BEFORE: So far so good with my SemiQuinCentennial review of 50 films, representing our great 50 states. But I think I'm going to be in trouble very very soon - I will explain tomorrow. Today a number of prominent directors carry over from "Jaws @ 50" - let's keep the focus on Martin Scorsese because he was in the recent "Star Wars" movie, too. At one point I was trying to figure out which film to try and land on Independence Day, and then I noticed one of my proposed docs had the word "America" right there in the title - well, that's the one, then, isn't it? And I made it work out. There's the TINIEST connection between Sergio Leone and one of our U.S. states, it's UTAH! Huh, so far it's been all states that I've lived in or visited, imagine that...
Date admitted to the U.S. January 4, 1896 (the 45th state)
Claim to fame: Parts of the Sergio Leone film "Once Upon a Time in the West" were filmed in Monument Valley, UT, although most of the film was shot in Spain.
Nickname: The Beehive Hairdo State
Prevalent language: Mormon
State Motto: "Industry"
State Flower: Sego lily
State Fish: Bonnevill cutthroat trout (WTF?)
State Fish: Bonnevill cutthroat trout (WTF?)
State Reptile: Gila monster
State Mushroom: Porcini
State Drink: probably postum, which is fake coffee
State Insect: Western honey bee (which lives in a beehive, duh)
State Mammal: Rocky Mountain elk
State Tree: Quaking aspen
State Dance: None - nobody in Utah is allowed to dance
Notable Sports Teams: Umm, Utah Jazz? Is that a thing?
Fun Facts: The Puebloans, the Navajo, the Shoshone, the Goshute tribes, and then the Spanish conquistadors and European trappers all avoided the Utah territory for hundreds of years. I'm sure they all had their reasons. People stayed away in droves until the Mormons, who like the Puritans, had been kicked out of just about every place else, including Illinois, for being so religious and uptight, reached Utah in 1847 and began to practice polygamy until the LDS church banned it in 1890. Damn, that could have been such a fun state...
I visited Utah three times, not for Bryce Canyon or Zion or Arches or Monument Valley, but for the Sundance Film Festival in 1998 and 2001, and the Slamdance Festival in 2004. I have not been back since, and now Sundance is moving to Boulder, Colorado so I have no plans to return.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Once Upon a Time in America" (Movie #3,419)
THE PLOT: An homage by various film professionals to the legendary Italian director Sergio Leone, director of "Once Upon a Time in America" and famous for the creation of the subgenre "spaghetti Western".
AFTER: I realize that it might seem a bit weird to turn over our nation's birthday - and the big 250th one at that - to a documentary about an Italian man. But think about it for a minute, we are nothing if not a nation of immigrants, so people of ALL nationalities make up America, plus we do owe some debt to two other Italians, Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Hell, our country is NAMED after an Italian man, so there you go. It's also the whole point of the documentary, to show that this Italian man had something of a unique take on the Western movie, which supposedly documents our country's history, but of course it never really did. Leone's take on Western movies was a re-invention of the tropes about good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians, farmers and cattlemen, and of course history was never really like the movies to begin with, so it's a re-imagination of another imagination, so at least two degrees removed from reality, but damn, if the movies aren't a lot more fun than boring old reality.
Here's what I've seen out of Sergio Leone's films - the Clint Eastwood Western "non-trilogy" of "A Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", and about five years ago I watched "Once Upon a Time in America". That's it - but I didn't let my avoidance of Bergman films prevent me from watching "Trespassing Bergman", I just caught up with a bunch of Bergman films the following year. I have "Once Upon a Time in the West" on my DVR now, the hard part is linking back to a film from the 1960's - I thought that maybe I would take a break from the Doc Block and squeeze that film in, along with "How the West Was Won", but then when I took a look at the linking, it wasn't going to happen, my Doc Block came together a different way - you could say it kind of organized itself, and I couldn't fit in both movies. Anyway it seemed a bit weird to stop the Doc Block right after getting started, just to knock off a Western. I'll get to both of those classic Westerns some other way. Maybe. Someday.
