Sergio Leone was born in 1929 into a cinematic family: his father was director Roberto Roberti and his mother silent film actress Edvige
Valcarenghi. Leone dropped out of college at 18 to pursue his own film
career, working with Vittorio de Sica on The Bicycle Thief (1948) and
afterwards building his own career on popular historical films. In the
1960s, he pioneered a Hollywood-European (and even Asian) hybrid, the
“Spaghetti Western”, which combined the myth and ambience of an aging
American classic with European staffs and sensibilities, Spanish
landscapes, Asian and other art models and a mélange of actors and
languages. While over 600 spaghetti westerns appeared by the
1980s, Leone’s works became particularly influential for their artistry
and striking, almost operatic tales, embodied in the “Dollars Trilogy”
with Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name and its distinctive themes
by Ennio Morricone. Spaghetti westerns, in particular, changed the
nature of heroism, using antiheroes or pairs of heroes of very different
backgrounds and interweaving violence and motives of money and revenge
that undercut the noble myth of the cowboy. Although the genre
waned in a spate of comedies in the 1970s, they still influence American
directors who have rethought the Western, including Eastwood himself
(Hang ‘Em High, 1968) and Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained, 2012). In
the 1970s, working with larger stars and budgets, Leone took on more
and more ambitious global projects, whether tackling an encounter of the
IRA and Mexican revolutionaries (Once Upon A time in the Revolution) or
bringing the renewed Western back home to Hollywood in Once Upon A Time
in the West, a film chopped by fearful Hollywood studios (perhaps
affirming Leone’s sense of the problems of the Western). Passing
on the opportunity to direct The Godfather (1972), Leone made his
culminating project the big-screen, all-star vehicle Once Upon a Time in
America (1984), to be screened in the 39th HKIFF. Nonetheless, it also
faced problems from the studio. Hence, despite dreams of other projects,
Leone never completed another film before dying at age 60. Decades
later, though, his powerful visions of film and the myths of America
have been recognized masterful cinema and tremendous entertainmentInfo: http://bit.ly/ZBLqT2Programme and screening scheduleA Fistful of DollarsFor a Few Dollars MoreThe Good, the Bad and the UglyOnce Upon a Time in the WestOnce Upon a Time in the Revolution