Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death

The first biography of the Italian director who reinvented the film Western with his series of "spaghetti" westerns.
The Italian film director Sergio Leone reinvented the American Western with his movie A Fistful of Dollars, a spare reworking of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese outlaw drama Yojimbo transferred to the Texas-Mexican border. In doing so, Leone also created a new kind of Western protagonist–silent, mysterious, morally ambiguous–and found a new star to embody this new archetype: Clint Eastwood.

Leone's entire life pointed toward his reinvention of the American Western: he grew up during the Nazi occupation of Italy, a period in which he saw terrible parallels to the traditional Western. When he was in a position to direct his own films, the low budget of his first "spaghetti" Western meant that he could only afford to hire a relatively unknown American actor, Clint Eastwood, to star in A Fistful of Dollars, which has been credited with reviving the Western as a credible film genre in the 1960s. This book is the first to document not only Leone's life but also to explore fully the development–and phenomenon–of the Italian film Western. In addition, Christopher Frayling examines Leone's late masterwork, Once Upon a Time in the West, which TimeOut says "ranks among the greatest examples of 'pure cinema' in the history of the medium."