Sergio Leone was born in Rome in 1929, the son of an actor who used the stage name Roberto Roberti and silent film actress Edvige Valcarenghi, and he spent a lot of time on film sets as a child, so you can say he was kind of destined to be a film director himself. He studied law for a bit at university, but of course dropped out to work in movies. He worked as an assistant to the director of "Bicycle Thieves" and then wrote screenplay for the "sword and sandal" historical films that were hot in Italy during the 1950's. This led to A.D. work on "Quo Vadis" and "Ben-Hur", which were filmed in Europe but backed by American studios. He helped complete a film called "The Last Days of Pompeii" when the director got sick, and then got a chance to direct a film called "The Colossus of Rhodes", and by this time he knew how to make low-budget films that looked like large budget epics.
When historical epics became less popular, he shifted his attention to Western films, and his style became known as "spaghetti Westerns", with some Japanese influence in addition to all the nods to the American West. If you watch those "Dollars" films, the characters are a lot more complex than those seen in traditional Westerns, everyone is somehow self-serving, it's like every man for himself, plus everyone looks dirty and unshaven and makes you glad the film was not made in Smell-O-Vision. He cast Clint Eastwood as the "Man With No Name" and since Clint had a month off from his TV work on "Rawhide" he gave it a go, and they ended up working well together, even though one spoke only English and the other spoke only Italian. Each film was more complex and technically well-made than the last, they kind of made each other better or something, Clint became his muse just like Harrison Ford did for George Lucas, together they just clicked and made something innovative and fresh in a genre that was pretty worn-out.
Leone then got the chance to come to the United States and make "Once Upon a Time in the West", though as I said above it was mostly filmed in Spain and Rome - parts of Spain that looked amazingly like the American Old West landscape, plus a little bit filmed in Utah. I'll try to get to this film and then maybe I'll have more to say about it. Then Leone got an offer to direct "The Godfather", but he turned it down because he wanted to make "Once Upon a Time in America", and spent the next 10 or 11 years developing it, finally shooting a four-hour epic version that KILLED at the Cannes Festival, but was deemed too long by the studio, who then made a cut that was only two hours long, you know, for the American market because of the short attention span of dumb Americans. (well, the studio wasn't wrong...). People who have seen the entire four-hour epic cut, however, get a lot more out of it and I'm thinking the movie makes a lot more sense that way.
He never made another feature after that, and died in 1989 - he had plans to make another epic about the Siege of Leningrad, but I think we can assume that he was creatively "stuck" after Hollywood tore the film he worked on for a decade and a half to shreds. What a terrible place Hollywood is, I bet he wished he never went there and had just stayed in Rome making the films he wanted to make.
Directed by Francesco Zippel
Also starring Fausto Ancillai (last seen in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), Dario Argento, Darren Aronofsky, Jacques Audiard, Damien Chazelle, Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "The Comeback Trail"), Enzo Dililberto, Clint Eastwood (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Gian Luca Farinelli, Christopher Frayling, Andrea Leone, Francesca Leone, Raffaella Leone, Arnon Milchan, Frank Miller (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Giuliano Montaldo, Noel Simsolo, Steven Spielberg (also carrying over from "Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story"), Quentin Tarantino (ditto), Giuseppe Tornatore, Hark Tsui, Carlo Verdone,
with archive footage of Sergio Leone, Brian Bloom (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Charles Bronson (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Claudia Cardinale (last seen in "Effie Gray"), James Coburn (last seen in "Faye"), Jack Elam (last seen in "Kismet"), Henry Fonda (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Ennio Morricone, Woody Strode (last seen in "Trumbo"), Lee Van Cleef (last seen in "High Noon"), Eli Wallach (last seen in "The Hoax"), James Woods (last seen in "Too Big to Fail")
RATING: 6 out of 10 extreme close-ups
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