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Sergio Leone

 

TSPDT Rating

Director / Screenwriter / Producer
1929 - 1989 
Born January 3, Rome, Italy
Key Production Country: Italy 
Key Genres: Spaghetti Western, Western, Epic Western
Key Collaborators: Ennio Morricone (Composer), Carlo Simi (Production Designer), Nino Baragli (Editor), Clint Eastwood (Leading Player), Luciano Vincenzoni (Screenwriter), Tonino Delli Colli (Cinematographer), Lee Van Cleef (Leading Player), Gian Maria Volonte (Leading Player), Alberto Grimaldi (Producer), Fulvio Morsella (Producer)
Highly Recommended: For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Recommended: A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Links: [ IMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide[ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [ Film Reference ] [ Fistful-of-Leone ] [ Sergio Leone.Net ] [ Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone ] [ The Dollars Trilogy ]
Books: [ Sergio Leone: Something to do with Death ] [ Sergio Leone ] [ Sergio Leone: The Great Italian Dream of Legendary America ] [ Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone  ] [ The Art Of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West: A Critical Appreciation  ] [ Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone ]
DVD's: [ Amazon ]  
1,000 Greatest Films: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
 
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)Once Upon a Time in America (1984)For a Few Dollars More (1965)The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
 
     
  "Not since Franz Kafka's America has a European artist turned himself with such intensity to the meaning of American culture and mythology. Sergio Leone's career is remarkable in its unrelenting attention to both America and American genre film. In France, Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol have used American film as a touchstone for their own vision, but Leone, an Italian, a Roman who began to learn English only after five films about the United States, devoted most of his creative life to this examination." - Stuart M. Kaminsky (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)  
     
  "Working against traditional concepts of heroism, his darkly troubled protagonists are driven by greed, revenge, sheer malice or a rough sense of justice, while his epic, flashback-heavy tales are often dominated by set-piece tableaux of deadly conflict." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)  
     
  "The films themselves are bloodbaths, full of sound, fury and sadism. Bullets made round, black-edged holes, through which blood was seen to gush. People were hit by them in painful places. Characters were beaten, whipped, raped: the films were orgies of destruction of life and property, often with slow, deliberate showdowns, full of portentous close-ups of grime-encrusted faces." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)  
     
  "A satirist of the American West, Leone's Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood is funny, violent, and reminiscent of the mythmaking dime novels of yesteryear." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
  "I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time." - Sergio Leone  
     
 
 
 

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