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Here's a quick list of all movies watched by the SMC. Or if you prefer, here's a more detailed examination.
If we count The Proposition, a Western in spirit if not in locale, then we have now watched five Westerns in the Club. That's more Westerns than action movies.
But one thing about this week is a first: Sergio Leone.
Once Upon a Time in the West is directed by SERGIO LEONE.
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter, credited as the inventor of "Spaghetti Western" genre.
Leone's film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include the sword and sandal action films The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) and The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), the Dollars Trilogy of Westerns featuring Clint Eastwood (A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)), the Western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the epic buddy Zapata Western Duck, You Sucker (1971) and the epic crime drama Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
In the mid-1960s, historical epics fell out of favor with audiences, but Leone had shifted his attention to a subgenre which came to be known as the "Spaghetti Western", owing its origin to the American Western. His film A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was based upon Akira Kurosawa's Edo-era samurai adventure Yojimbo (1961). Leone's film elicited a legal challenge from the Japanese director, though Kurosawa's film was in turn probably based on the 1929 Dashiell Hammett novel, Red Harvest. The film is also notable for establishing Eastwood as a star. Until that time Eastwood had been an American television actor with few credited film roles.
In 1968 Leone directed Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) for Paramount Pictures. The film was shot mostly in Almería, Spain and Cinecittà in Rome. It was also briefly shot in Monument Valley, Utah. The film starred Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale. The film emerged as a long, violent, dreamlike meditation upon the mythology of the American Old West, with many stylistic references to iconic western films.
In 1971 Leone directed Duck, You Sucker (1971) (Giù la Testa) a Mexican Revolution action drama, starring James Coburn as an Irish revolutionary and Rod Steiger as a Mexican bandit who is conned into becoming a revolutionary.
Leone turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather (1972), in favor of working on another gangster story he had conceived earlier. He devoted ten years to this project, based on the novel The Hoods by former mobster Harry Grey, which focused on a quartet of New York City Jewish gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s who had been friends since childhood. The four-hour finished film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), featured Robert De Niro and James Woods. It was a meditation on another aspect of popular American mythology, the role of greed and violence and their uneasy coexistence with the meaning of ethnicity and friendship.
Henry Fonda: www.imdb.com/name/nm0000020
Jason Robards: www.imdb.com/name/nm0001673
Charles Bronson: www.imdb.com/name/nm0000314
Claudia Cardinale: www.imdb.com/name/nm0001012
Premise: A mysterious stranger with a harmonica joins forces with a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin working for the railroad.
Budget: $5 million
Box Office: $5.3 million in the US, unsure about worldwide
* Henry Fonda prepared for his role as the villain "Frank" by arriving in Italy with a pair of brown colored contact lenses and a mustache. When Sergio Leone saw them, he ordered them removed. Leone had planned an important close-up shot of Frank's entrance and wanted the audience to instantly recognize Fonda with those blue eyes.
* Al Mulock, who played one of the three gunmen in the opening sequence, committed suicide by jumping from his hotel window in full costume after a day's shooting. Production manager Claudio Mancini and screenwriter Mickey Knox, who were sitting in a room in the hotel, witnessed Mulock's body pass by their window. Knox recalled in an interview that while Mancini put Mulock in his car to drive him to the hospital, director Sergio Leone said to Mancini, "Get the costume! We need the costume!" Mulock, who had appeared as the one-armed bounty hunter in Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), was wearing the costume he wore in the movie when he made his fatal leap.
* The main selling point to producers for the use of the Techniscope process was the savings in camera negative; but, another advantage was being able to derive the 2.35:1 aspect ratio while shooting with spherical lenses which avoided the distortion created by anamorphics during certain camera moves and extreme close-ups (such as those used by Sergio Leone). This film, together with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) (also directed by Leone and shot by Tonino Delli Colli) are now considered masterpieces in the use of the Techniscope system.
* For the opening sequence where the three dusters waited for the train, filmmakers lightly coated the face of Jack Elam with jam and began filming close-ups while letting a fly out of a jar filled with flies, attempting to get Elam's reaction as one would land on his cheek.
* This marked the first of the last three films to be fully directed by Sergio Leone. All three of his last films would be edited for U.S. distribution, resulting in box-office failure in the U.S. (although the longer international versions would be successful in other countries). In Italy an even longer version of the movie was released. It does not exist in an English dubbed version.
