Precious few foreign artists have so thoroughly reappropriated an American cultural idiom as to make it entirely their own – the feat brilliantly achieved by Italian director Sergio Leone (1929-89) who revolutionized the Western, and later the gangster film, into deeply personal statements about history, memory and cultural mythology. A Proto-Pop artist, Leone transformed the widescreen canvas into bold collages drawing with ironic sincerity from the cinema, popular culture, history and religion. Although he directed only seven features, Leone has exerted an immeasurable influence upon the American and world cinema, with his signature bravura style ceaselessly quoted by directors from around the world – from Tarantino and Scorsese to Kusturica, Miike and Woo.

Quite literally born into cinema, Leone’s family had deep roots in the Italian film industry, with his mother a former silent movie star and his father also a silent-era actor, and director. Leone would never lose the passion for the cinema as a fantasy mythology which he kindled as a child, nor for the comic books and genre films that would serve as important inspirations for his mature work. Although he apprenticed early for a number of neo-realist directors, including Vittorio de Sica who employed Leone as an assistant on The Bicycle Thieves, Leone’s first steps as a director really began during the Fifties “American invasion” of Rome, when he worked as an assistant for several Hollywood directors taking advantage of the new forged relationship between Cinecitta and the US studios – among them Leone’s personal heroes Robert Aldrich and Raoul Walsh. Often dismissed as a formulaic studio assignment, Leone’s directorial debut The Colossus of Rhodes is important for announcing Leone’s interest in the far distant past, the “once upon a time” land understood through myths and legends, through popular rather than personal memory. Although Leone’s exploration of the past would gradually become more personal- culminating in Once Upon a Time in America’s flashback-driven collage narrative – he maintained the historic past as a world of fantasy projections, conjured on screen as always an unreal, baroque world.

With A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone cemented the wildly popular trend of Spaghetti Westerns that would essentially save the faltering Cinecitta and provide a new lease on the careers of many aging Hollywood action stars. Typically derided by contemporary critics suspicious of their tremendous popularity and artistic excesses, Leone’s Westerns are recognized today as the postwar Italian cinema’s most original contribution after neorealism. Partnering with the great composer Ennio Morricone, Leone defined a thrilling mode of anti-classicism that exploded stylistic, narrative and genre conventions, channeling the baroque tendencies of late studio directors such as Aldrich, Boetticher and Fuller. Crippled by a quaking fear of failure, Leone moved with increasing trepidation into his next project, a pattern which imperiled many of his projects and almost destroyed his final and perhaps least understood work, Once Upon a Time in America.

Endlessly studied and discussed, Leone’s work is actually quite difficult to see. For the full dimensions of Leone’s operatic vision of the past is best – and arguably only – understandable on the widescreen and with the type of excellent archival prints gathered for this exclusive HFA retrospective. – Haden Guest