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Essays (book reviews) |
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Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death |
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Sergio Leone: producer-director, showman supreme, a
“spectacularist” (according to his collaborator Fulvio Morsella) in cinema as
in everyday and professional life, an artist always striving for the grandest
effect. Not just (as he was perceived by the public at large) the inventor, populariser
and maestro of the hideously named Spaghetti Western, but an auteur who truly
revolutionised the modern cinema, beginning with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964.
A filmmaker who – in his all-consuming, highly
creative obsession with Hollywood Westerns and gangster movies – helped several
generations in his wake to negotiate their at once fascinated and troubled
relationship to classical (and especially American) cinema. Leone, who devoted
his life to making “fairy tales for adults”, mixing a boisterous childlike
vulgarity and innocence with a no less keen sense of disenchantment, loss and
the brutality of history.
Christopher Frayling’s mammoth Sergio Leone [since translated into Italian, Spanish and French]
is, incredibly, the first biography of the director in any language. Sir Frayling
(born 1946) long ago staked Leone as “his” turf, and he guards it zealously in
all fora yet devoted to this Master, from international conference keynotes and
cinémathèque retrospectives to DVD audio commentaries, from documentaries and
museum exhibitions to “expert talking head” clips on TV. Only Tim Lucas has
managed to muscle in a little on this Frayling field! But at least Frayling
mentions my 1998 book on Once Upon a Time
in America (1984) along the way, and credits me with some unique research
into the contribution of Stuart Kaminsky [1934-2009] as one of its many
screenwriters. (I still have that immaculately typed and movingly eloquent
letter from Kaminsky in my files.)
The Leone we come to know from this book is revealed
almost solely in his relation to filmmaking. This is Frayling’s postmodern
biographical conceit: that there is little distance between the man and the
images he beheld or invented for the cinema screen. Among the great directors,
he was – unlike Orson Welles or John Cassavetes, and before Martin Scorsese –
both cineaste and cinephile, artist and ideal spectator. Leone said it himself:
“For me, cinema is life and vice versa”. And certainly, his films – especially Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America – spin giddy
interchanges between the simulacra emanating from the big screen and the
fragile worlds inhabited by the characters.
All the same, it is disconcerting to read a biography
that leaves the reader in suspense for over 100 pages as to whether its subject
ever went on a date. Frayling exhibits a peculiarly British form of tact and
restraint here. We learn precious little about Leone as a husband or father –
beyond a charming account from his wife, Carla, of her first meeting with this
“great storyteller”.
More than a reportage on an individual life, however,
this is a project dedicated to the burgeoning mode of critical research known
as production history. Frayling carefully traces the often troubled development
of each Leone film, from first idea to final cut. The wealth of detail, in each
case, is dependent on which crew and cast members Frayling is able to access
(which, in turn, is dependent on whether they are alive or dead!). The book is
especially strong, for example, on Carlo Simi’s contributions as art director,
and the intricate stages of Ennio Morricone’s musical scoring. But it is less
revealing about Nino Baragli’s editing process, or the material ways in which
Leone staged and shaped his mise en scène for the camera.
Frayling draws us away from the usual – and thoroughly
hackneyed – characterisations of Leone’s style as Pop Art-inspired or operatic,
into a better appreciation of theatrical sources of inspiration such as the
Pupi Siciliani shows viewed by the director in his childhood. And he puts his
finger on an essential element of the Leone magic: how the grand, mythic
flights are counterbalanced at every moment by an extraordinary (almost
neo-real, or at least hyperreal) attention to the authentic, nitty-gritty
detail of costumes, props and sets. But Leone connoisseurs may still find
themselves longing for a finer-grain demonstration of his formal genius.
Frayling tells us that this book began life as a
critical study and then, upon the director’s death in 1989, evolved into a
biography. This no doubt explains its unevenness: it ends up providing neither
an exhaustive analysis of the texts nor a comprehensive reconstruction of the
life and times. A third, somewhat polemical strand adds to his unevenly mowed
terrain: Frayling also offers a “history of Italian popular cinema since the
1920s … the sort of cinema that is rarely mentioned in the standard works”. As
is certainly true in so much discussion of select “national auteurs”: Swedish
cinema beyond Ingmar Bergman, Iranian cinema beyond Abbas Kiarostami …
With so much material to convey, it’s little wonder
that Frayling got a little lost, structurally, along the way. But the book is,
first and last, a homage to Leone, a passionate, informed and informative
attempt to write him into the annals of cinema history once and for all. All
the same, I am not so sure that Sergio
Leone: Something To Do With Death will change the attitudes of those who
are sceptical or indifferent about the director’s cult status. That’s a war
over aesthetic and cultural value which
requires an even bigger and more cannily argued strategy. (I know this well,
because I’ve spent virtually my whole life on it, with varying degrees of
success.)
Frayling never really bothers to argue out the terms
of Leone’s ultimate worth (which is immense) as a 20th century
artist, beyond insisting that he was among those rare figures who “managed to
bridge ‘popular cinema’ and ‘art cinema’ … while at the same time achieving
international success”. But that, alas, is not to say enough. Sadly, in our
world, it takes more than evidence of niche-straddling and box-office receipts to
turn around those who proudly and eternally assume normative, middle-class
standards of artistic achievement (the Brian McFarlane types), and refuse to
consider a “spectacularist” cinema of effects and surfaces (but only
superficially superficial surfaces!) – whether committed
by Leone or anybody else – as anything more than a possibly entertaining but
trivial and ephemeral form of pop culture, with no hold on history’s canons:
just junk, in the long run.
So Frayling ends up preaching to the converted –
that’s OK for me because, where Leone is concerned, I’m among them. Happily,
however, the ranks of those converts seem to be swelling ever greater with each
passing year. It is for that legion of fans, yesterday, today and tomorrow,
that this biography has been so respectfully and fastidiously fashioned.
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