* The original intent for the opening scene was to use music already composed by composer Ennio Morricone; however, the attempted blend didn't seem to fit well. The decision was made to drop Morricone's score from the opening train station sequence and record the ambient sounds relating to the scenes (including the squeaking windmill and individual footsteps) after Morricone experienced a musical performance created by using only the sounds of a metal ladder. This created an exaggerated version of what had come to be known as "spaghetti sound."
* After completing the Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)), Sergio Leone didn't want to do another western and began working on Once Upon a Time in America (1984); however, after the huge success of the Dollars Trilogy in the States in 1967, Leone wanted to produce films in the US and he began selling the idea for "Once Upon a Time in America", but studios wouldn't let him do it until he made another western for them. Eventually Leone decided to create another trilogy which begins with Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), develops into Duck, You Sucker (1971) and ends with Once Upon a Time in America. The ''Once Upon a Time'' trilogy, as it is often referred to, is effectively about "three historical periods which toughened America".
* Sergio Leone originally offered the role of Harmonica to Clint Eastwood, but he turned it down, as he was no longer interested in working for Leone. James Coburn was also approached for the role of Harmonica, but demanded too much money. The role went to Charles Bronson, who had previously turned down roles in the Dollars Trilogy.
* Jason Robards showed up at the set completely drunk on the first day of filming, and Sergio Leone threatened to fire him if he ever did that again. Robards was generally well-behaved thereafter, though in June 1968, after receiving word of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, he broke down and refused to perform until the day was over, and Leone decided to stop filming for the day.
* Over half of the film's budget was spent on the actors' salaries.
* Co-writer Bernardo Bertolucci says on the film's DVD that when he first suggested to director Sergio Leone that the film's central character be a woman, Leone was hesitant. Leone first budged on this subject by suggesting the introductory shot of Jill would be from below the train platform so the camera could see under Jill's dress and show she wasn't wearing any undergarments. Claudia Cardinale says she was never told this idea and says she probably wouldn't have agreed to be in the movie if it required this shot (suggesting that Leone, mercifully, gave up on the idea in the writing process).
* Although Lionel Stander's establishment is located in Monument Valley, the interiors were actually shot at Cinecitta. Cheyenne's men enter with a cloud of red dust. The red dust was actually dust imported from the Monument Valley location.
* The Indian woman who flees from the train station in the opening sequence was actually played by a Hawaiian princess, Luukialuana (Luana) Kalaeloa (aka Luana Strode). She was the wife of actor Woody Strode.
* The McBain house was built of solid logs that remained following production of the Orson Welles' movie Chimes at Midnight (1965).
* In the opening scene, when Stony (Woody Strode) is under the water tank, water kept dripping onto the brim of his hat, causing him to flinch and Sergio Leone to stop filming. Leone was going to move Strode but, at the actor's suggestion, kept him in the same spot. Strode wanted his character to be viewed as so cool as to not let dripping water affect him. On the spur of the moment, Leone had Strode take off his hat and drink the collected water.
* The first draft of the script was 436 pages long.
* Sergio Leone liked to tell the story of a cinema in Paris where the film ran uninterrupted for two years. When he visited this theatre, he was surrounded by fans who wanted his autograph, as well as the projectionist, who was less than enthusiastic. Leone claimed the projectionist told him "I kill you! The same movie over and over again for two years! And it's so SLOW!"
* Ennio Morricone composed the musical score to the original screenplay by Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. The plot was subsequently changed, and in many places, Leone directed the film to the existing musical score.
* Sergio Leone originally wanted Sophia Loren to play Jill McBain, and Carlo Ponti, her husband, was willing to provide a considerable amount of financial backing if she was in the film. However, Leone decided not to cast her because he feared that she would try to gain too much dominance and influence on how the film was made, given her famously headstrong and temperamental personality. He instead cast Claudia Cardinale, a personal friend of his, whom he convinced to play Jill without showing her the script.
* The Flagstone set reportedly cost as much as the entire budget for Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
* The McBain farmhouse location in Almeria turns up in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
* For this film Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa take the longest buggy ride in movie history. It begins in Spain and goes through Monument Valley.
* Afraid of being typecast having made 3 spaghetti Westerns in a row with Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood declined the opportunity to appear in the film. This led to a breakdown in Eastwood and Leone's relationship which was only resolved in 1988 when Eastwood was in Rome promoting Bird (1988) and got a call from his former director. They met for dinner. A few months later, Leone died from a heart attack.
