A Fistful of DVDs
Sergio Leone's influence is felt in the latest disc releases and upcoming films.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 07/01/2007
At the same time, James Bond has been successfully reborn in Casino Royale, his sixth incarnation, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy ball is still in play, the Marvel Universe of the early 1960s is dominating the box office with Spidey 3 and Fantastic Four 2, and the 40-year anniversary of the Summer of Love is the talk of the season.
In that same ‘60s package is the new Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM; $89.98), which joins to the already existing special edition of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) brand new double discs with bells-and-whistles versions of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and, for the first time, what appears to be the definitive and completely reconstructed and restored Duck, You Sucker a.k.a. A Fistful of Dynamite (1971). Combined with the deluge of John Wayne product this year, the Leone material makes 2007 a year to remember for Western fans.
More important, the people responsible for producing this collection have obviously been given a considerable budget for producing bonus material, which is the name of the game when it comes to this sort of thing. The discs feature full documentaries, restoration materials, interviews with Clint Eastwood (from 2003) and interviews with principal players in the production and writing of the films. Best of all of these extras are the absolutely brilliant commentaries by Sir Christopher Frayling on three of the films—equivalent to a full course in the history, inspiration and minutiae of these unique pictures. You’ll even find some haunting revisits and photographic comparisons to the original places and sets the pictures were shot. This is the motherlode.
One can examine these movies as intriguing relics, dissecting in any number of ways their place in cinema history and the Western genre (Italian film specifically), and the inspired genius of one very important iconoclastic filmmaker (Sergio Leone) and the other inductees in what amounts to a full blown cinematic movement, contained fairly neatly in a single decade (1964-74).
The influence of these movies can be seen everywhere—even Quentin Tarantino, an avowed Spaghetti Western buff, stole visual motifs and bits of Ennio Morricone’s music, which is arguably as important as Leone’s direction, for his Kill Bill movies. In fact, as we see, and not just in the collection at hand, the Spaghetti Western is undergoing an amazing rebirth both domestically and in markets as far away as Japan and Thailand.
In that same vein, the three Eastwood films in the package can justifiably be seen as the singular birth of the career of one of the 20th century’s most important talents, as actor, director and producer. I don’t think that anybody would deny that the “Man With No Name” films, as they were marketed here, moved Eastwood from the back alleys of TV (Rawhide) to the front row of all-time movie icons. Eastwood is the John Wayne (and the anti-Wayne) of a subsequent generation. While his ambition and intelligence might have taken him in interesting directions regardless, it may also be true that had A Fistful of Dollars flopped, the history of American film as we know it would have been radically reconfigured.
Eastwood’s character in the Leone films was a springboard for nearly all of the actor’s performances in the next couple of decades—he was either reprising the character or bouncing off of it. His work with Director Don Siegel as far back as Coogan’s Bluff (1968) was Eastwood’s postgraduate degree as a filmmaker and icon. It’s fair to say that the popularity of the Leone films is not only what made him an international star, it made him bankable enough for directors like Siegel to launch films such as Dirty Harry (1971).
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