Of all the eccentric European filmmakers that exploded onto the international film scene in the 50s and 60s, few can compete with the bombastic, larger-than-life character of Sergio Leone. Born to a family deeply entrenched in the Italian film industry, his father Roberto Roberti (real name Vincenzo Leone) a famous silent film director, and his mother, actress Edvige Valcarengi, Leone grew up in the Trastavere neighborhood of Rome at a time when cinemas were as common as coffee shops. Obsessed with westerns from a young age, he soon found himself working in the film industry, doing odd jobs here and there, writing and co-writing various sword-and-sandal movies and worked his way up until he finally found a way to take a swing at directing with The Colossus of Rhodes.

Europe’s film industry was already booming in the 60s, but Leone had little interest in the kind of quirky, eccentric little films Godard, Truffaut and Fellini were putting out. He wanted it big! Explosive! Every frame tinged with excitement and action. Tough guys, mexican standoffs and the dusty, untamed west he had grown up with. Leone lived and breathed westerns, quoting and playacting entire scenes (in broken english) at the drop of a hat, and idolizing his favorite directors, John Ford and Sam Peckinpah, icons from his beloved America. But what had once been the greatest genre of them all, had by 1964 when the first of Leone’s five westerns was released, largely exhausted its tropes and mythology, and the audience had moved on.

Then A Fistful of Dollars was released.

It was a smash hit, earning more money than any other Italian film up until that point, and sweeping across the lands in ways that Star Wars would echo over a decade later. This was exciting cinema; unrelenting in its desire to deliver the kind of spectacle that Leone had always dreamed of. A kind of compressed, heightened version of the movies he grew up with, packed from start to finish with influences, homages and downright ripoffs of other westerns. Bosley Crowther in his New York Times review called it an “egregiously synthetic but engrossingly morbid, violent film,” and Christopher Frayling famously stated that they where like “opera in which the arias aren’t sung. They’re stared.”

Made for a pittance, and shot fast and dirty (and dubbed in much the same manner), it was the starting shot for a new sub-genre that would encompass hundreds of films and influence directors well into today, including as we shall see shortly, Lucas. This new type of western would soon come to be known as horse operas, or the more well known moniker: spaghetti westerns. As with the space opera term, it was initially meant as derogatory towards the melodrama aspects of the genre, but as the genre exploded in popularity, the people working in it, with Leone himself leading the charge to outshine his contemporaries, would become more and more inventive within its genre constraints, culminating in his final western opus, Once Upon a Time in the West.

A few years earlier, Leone had seen Akira Kurosawa’s latest film about a masterless samurai who wanders into a city split in two by warring clans, Yojimbo, and liked it so much that he took it, story, plot and characters, for his own movie. It was the far east, transposed into the wild west through a european viewpoint. Perhaps surprisingly, this wasn’t the first time Kurosawa had seen a film of his translated from medieval Japan to the American west of the 1800s. His 1954 samurai epic, perhaps the most successful film of his career, Seven Samurai (1954), about a rag-tag group of ronin who come together to protect a village of farmers from bandits, had been remade in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven, a film which garnered great success and spawned two sequels and a TV series. Leone undoubtedly knew all of this, as his first draft of what would become A Fistful of Dollars, was titled The Magnificent Stranger.

After Fistful was released and made the rounds, Leone even received a letter from Kurosawa himself, in which he congratulated him on the film, which he had enjoyed very much. Unfortunately, he said, it was his film. Leone did everything between pleading ignorance, claiming that he had adapted it from a friend’s play, and counter-attacking Kurosawa by pointing out that Yojimbo itself was an adaptation from Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, the 1929 crime story Red Harvest. Now this is where the rabbit hole deepens. First of all, even amongst Kurosawa scholars there is still some contention as to whether or not this is actually true. Kurosawa himself said that he was inspired by 1942 film The Glass Key (based as it happens on another Hammett novel), and there is some evidence to suggest that that indeed could be the case. And while there are similarities between Red Harvest and Yojimbo, they are not nearly as significant as they’re often made out to be.

Allen Barra digs a bit deeper in his 2005 piece celebratory piece for Red Harvest.

Several film critics over the years, beginning with Andrew Sarris, saw the parallels between the great American gangster novel and the great samurai film classic. Manny Farber stated flatly that “Yojimbo” was “a version of ‘Red Harvest’ — a bowdlerized version.” Not everyone was so sure. Donald Richie, perhaps the leading scholar on Kurosawa’s work, said in a 1996 interview, “I think the similarity in themes is just coincidence. Kurosawa has always acknowledged his sources.” Kurosawa was a reader of American crime fiction; his 1960 film “Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru,” or “The Bad Sleep Well,” was adapted from an Ed McBain novel. But some feel Kurosawa was not so open in acknowledging his sources; his 1949 film “The Quiet Duel” owes much to Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” David Desser, another Kurosawa scholar, in his book “The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa,” states categorically that “Yojimbo is an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s ‘Red Harvest’” and “the basic situation that motivates the plot in Yojimbo is adapted from Hammett’s ‘Red Harvest’.”

