Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

Duck You Sucker (1971)

Irritatingly, the best title for this film is the French one: It etait une fois la revolution. And the worst is the one plastered over both of my R2 DVDs: A Fistful of Dynamite. That is, if the worst isn’t the actual title on the print and the one in bold above. Duck You Sucker was based on one of those cultural miscomprehensions in which Sergio Leone was convinced that the phrase was one of those in common usage throughout the English speaking world, like look before you leap, say. Of course, not only is Duck You Sucker not this, not even now it’s known as the title of Leone’s penultimate film has it become part of the English language. It never was, and it never will be. So let’s pretend that this film actually has a completely different title, one it never has had in English, and I’ll take it from there.

Once Upon a Time the Revolution (1971)

Sergio Leone’s penultimate film is very odd indeed. As odd as Ennio Morricone’s very odd score in fact. All of Leone’s mature films use the flashback as an essential element of the narrative (this includes A Fistful of Dollars (1964) which has no flashback per se but does have Joe (Clint Eastwood) refer to an incident in his past which results in perhaps his only moral act in the course of the entire film). The flashbacks in this film are the most baroque and distant from the rest of the film, set as they are in early Republican days in Ireland, actually filmed in Ireland in place of being recreated in Almeria. They provide a crucial underpinning to the rest of the story and help to explain why James Coburn is who he is in the rest of the film, and this new DVD Special Edition is really the first time the flashbacks are all intact and the film is at its most complete. The oddity starts to take a backseat as you watch and the extent of the darkness at the heart of Leone’s vision of revolution starts to take root. The betrayals that were played for fun in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) are played for real here, and they linger long after the film is over. This is the first time I’ve ever seen the film, and it’s stayed with me.

Once Upon a Time in America (1983)

I’ve never seen the short version of this film and I never will. Even when I saw it at the cinema for the first time on 3rd November 1984 it was the full four hour version. What’s become apparent is that America is in effect two films: there’s the one with the conventional narrative that just happens to have the structure of an art film, and then there’s the art film that starts and ends in the opium den, and everything that happens after that – the 1960s sequences – didn’t happen, and everything that happened before – the childhood sequences – may not have happened either, suffused as they are with the rose-tinted aura of nostalgia. Leone would neither confirm nor deny that this was the case, but it is known that he welcomed the ambiguity. This same ambiguity turns up in Blade Runner (1982) (the fabled Deckard may be a replicant subplot) and Total Recall (1990) (Arnie kills the bad guys, gets the girl and saves the planet, but all of that may be taking place in his head). These alternate versions of these film’s narratives were not apparent at the time of these films’ initial releases, but over the years the more ambiguous readings of these films have become the most interesting way to discuss them. Which kind of makes me wonder how many more films there are out there with “concealed” narratives waiting to be unpicked?

No cinema visits this week. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

The second Dollars film was a much bigger hit than the first, and allowed Leone access to an even larger budget for the third one. Even though the films are clearly related, it is a mistake to view them as sequels in the conventional sense. The first item to increase in size is the running time, now clocking in at a hefty three hours, and the second is its overall scope. The reality of the American Civil War, especially a little known failed campaign fought in Texas by one Confederate Colonel Sibley, here intrudes upon the mythic treasure hunt which preoccupies the three protagonists of the title. And it is this clash between the actuality of the West and Leone’s own memories of the Westerns he saw as a boy that will form the subject matter of the films he directs in the rest of his career, including the gangster film of 1983. There is a marvellous kitchen sink quality to this film, which switches modes of expression in practically every scene from sadism to low comedy, single gunfights to the clash of armies, all of it scored brilliantly by Ennio Morricone. By the time the journey ends in yet another circular arena surrounded by gravestones and the ecstasy of gold, there is a sense that a profound (if not profane) journey has taken place, the meaning of which remains to be teased out for decades to come.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

This is one of my favourite films. Has there ever been another film with a cooler “Story By” credit: Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci & Sergio Leone? Would you not pay good money to get these guys together every year for the rest of their lives to come up with more projects like this one? Something that never happened. The running time issue became even more acute here since the project was bankrolled by Paramount Pictures, at the time run by the charismatic, eccentric Charlie Bludhorn, who regarded Leone as a genius (but Bludhorn still ended up fatally shortening the film for its initial American release). The extremely oblique quality of the narrative that I so admire (it’s never obvious at first who has committed what piece of onscreen action or why they have done so – although all of these narrative pieces are eventually revealed) came about as a result of Leone realising that the script was too long and the scenes were all going to play too slowly and the film would run about five hours, so scenes had to be cut on the run and patched together later. Large chunks of Morricone’s score were pre-recorded for use during filming, one wonderful example being the early crane shot that reveals the town of Flagstone – it looks like it’s been perfectly timed to Morricone’s music, and it has, because the piece was played on the set while the shot was being filmed. The film has a whole bunch of cliched characters and situations, quotes from other Westerns and its entire plot filched from Johnny Guitar (1954). On the face of it there is nothing original about it, but the emotional weight and gravitas that Leone brings to the end of the West as signalled by the arrival of the railroad and thus civilisation, has a gorgeous melancholy rapture to it that is really beyond my ability to describe in words. Once Upon a Time in the West is film as a dream of the West, of what was lost when the West was won, and all that Sam Peckinpah was reaching for and would achieve the very next year with The Wild Bunch (1969).