* Following the huge success of the " Dollars " trilogy, United Artists were prepared to finance Sergio Leone's ambitious epic but only if it featured top box office names. They put forward Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas but Leone balked at the proposed casting, and moved over to Paramount instead.
* The film was dubbed into several languages following its completion, including Italian, English, Spanish, French and German. For the Italian track, Gabriele Ferzetti and Paolo Stoppa dubbed their own dialogue, while Claudia Cardinale was dubbed by her regular Italian voice-over artist, Rita Savagnone. For the English version, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Frank Wolff, Keenan Wynn and Lionel Stander dubbed themselves. While none of the voice actors who re-voiced the other characters in the English version received a screen credit, it is known that actor Bernie Grant and his wife, Joyce Gordon, dubbed the voices of Ferzetti and Cardinale respectively.
* Claudia Cardinale's first day of filming was her nude love scene with Henry Fonda. This also marked the first time Fonda had done such a scene; his wife insisted on being on set during the filming of it.
* Unlike the Dollars trilogy which were all solely shot in Spain, Sergio Leone actually traveled to the USA to shoot some scenes in the iconic Monument Valley, one of John Ford's favorite locations, making it the first "spaghetti Western" to be shot in the States.
* Selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2009.
* The original US print completely excised the final scene between Jason Robards and Charles Bronson, a pivotal moment when Robards' character actually dies.
* Henry Fonda originally turned down the role of Frank. Director Sergio Leone flew to the United States and met with Fonda, who asked why he was wanted for the film. Leone replied, "Picture this: the camera shows a gunman from the waist down pulling his gun and shooting a running child. The camera pans up to the gunman's face and...it's Henry Fonda" (until then - with one exception - Fonda had only been cast in "good guy" roles. Leone wanted the audience to be shocked).
Members: @shadow_priest_x @europe1 @jeicex @MusterX @Coolthulu @Scott Parker 27 @the muntjac @Caveat @RabidJesus @usulrah
Here's a quick list of all movies watched by the SMC. Or if you prefer, here's a more detailed examination.
If we count The Proposition, a Western in spirit if not in locale, then we have now watched five Westerns in the Club. That's more Westerns than action movies.
But one thing about this week is a first: Sergio Leone.
Our Director
Once Upon a Time in the West is directed by SERGIO LEONE.
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter, credited as the inventor of "Spaghetti Western" genre.
Leone's film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include the sword and sandal action films The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) and The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), the Dollars Trilogy of Westerns featuring Clint Eastwood (A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)), the Western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the epic buddy Zapata Western Duck, You Sucker (1971) and the epic crime drama Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
In the mid-1960s, historical epics fell out of favor with audiences, but Leone had shifted his attention to a subgenre which came to be known as the "Spaghetti Western", owing its origin to the American Western. His film A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was based upon Akira Kurosawa's Edo-era samurai adventure Yojimbo (1961). Leone's film elicited a legal challenge from the Japanese director, though Kurosawa's film was in turn probably based on the 1929 Dashiell Hammett novel, Red Harvest. The film is also notable for establishing Eastwood as a star. Until that time Eastwood had been an American television actor with few credited film roles.
In 1968 Leone directed Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) for Paramount Pictures. The film was shot mostly in Almería, Spain and Cinecittà in Rome. It was also briefly shot in Monument Valley, Utah. The film starred Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale. The film emerged as a long, violent, dreamlike meditation upon the mythology of the American Old West, with many stylistic references to iconic western films.
In 1971 Leone directed Duck, You Sucker (1971) (Giù la Testa) a Mexican Revolution action drama, starring James Coburn as an Irish revolutionary and Rod Steiger as a Mexican bandit who is conned into becoming a revolutionary.
Leone turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather (1972), in favor of working on another gangster story he had conceived earlier. He devoted ten years to this project, based on the novel The Hoods by former mobster Harry Grey, which focused on a quartet of New York City Jewish gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s who had been friends since childhood. The four-hour finished film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), featured Robert De Niro and James Woods. It was a meditation on another aspect of popular American mythology, the role of greed and violence and their uneasy coexistence with the meaning of ethnicity and friendship.
