Sergio Leone & John Ford

by Paolo Valassi

​Sergio Leone's westerns represent a turning point compared to the epic and optimistic ones by John Ford. 
Ford describes the "birth of a nation"; Leone's "heroes" are instead ugly, dirty and bad, they do not fight for some high ideal but exclusively for a nice pile of dollars. Even "the good guy" in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is only more ironic than the others but no less cynical and attentive to his own interests. 
This Leonean vision reaches its apotheosis in 1968 when the Italian director goes to Monument Valley, the location of almost all of John Ford's productions, to shoot Once Upon a Time in the West. The film is a great tribute to the epic of the frontier sung by Ford but at the same time represents the final act of the legend and the passage to a new era, characterized by technology (trains), by new characters who are more cynical, less idealistic and no longer believe (romantically) that to fix things all it takes is “a good gunshot”. 
If John Ford was the singer of the birth of a world, Leone tells of its death. 
The colors of Ford’s Monument Valley are sunny, clear and endless, while Leone’s are blinding, dusty and claustrophobic. The color of Once Upon a Time in the West is the sepia of a vintage photo. A color of the past. Even the enormously dilated times of the film are functional to evoke a long agony, the agony of a world that Leone does not seem to want to abandon because he knows it will never return. As Leone himself said: "Ford's hero looks out the window to see the horizon, the bright future. My hero, if he looks out the window, risks getting a bullet in the forehead...".

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​John Ford was also the director who shot The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a film that has characteristics that make it the most “Leonian” of “Fordian” films. 
This western, John Ford’s most bitter, is a sort of funeral of the old West and it is no coincidence that the plot begins with the funeral of Tom, a character played by John Wayne. The old Ford hero, John Wayne, is now on the way out, overtaken by technology (trains, here too) and by Ransom (played by James Stewart), a new, different type of human being who comes from the East, a law graduate who doesn’t know how to hold a gun, who adapts to being a scullery boy, who faces the duel with the bad guy on duty (Liberty Valance played by Lee Marvin) wearing a waiter’s apron. 
But ironically the new world owes its fame, its success, its wealth to the old world, to its methods, to its men, those accustomed to fixing things, precisely, with “a good gunshot”. In fact, everyone believes that Liberty Valance was killed in a duel by Ransom, while in fact it was a bullet fired from Tom's rifle, hidden in the shadows. And Ransom will build a brilliant political career on this misunderstanding. However, the old hero, once he has done his duty, with dignity and pride withdraws to the sidelines, giving way to the new human typology. Perhaps because he is aware that in any case "... here we are in the West, where if the legend becomes reality, the legend wins". 

Trivia 1: when it came to shooting the wonderful and highly studied (in all film universities) opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone had thought of having Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood play the 3 killers who wait for Harmonica at the station (and who are killed by him). This was to make it clear from the start that the film wanted to be the funeral of the old West. The first two enthusiastically accepted but Clint Eastwood refused. The scene was then interpreted by 3 character actors of the American western cinema. Reason for the refusal? Eastwood said that a "star" could not die after 10 minutes from the beginning of the film. Perhaps the "star" did not understand that if he had interpreted that scene his figure would have been elevated to the category of "myth". 

Trivia 2: Woody Strode, the actor who in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance plays Pompey, John Wayne's black assistant, is one of the 3 character actors of the American western cinema who interprets the aforementioned initial scene of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. 
Choice of the actor by chance by Sergio Leone? Hard to believe, hard.