It's hard to believe that, except for a few posts at westerns, we haven't even discussed the master filmmaker who jump-started Clint Eastwood's career and changed the face of filmmaking even though he only officially directed seven films! (I don't want to get into the actual totals. He may have ghost-directed several others, including one of my faves, "My Name is Nobody")

Sergio Leone, of course, directed Clint in "A Fistful of Dollars" (remake of Kurosawa's "Yojimbo"), "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly". He also made the Henry Fonda/Charles Bronson "Once Upon a Time in the West", the James Coburn/Rod Steiger "A Fistful of Dynamite/Duck, You Sucker", and the De Niro "Once Upon a Time in America".

My fave Leone is "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", but all of the films are worth watching for their strangeness, wit, and originality (as well as some of Ennio Morricone's best musical scores.) Come on now, there's gotta be some people with opinions on this film giant.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: mark f,

Markf- I think you and I must have similar film collections, because I keep winding up excited by all the topics you start.

Of course the man with no name trilogy is excellent, but my favorite of the westerns is Once Upon a Time in the West. The book was still out for me as to which was better, Once Upon... or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, until I got the special edition dvd of Once Upon... a couple months ago. It looks perfect in the new edition, and the big shots of the west are every bit as inspiring as anything John Ford ever did. Of course, since I got the dvd they have released the longer cut of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, so things may change in the near future.

I have not seen Once Upon a Time in America in several years, but I still find myself humming the reccurring melody played on the ocharina. Morricone is some kind of master to make so few notes stick with me after several years.

Hmm, I think I might take A Fistful Of Dollars as my favorite. The others are great, but there is just something so raw and perfect to me about the film. However, I do love Kurosawa'a Yojimbo quite a lot as well, so that could inform my bias. Sergio certainly made his mark on the film world, his films are often imitated but never equalled.

I loved "My name is nobody", and would not be surprised if Leone, had a hand in it.

It very definitely has his feel, added to the slapstick elements of the film.

My favorite official Leone film is "Once upon a time in the west" also.

Fondas performance is top notch, and the soundtrack, as usual is also highest quality.

I agree, Leone is becoming the forgotten man of cinema, or at the very least, the forgotten man of the western.

He is as important as John Ford for his construction and deconstruction of the mythology of the west.

He single handedly brought the western into the modern era.

I agree with you stormy about almost everything, except I think you forgot about this guy in the '60s who directed "The Deadly Companions", "Ride the High Country", "Major Dundee", and a little thing called "The Wild Bunch". In 1970, he also made a very offbeat western called "The Ballad of Cable Hogue". Sam Peckinpah, anyone?

Peckinpah was one wild director. As good as The Wild Bunch is, I've gotta take one of his non-westerns as my favorite. Straw Dogs is just too bold to be ignored. I've never gotten the message of that movie completely straitened out, and the misogony is way out of my comfort zone, but it's still a great little movie.

"Straw Dogs" is the only Peckinpah DVD I own, and yes, I also think it's his best movie. The film, as you know, is about a lot more than what you just said. I'm not sure I can discuss the "misogyny" here without blacking out too much. You did see the uncut version, which has about three extra minutes, all involving the rape? It makes the whole scene play out a lot differently than in the version which is usually shown in the U.S.

It certainly isn't a "normal" movie by any stretch of the imagination, and I doubt anyone else could have made it anywhere near as well. (Of course, there's several people who think it's just pointless, sickening violence.) To me, it almost seems like an adaptation of a lost book from the Old Testament.

Actually, since the copy of it that I have is an old vhs i 'forgot' to return when I quit working at a video store in high school I don't think I have seen the uncut version.

4 Peckinpah posts in the Leone thread may mean it is time to start a Peckinpah thread. I'll leave that decision up to someone else though.

I can rename the thread Leone vs. Peckinpah. Sound good?

now that's a fight I would pay to see. Leone was a huge guy but somehow I think Peckinpah would fight dirty and win.

OK, I knew Peckinpah would get his supporters rallying to his cause, and fair enough.

But I think these two directors had/ have two such different approaches, that I can't really set them up against each other.

Leone dealt with mythologising the western "genre" almost as homage, where as Peckinpah was more into deconstruction.

I felt, in Peckinpahs portrayal of a decaying west coming to terms with being anachronistic, that he was actually trying to kill the western off.

I'll agree that most of Leone's films seem like operas and most of Peckinpah's seem like elegies. (Although, I believe very few operas have happy endings.) They were working at about the same time and were the most significant makers of westerns in the '60s, so that makes it appropriate to have them share the thread. Maybe if we start some more specific comparison threads around here, we'll get more posting.

Agreed, they both shared the same spaces occasionaly, but it is no coincidence that the Peckinpah film most cited in this thread is "Straw dogs".

My favorite Peckinpah is "The getaway".

Both non-westerns.

Peckinpah dealt more with the nature of violence, and occassionaly used the western to frame that theme.

