A vast, empty western landscape. The camera swung flat. Then the camera slides into a desperate face scorched by the scorching sun. The long shot, uncut, turns into a close-up, telling us that the landscape is not empty, but occupied by an outlaw who is close to us. In these opening scenes, Sergio Leone establishes a rule that he uses throughout the film. The rule is that our ability to see is limited by the frame. At many of the film's important moments, what the camera can't see, the characters can't see, gives Leone the freedom to surprise us by adding elements that don't make sense according to the topographical position in his shots.
For example, there was a moment when the men didn't notice their huge camp until they stumbled upon the Union Army. Another moment was in the cemetery, and a guy popped up out of nowhere, even though he was supposed to be seen a mile away. Then there are the men walking down a street, completely exposed to people's line of sight, but no one shoots at them, probably because the two groups are not in the same frame.
Leone doesn't care about what's actual or real at all, and his great films are built on the stereotypical garbage of old-fashioned Westerns, and he uses his cinematic language to turn scrap into art. The film was released in the United States in late 1967, shortly after its predecessors, A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). Audiences know they love the film, but do they know why? I watched the film from the front seat of the Oriental Theater, which had a wide and huge screen that was ideal for viewing Leone's opera-style work. My reaction was strong, but because I had been a critic for less than a year at the time, I didn't always have the wisdom to see intuition as more valuable than prudence. When I looked up my past film reviews, I found that I had given a movie that was described as a four-star rating three-star. Probably because it's a "macaroni western," it won't be art.
But it's art. It was summoned by Leone's imagination and painted on widescreen so vividly that we forget how marginal it was to make the film at the time—Clint Eastwood was an actor that Hollywood didn't look up to; budget constraints (Red Dead Redemption was $200,000) that caused some jaw-dropping errors in the sub-shots; the film didn't have much dialogue because it was easier to shoot non-talking shots, And then you can make up for the original sound and sound effects. They even miserably tried to make these films look more like American films.
Clint Eastwood
Or the Western trilogy — especially the masterpiece "The Golden Trio" — has a subtle exotic flavor that suggests that the films come from a world different from traditional Westerns. Unlike Hollywood movies, which are starring in a few bland extras, we can immediately identify locals who must have been hired near the Spanish-speaking region—a group of men who had suffered from wind and rain. Think of the legless beggar who walked into a bar with his hands and exclaimed, "Pour me a glass of whiskey!" ”
John Ford turned Monument Valley into his own turf for his Western characters, and he made great movies there. But there is something new and strange in Leone's treacherous Spanish landscape. We have never seen these deserts before. John Wayne never came here. Leone's story is more like a dream, and everything in the dream is bigger, more desolate, more cruel, more dramatic than real life.
Leone is more about telling the story with pictures than words. We can examine that unparalleled scene in the cemetery. It is said that gold was buried in a grave. Three men gathered together, and they all wanted to get it. The three role-players are Clint Eastwood (The Good Guy), Lee Van Cleef (The Bad Guy) and Eli Wallach (The Weirdo). Everyone pointed their guns at another person. If one person shoots, everyone shoots and everyone dies. Unless two people both decide to shoot at one of them before shooting at a third. But which two will these two people be, and who will this third person be?
Leone stretched the scene for no apparent reason, starting with a long shot and then inserting close-ups of guns, faces, eyes, and many sweats and flies. He seemed to be testing himself to see how long he could keep the suspense going. Or is it really a kind of suspense? It may be purely a stylistic exercise, a deliberate act of manipulation by the director and self-indulgence. If you can enjoy Leone's freedom to parody and show off bad movies, you can understand his approach. This is not a story, but an ode to fearless gestures.
Eastwood, the actor who first worked with Leone at the age of thirty-four, already had an unquestionable influence at the time. Much of that influence comes down to his acting experience in the television industry. He made his debut in Rawhide. It was a time when moviegoers wouldn't buy an actor who played for free on TV. Eastwood got away with that bad luck, but not all actors can do it — and not all directors can do it. He said he accepted Leone's roles because he wanted to make movies and Hollywood was reluctant to hire him. Yes, but Eastwood himself became an important director, and by then he must have realized that Leone was not just another Italian "sword and straw shoe epic" maker, but a passionate person. Leone and Eastwood, the two men who joined forces to dedicate the role of The Nameless, were not only bigger than a TV star, but also bigger than a movie star—a man who never needed to defend himself, whose boots, fingers, and eyes were important enough to fill the entire screen.
I don't know if the lines for Eastwood's character are more than a tenth of the character of Tuco played by Eri Wallach. The character is silent, and Tucco is talking. It was one of Wallach's most spirited performances, and he managed to avoid the absurd and ridiculous side of the character that could emerge, creating a desperate, feared image. When he turns himself into a clown, we can feel that this is a performance technique of Tuco, not his real personality. Wallach is trained in villain acting and is an experienced stage veteran. He takes this vulgar role seriously, evoking certain emotional resonances in people. Lee Van Cliff plays Angel Eyes. Born in New Jersey, he is a veteran of fifty-three films and countless television series, many of which are Westerns (his first film was High Noon [1952], playing a gangster role). In a film with many squinting shots, his eyes are the most squinted, and they also shine with fanatical obsession.
Eri Wallach, Clint Eastwood
All three men were chasing the gold and silver treasure left behind during the Civil War, and each had some secrets about where the treasure was buried (some only knew the name of the cemetery but did not know the name of the tomb, some only knew the name on the tombstone but did not know the name of the cemetery). So they knew they would be alive until the grave was found, and then they could kill each other.
The currently repaired version has a total duration of one hundred and eighty minutes. The plot of the film is not enough, but Leone is not short of good ideas. The gunfight scenes at the beginning of the film involve unrelated characters. There is a hoax in which Wallach plays a wanted criminal, and Eastwood arrests him for payment, and then, at the moment when he is about to be hanged, he walks through Yang and shoots the hanging rope. There is a spectacular desert scene in the film, where Eastwood abandons Wallach in the desert, and Wallach then treats him in the same way, and the scorching sun is reminiscent of the scene in Greed (1924). The scene of the out-of-control carriage is also unforgettable, and the carriage is full of dead and dying people. And surprisingly, there is also a magnificent civil war passage in the film, almost like a movie in a movie, where Aldo Giuffrè gives a touching performance, and the Captain of the Union Army simply explains his drunkenness: the commander who gets the most alcohol for his men before the war will win the war. His dying line was, "Can you let me live a little longer?" I look forward to the good news. ”
Sergio Leone (1929-1989) was a broad-minded, ambitious director who created himself almost as much as he created a macaroni Western. Eriksen writes that Leone bragged about his career as a filmmaker, "calling himself the assistant director of Robert Aldrich's Italian film Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), although he was fired a day later." Leone made a now-forgotten epic of the Roman Empire in 1961, and then made Red Dead Redemption based on the story of Akira Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo (1961), so much so that perhaps Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Horrors was not the first.