Our Stars
Henry Fonda: www.imdb.com/name/nm0000020
Jason Robards: www.imdb.com/name/nm0001673
Charles Bronson: www.imdb.com/name/nm0000314
Claudia Cardinale: www.imdb.com/name/nm0001012
Film Overview and YouTube Videos
Premise: A mysterious stranger with a harmonica joins forces with a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin working for the railroad.
Budget: $5 million
Box Office: $5.3 million in the US, unsure about worldwide
Trivia
(courtesy of IMDB)
(courtesy of IMDB)
* Henry Fonda prepared for his role as the villain "Frank" by arriving in Italy with a pair of brown colored contact lenses and a mustache. When Sergio Leone saw them, he ordered them removed. Leone had planned an important close-up shot of Frank's entrance and wanted the audience to instantly recognize Fonda with those blue eyes.
* Al Mulock, who played one of the three gunmen in the opening sequence, committed suicide by jumping from his hotel window in full costume after a day's shooting. Production manager Claudio Mancini and screenwriter Mickey Knox, who were sitting in a room in the hotel, witnessed Mulock's body pass by their window. Knox recalled in an interview that while Mancini put Mulock in his car to drive him to the hospital, director Sergio Leone said to Mancini, "Get the costume! We need the costume!" Mulock, who had appeared as the one-armed bounty hunter in Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), was wearing the costume he wore in the movie when he made his fatal leap.
* The main selling point to producers for the use of the Techniscope process was the savings in camera negative; but, another advantage was being able to derive the 2.35:1 aspect ratio while shooting with spherical lenses which avoided the distortion created by anamorphics during certain camera moves and extreme close-ups (such as those used by Sergio Leone). This film, together with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) (also directed by Leone and shot by Tonino Delli Colli) are now considered masterpieces in the use of the Techniscope system.
* For the opening sequence where the three dusters waited for the train, filmmakers lightly coated the face of Jack Elam with jam and began filming close-ups while letting a fly out of a jar filled with flies, attempting to get Elam's reaction as one would land on his cheek.
* This marked the first of the last three films to be fully directed by Sergio Leone. All three of his last films would be edited for U.S. distribution, resulting in box-office failure in the U.S. (although the longer international versions would be successful in other countries). In Italy an even longer version of the movie was released. It does not exist in an English dubbed version.
* The original intent for the opening scene was to use music already composed by composer Ennio Morricone; however, the attempted blend didn't seem to fit well. The decision was made to drop Morricone's score from the opening train station sequence and record the ambient sounds relating to the scenes (including the squeaking windmill and individual footsteps) after Morricone experienced a musical performance created by using only the sounds of a metal ladder. This created an exaggerated version of what had come to be known as "spaghetti sound."
* After completing the Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)), Sergio Leone didn't want to do another western and began working on Once Upon a Time in America (1984); however, after the huge success of the Dollars Trilogy in the States in 1967, Leone wanted to produce films in the US and he began selling the idea for "Once Upon a Time in America", but studios wouldn't let him do it until he made another western for them. Eventually Leone decided to create another trilogy which begins with Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), develops into Duck, You Sucker (1971) and ends with Once Upon a Time in America. The ''Once Upon a Time'' trilogy, as it is often referred to, is effectively about "three historical periods which toughened America".
* Sergio Leone originally offered the role of Harmonica to Clint Eastwood, but he turned it down, as he was no longer interested in working for Leone. James Coburn was also approached for the role of Harmonica, but demanded too much money. The role went to Charles Bronson, who had previously turned down roles in the Dollars Trilogy.
* Jason Robards showed up at the set completely drunk on the first day of filming, and Sergio Leone threatened to fire him if he ever did that again. Robards was generally well-behaved thereafter, though in June 1968, after receiving word of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, he broke down and refused to perform until the day was over, and Leone decided to stop filming for the day.
* Over half of the film's budget was spent on the actors' salaries.
* Co-writer Bernardo Bertolucci says on the film's DVD that when he first suggested to director Sergio Leone that the film's central character be a woman, Leone was hesitant. Leone first budged on this subject by suggesting the introductory shot of Jill would be from below the train platform so the camera could see under Jill's dress and show she wasn't wearing any undergarments. Claudia Cardinale says she was never told this idea and says she probably wouldn't have agreed to be in the movie if it required this shot (suggesting that Leone, mercifully, gave up on the idea in the writing process).