If I'm not mistaken, Leone dealt almost exclusively in westerns, and did so because of a love of the mythology.

Sometimes, an outsider can illuminate aspects of a situation that an "insider" can't see.

I cite Jaime Robert Robertson of the Band as an example.

He wrote excellently perseptive songs about the south, despite being born and raised in Canada.

Well, Leone didn't make very many films. Besides the ones mentioned in the first post of this thread, he made a sword and sandal flick, "The Colossus of Rhodes". He made his three with Eastwood, "Once Upon a Time in the West", and "A Fistful of Dynamite" in an eight-year period, then he produced some films, including "My Name is Nobody", which I think he directed, before releasing "Once Upon a Time in America" twelve years after his last "official" film. THE END.

Peckinpah's non-westerns DO seem like westerns to me. Both "Straw Dogs" and "The Getaway" could easily have been made into westerns, but I think Peckinpah was more interested in making some modern social commentary. Your fave was based on a Jim Thompson novel (he doesn't get mentioned around here enough.) "Straw Dogs" was also based on a novel. The basic plots and situations seem to have been used in dozens of westerns and period adventures set even earlier (except for maybe the garbage truck in "The Getaway".)

I like Leone and love Peckinpah. Coincidentally, one of the rep houses in NYC just had a spaghetti western retro and I caught up with MY NAME IS NOBODY for the very first time. I thought it was ok, not as good as the oaters Leone directed.

While I like Leone's westerns, I was very disappointed in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. People may not know this or not remember, but OUATIA had a very tortured release. When originally released theatrically in the early 1980s a heavily edited version was dumped into theatres and was savaged by the critics. There was such an uproar over the way the lengthy film was cut that they released the full version theatrically shortly after. I remember seeing the long version as Leone originaly envisioned it at the old Eight Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where I was then living and the line to get in was literally around the block on Sixth Avenue. And I remember being underwhelmed at the movie. I found the whole tone of the film odd.

I have since caught up with the film when it screened at MoMA and again it did nothing for me.

One film not mentioned, which is my favorite of Peckinpah's oeuvre, is PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID with Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn and, of all people, Bob Dylan. A passel of great character actors were in this one as well, including the great Slim Pickins. A beautifully shot film, elegiac is a great way to describe it.

SAM

Sam Peckinpah came into my life in the 1950s as a scriptwriter and director of several Western genre television series like The Westerner, Gunsmoke and The Rifleman. My mother sold our TV in 1957, after a six year life history in our house while I was in grades two to six. Occasionally I saw these westerns at the homes of friends during my late primary and high school days. I don’t recall seeing any of these Westerns after 1963. And Peckinpah was an unknown quantity. Knowing who a director was did not play a part in my knowledge inventory in primary and high school. When my pioneer life began in August 1962 on the homefront in Canada, Peckinpah’s film Ride the High Country had just been released in the USA(20/6/62). Again, if I knew anything about Peckinpah it is doubtful and if I even saw the film, I can not recall after 45 years. The same was true of his film Straw Dogs released six months after I arrived in my overseas pioneer post in 1971.

Watching a 90 minute BBC documentary tonight Sam Peckinpah: Man Of Iron on ABC2 in Australia put this director’s life squarely in the context of my own. I had not seen this TV doco made some 15 years ago. Peckinpah was born 19 years before me and I have now lived 23 more years than he. But we shared the stage for 40 years: 1944 to 1984. I don’t want to outline his entire biography. But it was clear that we shared some aspects of our life: obsessiveness, the theatrical element in daily life, mental illness, a world of major value shifts, the personal search for meaning in a violent and absurd world, the feeling of a need for redemption or deliverance from self, an emphasis on action and the poetic, the roller-coaster ride of reputation, health and career, the singular direction to our careers. –Ron Price with thanks to “Sam Peckinpah Internet Sites,” 23 March 2007.

It was good to know you, a little, Sam;
better late than never, I suppose, even
if you had to be dead for twenty-three
years: your life was rockier than mine,
more troubled and your mental-illness
more horrific than mine. You were more
successful in the wide-wide world, more
obsessive, more famous, your relationships
so very troubled: how did you stand it, Sam?

Did you find any redemption, deliverance
in all your living? I found, quite early in
my life when you were starting your first
film & churning out those westerns, a Man
who concentrated His energies on a pivotal
purpose—to transmute His tribulations into
instruments of redemption and to summon
all the peoples of the Earth to the banner of
unity through the copiousness of His writings.1

1The Universal House of Justice, 28 May 1992.

--Ron Price 24 March 2007

One thing Peckinpah and Leone have in common is that their films were riding the wave of increased violence in cinema (and I guess increased realism, but I couldn't really call their films 'realistic'). Both handle violence very well and use it to enhance their stories/fables. If it were not for the violence in their work their films would be very different. But that aside I deeply respect both as directors. My personal favorite would be Leone because he has wit and more optimism in his work. Peckinpah is definitely a depressive whereas Leone seems to offer more hope in his films. However both are brilliant!