The Below Decks salutes and honors Sergio Leone (January 3, 1929 – April 30, 1989)! The New York Times July 30, 2005 Saluting Father of Spaghetti Westerns By MANOHLA DARGIS LOS ANGELES, July 29 On Tuesday, in a museum tucked into a corner of Los Angeless sprawling Griffith Park, three men re-enacted the climactic shootout from the 1966 western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In that Sergio Leone masterwork, Clint Eastwood plays the good guy who is actually pretty bad, Lee Van Cleef plays the really bad guy and a jovially venal Eli Wallach plays the ugly one, though in truth all three characters are scoundrels. Van Cleef died in 1989, and that partly explains why, this time, the famous three-way battle was performed by 10-foot-tall puppets with enormous bobble heads. The puppet shootout capped an evening tribute to Leone at the Museum of the American West at the Autry National Center to kick off its exhibition Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone, which opens on Saturday and runs through January. During the 1960s, the Italian director, who died the same year as Van Cleef, resurrected the most American of all movie genres with a handful of austerely beautiful, hyperviolent films known as spaghetti westerns. Leones first foray into the genre was A Fistful of Dollars. Based on Akira Kurosawas samurai classic Yojimbo, the film was set in Mexico and shot principally in Spain, with the interiors staged in Rome. For his lead, Leone hired Mr. Eastwood, who made the movie while on hiatus from the television show Rawhide. In the handsome oversize book published in conjunction with the exhibition, also titled Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone explained in an interview with the author, Sir Christopher Frayling, that he had been looking for an American actor, and James Coburn cost $10,000 more than his budget allowed. It was while watching Episode 91 of Rawhide (Incident of the Black Sheep) that Leone found his leading man: His laziness, his laid-back quality, is what came over so clearly. When we were working together, he was like a snake, forever taking a nap 500 feet away, wrapped in his coils, asleep in the back of the car or on the set. Then hed open his coils out, unfold and stretch. ... Mr. Eastwood signed up with Leone and took the gun grip and boots he wore on Rawhide to Italy with him. These items are among the material artifacts that Sir Christopher and Estella Chung, an associate curator at the museum, gathered for the show, which they believe to be the largest such exhibition devoted to the work of a single director. As is often the case with museum shows about movies, the exhibition includes a wealth of graphic elements, including reproductions of sketches by Leones production and costume designer, Carlo Simi, and an assortment of eye-popping posters from around the world. But what makes this engaging exhibition even more resonant are the artifacts, like the Winchester rifle that plays a crucial part in A Fistful of Dollars. During a press preview on Tuesday, Sir Christopher led several dozen journalists, including a few Italian television crews, through the exhibition. Let me introduce you to Mussolini, Sir Christopher said, gesturing to the large blow-up photograph of Il Duce that hangs over a case containing reprints of vintage comic books and helps inaugurate the gallery room devoted to Leones early years in Fascist Italy. Sir Christopher walked his appreciative audience through the exhibition, past the monitor playing Episode 91 of Rawhide and the large-screen videos with the minidocumentaries produced for the exhibit on continuous loop. Sir Christopher then ushered the group into a room where he paused before a large vitrine. Here, he said with a flourish, is the poncho! Mr. Eastwood lent the exhibition the poncho, the iconic garment that defined his character, the Man With No Name, as much as the slim cigar, the flat-crowned hat and the squint. (The same poncho, which tends to look green when reproduced but is more of a dun brown, was used in all three Eastwood-Leone films.) The actor also lent the gun grip and boots that he had borrowed from Rawhide, which are exhibited alongside the poncho. Almost three decades later, Mr. Eastwood wore these same boots in one of his contributions as a director to the revisionist western, Unforgiven. Mr. Eastwood wears very large boots. After the preview, Sir Christopher joined more than 700 guests in the Autry Center courtyard where, during the next few hours, speeches were made and the Italian consul presented the actress Claudia Cardinale, who starred in Leones masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, with an enormous plate from Umbria. With her tan and dazzling smile, Ms. Cardinale looked exactly as a beautiful Italian movie star should. She kept her speech short and danced a waltz step with the consul, in honor of another of her films, Luchino Viscontis Leopard. Of Leone, Ms. Cardinale proclaimed I love him! After the star, the consul and the rest had cleared the stage, an elderly gentleman with a guitar took their place. This was Alessandro Alessandroni, the man who whistled (and wailed) on some of the haunting scores that Ennio Morricone wrote for Leone. Although some of his notes wobbled, Mr. Alessandroni filled the cool Los Angeles night air with notes as sweet and piercingly strange as those in the films. After he finished, the three giant puppets listed into the courtyard, guns in hand and faces fixed in Leone-style scowls. They got down to their dirty business quickly. As in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the Eastwood puppet shot first and the Van Cleef puppet bit the dust, or more accurately was gingerly lowered to the ground by the puppeteer wearing the great body and carved-foam head. That was it. The bad guy had been vanquished, the Gallo wine quaffed, the gelato devoured. It was time to hit the trail.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 17:05:27 +0000
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