* Although Lionel Stander's establishment is located in Monument Valley, the interiors were actually shot at Cinecitta. Cheyenne's men enter with a cloud of red dust. The red dust was actually dust imported from the Monument Valley location.
* The Indian woman who flees from the train station in the opening sequence was actually played by a Hawaiian princess, Luukialuana (Luana) Kalaeloa (aka Luana Strode). She was the wife of actor Woody Strode.
* The McBain house was built of solid logs that remained following production of the Orson Welles' movie Chimes at Midnight (1965).
* In the opening scene, when Stony (Woody Strode) is under the water tank, water kept dripping onto the brim of his hat, causing him to flinch and Sergio Leone to stop filming. Leone was going to move Strode but, at the actor's suggestion, kept him in the same spot. Strode wanted his character to be viewed as so cool as to not let dripping water affect him. On the spur of the moment, Leone had Strode take off his hat and drink the collected water.
* The first draft of the script was 436 pages long.
* Sergio Leone liked to tell the story of a cinema in Paris where the film ran uninterrupted for two years. When he visited this theatre, he was surrounded by fans who wanted his autograph, as well as the projectionist, who was less than enthusiastic. Leone claimed the projectionist told him "I kill you! The same movie over and over again for two years! And it's so SLOW!"
* Ennio Morricone composed the musical score to the original screenplay by Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. The plot was subsequently changed, and in many places, Leone directed the film to the existing musical score.
* Sergio Leone originally wanted Sophia Loren to play Jill McBain, and Carlo Ponti, her husband, was willing to provide a considerable amount of financial backing if she was in the film. However, Leone decided not to cast her because he feared that she would try to gain too much dominance and influence on how the film was made, given her famously headstrong and temperamental personality. He instead cast Claudia Cardinale, a personal friend of his, whom he convinced to play Jill without showing her the script.
* The Flagstone set reportedly cost as much as the entire budget for Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
* The McBain farmhouse location in Almeria turns up in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
* For this film Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa take the longest buggy ride in movie history. It begins in Spain and goes through Monument Valley.
* Afraid of being typecast having made 3 spaghetti Westerns in a row with Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood declined the opportunity to appear in the film. This led to a breakdown in Eastwood and Leone's relationship which was only resolved in 1988 when Eastwood was in Rome promoting Bird (1988) and got a call from his former director. They met for dinner. A few months later, Leone died from a heart attack.
* Following the huge success of the " Dollars " trilogy, United Artists were prepared to finance Sergio Leone's ambitious epic but only if it featured top box office names. They put forward Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas but Leone balked at the proposed casting, and moved over to Paramount instead.
* The film was dubbed into several languages following its completion, including Italian, English, Spanish, French and German. For the Italian track, Gabriele Ferzetti and Paolo Stoppa dubbed their own dialogue, while Claudia Cardinale was dubbed by her regular Italian voice-over artist, Rita Savagnone. For the English version, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Frank Wolff, Keenan Wynn and Lionel Stander dubbed themselves. While none of the voice actors who re-voiced the other characters in the English version received a screen credit, it is known that actor Bernie Grant and his wife, Joyce Gordon, dubbed the voices of Ferzetti and Cardinale respectively.
* Claudia Cardinale's first day of filming was her nude love scene with Henry Fonda. This also marked the first time Fonda had done such a scene; his wife insisted on being on set during the filming of it.
* Unlike the Dollars trilogy which were all solely shot in Spain, Sergio Leone actually traveled to the USA to shoot some scenes in the iconic Monument Valley, one of John Ford's favorite locations, making it the first "spaghetti Western" to be shot in the States.
* Selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2009.
* The original US print completely excised the final scene between Jason Robards and Charles Bronson, a pivotal moment when Robards' character actually dies.
* Henry Fonda originally turned down the role of Frank. Director Sergio Leone flew to the United States and met with Fonda, who asked why he was wanted for the film. Leone replied, "Picture this: the camera shows a gunman from the waist down pulling his gun and shooting a running child. The camera pans up to the gunman's face and...it's Henry Fonda" (until then - with one exception - Fonda had only been cast in "good guy" roles. Leone wanted the audience to be shocked).
Members: @shadow_priest_x @europe1 @jeicex @MusterX @Coolthulu @Scott Parker 27 @the muntjac @Caveat @RabidJesus @usulrah
