audience, gather information from the viewers, before opinions are "distorted" by official criticism. It’s right, indeed sacred, to buy and read newspapers, but the day after. And the first impressions of "For a Few Dollars More" seem to converge in the same direction. This film is a masterpiece.
Despite the universally recognized importance of the genre and its moving beauty, American western cinema has experienced contrasting moments: from the classics of the first half of the 20th century to the complexity (and revisionism) of the present, passing through the revolutionary critique of the '60s and '70s. America had a tumultuous birth: it was born in chaos, and in chaos, it was constituted and sublimated. After the 1770 revolution, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, from 1865 the United States experienced a period of relative tranquility, but they soon realized it was only an absence of war, and this did not at all mean being at peace. In fact, the war was not over; it had just changed its form. There was a conflict, with indigenous populations, the natives, and it has indelibly marked the American conscience, the blood-stained conscience of a people permanently in conflict with everything and everyone, inside and outside the boundaries of a wild world.
American history as a granite foundation on which to build the conscience and shape the identity of a people, the western cinema.
And yet, Sergio Leone is Italian. He is no more American than the locations where he shot his first westerns. He is not more American than the enchanting landscapes of Andalusia, where he filmed some of the most exciting scenes of "For a Few Dollars More." Sergio Leone is not John Ford. His westerns do not possess the ethical and political implications of the American ones: as spectacular as they may be, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "A Fistful of Dollars" tell nothing more than tales of a sack of gold coins and a money-bag full of dollars. Not the honor in "High Noon," the greed of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," or the survival instinct in "Stagecoach." Not even the revenge in "Unforgiven." There is no noble sense in Leone's westerns.
I read something similar about "Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece and one of the most absurd and insane films I’ve ever seen. Well, the author of the article (whose name, unfortunately, I don't remember) had grievances about "an incredibly vibrant and astonishing film, yet one that manages to remove any moral derivation from the greatest human tragedy of the twentieth century." Referring to the drama of World War II and, in particular, the Holocaust, he sharply criticized Quentin Tarantino's brutal yet casual style in handling the subject, relating it to Sergio Leone’s bloody and immoral westerns, which, therefore, have nothing in common with the heroic and sunny genuineness of Ford and Huston, of Walsh and Hawks, of Sturges and Aldrich.
In reality, Sergio Leone did more, much more. Besides appropriating a foreign genre, resurrecting it, and restoring it to its peak glory, Leone showed the world the other side of America: the "odd face of the dollar." It matters little if an absolute master like Akira Kurosawa rightly accused him of plagiarism. However much you want to belittle, or at least downsize, the efforts of the immense Italian artist, it would be disloyal to compare him to the marble columns of the glorious American pantheon: Ford let us in on the history, Leone on the myth. A raw, sweaty, and bloodstained myth. A myth that has been getting increasingly tainted, ever since a certain Sam Peckinpah decided it was time to reshuffle the deck, first with "Ride the High Country," then with "Major Dundee."
Everyone knows "For a Few Dollars More." Everyone has seen it. Many consider it the most important chapter in the famous and notorious "Dollars Trilogy," but everyone has seen it. It's my opinion, but I believe Sergio Leone (after the effort of "The Colossus of Rhodes") only gave birth to perfect children. No black sheep, only masterpieces. From the ultra-violent "A Fistful of Dollars" (initially banned for under-18s: "the ban on being viewed by minors under 18 is due to the particular spectacular configuration of the film which, in a climate of exaggerated and sometimes terrifying violence, portrays a recurring series of crimes and massacres, described and depicted with crude and bloodthirsty realism") to the sprawling criminal epic "Once Upon a Time in America," the poignant and dazzling work that cost him his life. In between, there’s space for over ten hours of legendary cinema, woven with civil wars, Mexican revolutions, and railroads spanning continents, from ocean to ocean. A bit like the Master's art.
If "For a Few Dollars More" is the film I would have wanted to make, it's because this is a perfect film. After a staggering opening sequence that knocks you out with the first "shot" and alone is worth half the movie (Ennio Morricone's music can’t be explained, you have to listen to it), the first thirty minutes explode in a furious whirlwind of wild violence: Lee Van Cleef, Clint Eastwood, and Gianmaria Volonté burst onto the scene with all the fire they have in their bodies. The shootouts are countless, as are the victims and bullets. Sergio Leone shows us a land even dirtier and burned than he had already shown in his previous film: the first victim of bounty hunter Douglas Mortimer (Van Cleef) is a bandit with a grim face, red hair, and protruding teeth. He’ll end up with a hole in the middle of his eyes. And that’s just the beginning. Quickly, The Man with No Name (Eastwood) moves, unloading his revolver on three gunmen, and one of the most memorable antagonists of all time, El Indio, a Gianmaria Volonté in God's grace... and the devil’s... who, after flooding with blood the prison from which he escaped with the help of his desperados, will track down the bounty hunter who shot him in the back a year and a half earlier, securing him to Justice, and will show no mercy, not even to his young family, because only that way "You will hate me just the right amount": the ensuing duel is among the highest moments of cinema of all time...
Here I come to terms with myself, with the films that marked my life, turning it inside out. Here is the golden cave waiting for my weary steps, in the dim light of day or in the dark of night. Here is the cure for lost adolescence. There’s the drug, like the greedy puffs of Indio, and the splendor of the sun-kissed hills. Here you come to terms with the dreams and nightmares of a lifetime. Of heroes and ghosts. Of what I couldn’t explain and what I never said... and that is worth more than a thousand words.
Loading comments slowly