Martin Scorsese, whose encyclopedic film knowledge is nothing to sneeze at, thinks that in reality it was based off of Buchanan Rides Alone (1958) (and that Leone’s inspiration was the 1743 play Servant of Two Masters)[p201, 1]onceinitaly. Whatever the case, Leone eventually relented, and Kurosawa won the distribution rights of Fistful in Japan, and it is rumored, made more money from that, than he ever did from Yojimbo.

Almost humorously, many of the films released in the wake of the spaghetti western fever, the likes of Django and The Mercenary, often by friends of Leone, were themselves derived very much from the Fistful template of the mysterious, fast-on-the-trigger stranger caught between warring factions, complete with twists on the bells and whistles that made Fistful so memorable. And to Leone’s credit, he never turned around and pointed fingers at them; rather he worked even harder to make his next film so much bigger, deeper and more extravagant.

Red Harvest may or may not have influenced Yojimbo. It almost certainly didn’t influence Fistful though; Leone probably picked up the Red Harvest/Yojimbo connection from somewhere else, as he was won’t to do (in interviews he would often namedrop swanky books that his friends were reading, in an effort to perhaps compensate for his guilty love of pulp cinema, and to live up to the image the european film journalists were painting of him). Yojimbo would over the years turn out to provide an exceptionally solid foundation for retellings, having been remade in the Roger Corman-produced fantasy film The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984), Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985) as well as the prohibition era Last Man Standing (1996), bringing it almost full circle, Lucky Number Slevin (2006), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) and probably several others.

And bringing it back home in a sense, in the early 80s when LucasFilm went into production on the high profile film that would eventually be named Return of the Jedi, it was disguised on hats, t-shirts and signs throughout production as Blue Harvest: Horror Beyond Imagination.

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Leone loved America, and it was the subject of most of his films. But he loved not only the mythological west; the country’s entire creation fascinated him. “It is a great shame if ‘America’ is always to be left to the Americans,”[p24, 2]frayling he said, and went on to in many ways redefine American mythology, through his films.

It was a love borne out of the hundreds of westerns he had watched and re-watched, growing up in Trastevere. Westerns he would return to for ideas, scenes, aesthetics and characters for his own films. His extensive reuse of bits and pieces from existing westerns earned him the accolade of the first post-modernist director’ from the french philosopher Jean Beaudrillard[p492, 2]frayling, “the first to understand the hall of mirrors within the contemporary ’culture of quotations’”.

The success of Fistful of Dollars in 1964 was followed by For a Few Dollars More in 1965, and rounding off the trilogy of films in 1966, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, far and away the most ambitious of the trilogy, and a roaring audience success. It initially fared less well with the critics, but has since seen wide recognition as something of a masterpiece, including a tip of the hat from Quentin Tarantino who called it ‘the best directed film of all time’.

Unsurprisingly, since Tarantino himself of course in many ways is a direct product of Leone’s mix-n-match creative direction, pulling entire scenes, characters, actors and whatever else on hand into his films, across genres and time periods, creating in some instances a kind of genre collage that is really quite similar to what Lucas did with Star Wars, only considerably more self-conscious. Whether this is something Tarantino picked up from watching Leone films, or simply a result of his own devout love of film across a wide spectrum of genres, is hard to say. But it’s not unreasonable to guess that it probably had a good deal to say, and that much of the collage-like style Lucas brought to Star Wars probably also has its genesis in Leone’s films. Consider after all that not only was the dollars trilogy released in the US in rapid succession in 1967 — then as The Man With No Name Trilogy, a moniker invented by the american marketing department, Eastwood’s character not only had a name in the original films, he had a new one in each, Joe, Manco and Blondi — and this just as Lucas and his compatriots were at film school, and deeply engrossed in european films. Followed in 1968 by what is often thought of as the best film in Leone’s oeuvre, Once Upon a Time in the West. Christopher Frayling lays it out:

This can be seen as the first truly postmodernist movie, made by a cinéaste for cinéastes. It begins with High Noon and The Iron Horse, and moves on to Shane, Pursued and The Searchers. The characters in the early sequences include John Ford’s statuesque black actor Woody Strode, the wall-eyed heavy of countless 1950s Westerns, Jack Elam, and a man playing a harmonica - like Silent Tongue in Run of the Arrow or, as Leone put it, ‘Bronson’s harmonica is also Johnny’s guitar’. Once Henry Fonda has appeared on the scene - ’the glacial Fonda in my film is the legitimate son of the intuition which John Ford brought to Ford Apache’ - and Jill has taken her buggy-ride through Monument Valley, the middle sequences refer to Winchester ’73 (the trading post), Shane again (the funeral), Johnny Guitar (the wooden model of the railroad), and Warlock (Cheyenne’s search for a mother). The character of crippled railroad baron Mr Morton is derived from a succession of wheelchair-confined patriarchs who try to run their landholdings with a rod of iron in 1940s and 1950s Westerns. The debate about business and gunplay nods in the direction of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, while Jill’s preparation for her role as water-bearer resembles the equivalent scene in Man Without a Star, the auction refers to Liberty Valance and Frank’s cautious walk down the Flagstone street recalls Rio Bravo. Mr Morton’s death is from Western Union, Cheyenne’s conversation about Jill being patted on the behind is from Jubal, Harmonica whittling on a piece of wood is from The Magnificent Seven and the final duel is edited just like the last reel of The Last Sunset. The ending comes from the ‘end of track’ in John Ford’s The Iron Horse. All in all, there were about thirty references to other Hollywood Westerns - confirmed by at least one of the participants in the pre-production meetings. [p266, 2]frayling