No cinema visits this week. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Armed with a bigger budget for the second Dollars film, Sergio Leone was able to achieve a fuller effect. One of the more subtle improvements over the first film is that Leone was able to employ extras to populate his offbeat recreations of Western towns (though it could be said that the lack of extras in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) only adds to the existentialism of it all). Leone was preoccupied with research and realism as a frontispiece to the scenes behind which the narrative can take place, which is very different to the Hollywood attitude. Christopher Frayling, in his recommended biography of Leone, recounts an incident in which a librarian at the Library of Congress in Washington was astonished by Leone’s requests for background research materials on the reality of life in the West that no American film director had asked to view in the 20 years the librarian had worked there. The end result is the intense weathering of the sets, the smoky atmosphere in the saloons, the cruddy costumes of the cast, detailed replica firearms, and Clint Eastwood’s unshaven face. Yet this realism serves only as a mask behind which the surrealism, carnival, satire and unreality of Leone’s approach can occur and an Italian mythos of the West is produced. Over time, this method has become dulled through its repetition by inferior talents, but in 1965 it was absolutely new.

Irréversible (2002)

Along with Mulholland Dr. (2001), The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-03) and INLAND EMPIRE (2006), this film completes my quartet of the only bona fide cinema classics to have been produced in the 21st Century of cinema. So far. It’s over four years since I saw it at the cinema and knew I was in the presence of something special. What I’ve found is that doubts set in about the film only afterwards when you’re not in its presence: doubts as to how seriously Gaspar Noé intends any of this, doubts about the incessant references to rectums, buggery and vaginas, doubts about every aspect of the making of the film, in fact. But all of these doubts disappeared once I started to watch the film again. As a boring liberal, there’s nothing I find more boring than having my liberal prejudices reconfirmed by a filmmaker telling me something I already know. For example, I haven’t seen Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) because I already know George Bush is an idiot and I don’t need Michael Moore to remind me. With cinema, I want to see something I’ve never seen before, something to astonish me, upset me, offend me, take me completely out of myself into worlds I would want to visit myself or never want to visit, not to escape the old, but to experience the new. And Irréversible delivers all of this in spades.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

The rise of DVD and the success of American television has had an unfortunate side effect. When it comes to widescreen framing for the big screen, directors who’ve worked predominately in television, advertising or music videos simply do not have a clue. JJ Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost, was heavily criticised for his filming of Mission Impossible III (2006) as if it was just another TV show: too many closeups, too many cuts, not the faintest idea that his images would be projected on forty foot wide cinema screens. What a contrast it is to watch Sergio Leone at work, a man with an instinctive feel for composition and shot selection where not a frame is wasted. Leone wasn’t an intellectual or a political filmmaker (except after Leone started to believe his own press), he was an instinctual one, and the effects he achieved reach such a fine pitch of pure visual cinema that it is hard to remember that a lot of the imagery we’ve enjoyed over the last 40 years started here in this low-budget, second-string Italian western.

Eastern Promises (2007) *

In which the Cronenberg project has continued to infect the local multiplex after the success of A History of Violence (2005). There are similar narrative tricks at work in this new film, which a second viewing will highlight. I don’t know whether it’s a result of his Canadian upbringing, but there’s a chilliness of affect Cronenberg brings to his films that’s quite unique. They have an unrelenting quality, a suggestion of inevitability. Things could only turn out the way they turn out because there was no other way they could go. There was an amusing “ban this filth” non-story in The Sunday Times last week, in which quite clearly nobody outside the newspaper had any interest. The simple defence of the violence in this film is this – this is what violence really looks like: nasty, brutal and bloody; utterly unredeeming, utterly unstylised, utterly shocking. Criticising Cronenberg for an honest approach to violence is a dead end, and the so-called Arts Editor who wrote the piece should be sacked for lacking cultural awareness, intelligence, comprehension and film literacy.