Once Upon a Time was again met with resistance from the critics, most of whom found the film long-winded, too self-conscious and at times overly sadistic in its reversals of Hollywood stables. The up and coming generation of filmmakers, Lucas’s peers, however saw it differently. Here was a film that turn the world on its head, confronted the conventional American mythology, and blew it away. John Boorman, director of Deliverance and Excalibur (and Zardoz) said:

“Sergio Leone’s westerns revitalized the form because he consciously reverted to mythic stories, making the texture and detail real, but ruthlessly shearing away the recent accretions of the ‘real’ West and its psychological motivations. Unfortunately this was not understood in Hollywood… In Once Upon a Time in the West, the Western reaches its apotheosis. Leone’s title is a declaration of intent and also his gift to America of its lost fairy stories. This is the kind of masterpiece that can occur outside trends and fashion. Is is both the greatest and the last Western.”[p22–23, 3]boorman

That notion, that it was the greatest and the last western, because it so dissected and decimated the genre; like an explosion blasting the life out of a fire, leaving no ground left for the rest of the spaghetti westerns to cling to, arguably holds even today. Wim Wenders noted in 1969, that “This one is the very end, the end of a craft”[p300, 2]frayling. The Western had one great, brief renaissance, and has gone to grounds and rarely rears its head in any noticeable manner. A kind of role reversal happened when Star Wars came out, when it so dominated the box office and the pop culture image of the time, that it almost instantaneously derailed the revolutionary New Hollywood movement and its personal films, and put the studio system back on track, where it has remained ever since.

Leone brought the Western back from the dead, and then killed the genre; Lucas helped bring New Hollywood to life, and then killed it.

Meanwhile, if anyone helped Once Upon a Time in the West make out at the box office, it was the student population. It was after all in a sense a film student’s wet dream. At once a sweeping, yet intellectual fairytale, it was also a cinematographic marvel, brimming with great performances and an impeccable attention to detail in everything from set and costume design to the soundtrack, which was at once experimental, yet harking back to the Western roots. And on top of that, was packed with film references and reversals, recalling the cinema of his youth, in the same way that the films of Lucas, De Palma, Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and the rest of the brat pack would go on to in the years following.

His cinema was also one of nostalgia, of taking films that he had seen, and the whole genre of the western, and reliving it, but transforming it in the process. Scorsese recalls: "And I remember him telling me - well, he said this a number of times - he used to say that the title should really have been There Was Once a Certain Type of Cinema rather than Once Upon a Time in America.” [p205, 1]onceinitaly

Only circumstantial evidence is available to support the argument that Leone’s westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West in particular, inspired the movie brats to approach their works in much the same manner as he had done — with Lucas at the forefront of course, but given the timing and the adoption of this post-modernist approach to film making, it seems not only possible, but most plausible. Aside from the evidence directly related to Star Wars, which we will come to shortly, it’s worth noting that John Milius for instance on several occasions has included Leone in his list of most influential directors (and has appeared on various releases, talking about Leone and his work). He was even slated to write Once Upon a Time in America for Leone, who had been impressed by his 1973 film Dillinger:

[Leone:] “He came to pick us up, to drive us to dinner at his place. We travelled in his open car. As we approached his house, I heard the music from all my films playing in the sky. He had put powerful loudspeakers around his house which overlooked the hill. The sound echoed everywhere.” … Milius enthused about his years at the University of Southern California film school, where he, and classmates like George Lucas, ‘took apart all Leone’s films, shot by shot’. Then, the summit of Milius’s ambition had been to spend his life writing and directing ‘B’ Westerns. The generation of film-makers soon to be dubbed ‘the movie brats’ (Milius, Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, Carpenter and Scorsese) had all admired Leone’s Westerns, and they shared his admiration for old masters, and his disappointment with the seeming inability of contemporary Hollywood to create magic as it used to. … [They] identified with his use of film language and his unfashionably firm belief in the possibilities of cinema. … They chatted about Ford and Kurosawa (Milius’s favorite directors).[p398, 2]frayling

Leone tried for several years to get the rights for the book The Hoods, which formed the basis of his story for Once Upon a Time in America, and during that time formed quite a friendship with Milius, but ultimately the timing never clicked.

Another of the movie brats who ended up a great proponent of Leone’s was Martin Scorsese, about whom Leone would later tell Cahiers du Cinema, “I’m good friends with him. He said he sees Once Upon A Time In The West once per week”[4]