Product Description

This biography explores the little-known private life of one of Hollwood's cult directors, Sergio Leone. It demonstrates how Leone made movies, but how - coming from a film background - films also made him. With testimony from his friends and colleagues, it is rich in anecdotes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123546 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 570 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
They were "ersatz Westerns" to American critics. Umberto Eco compared them to the "godless nostalgia" of Renaissance writing, and the director himself described them as about "picaresque people placed in epic situations". The films of Sergio Leone have inspired generations of directors, from Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (whose film Star Wars was effectively a Western in space) and John Carpenter to Quentin Tarantino. Christopher Frayling certainly needs no convincing of the man's talent. Already the author of Spaghetti Westerns, his first full-length biography is a cinéaste's delight, a detailed and rewarding survey of the career of the man of whom Bernardo Bertolucci said, "I like the way he filmed horses' arses".

Leone was born into film: his father directed the first Italian Western in 1913 and his mother was an actress. Beset by a formative tangle of influences, such as Neapolitan marionette shows and a love of John Ford and Charlie Chaplin, he moved from "toga flicks" to the landscape of his dreams, the American mid-West (actually Almeria in Spain). The 1960s Dollars trilogy, with their fledgling star Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name (actually Joe in the first, then Blondie) and their lingering camerawork allied to Ennio Morricone's haunting scores, defined a genre from which he fought to escape. Once Upon the Time in the West followed, with its dizzying stillness but there would be a decade of relative inertia before the epic Once Upon a Time in America, the gangster film he reputedly turned down The Godfather to direct. The film is a mosaic of reference to film noir and America, the genre and country that continued to inform and delight him. Frayling's cultured prose focuses less on the man than the movie-maker, yet his study, which also doubles as a general history of Italian cinema, splendidly feeds off the numerous legends and bitching that sprung up around the history of Leone's productions. Drawing on conversations with the director himself before his death in 1989, as well as dialogues with old acquaintances--and, most essentially, a first-class knowledge of the films themselves--Frayling has written a comprehensive homage to one of the trademark directors of 20th-century cinema. --David Vincent

The Sunday Telegraph
"Luxuriously illustrated...Sir Christopher Frayling is an expert in the genre"

Customer Reviews

Fine and detailed account of Leone and his films
The enormous strength of this book for me is Frayling's succinct and detailed analysis of Leones films. He takes key scenes from all of Leones films backing them up with excellent anecdotes, to point out either a technical point to Leones directing, or as an excuse to show Leone's emotional sometimes bullying and overbearing manner when directing. The biography does get a little too bogged down in minor detail sometimes. This can be distracting but its better to be slightly over detailed than under detailed in a biography. The only other minor quibble I would have with the book is the start of it, which confusingly starts with Leone as a young teenager or so, before going back to when he was born. Although this shift in time was a common gimmick in Leone's films, Frayling's idea although nice in theory, disjoints the start of the book to no great purpose and does become a minor irritation. On the otherhand the anecdotes Frayling uses are of a superb quality, and are very well used to reflect different aspects of Leones character. This book will I suspect be a key work for those interested in spaghetti westerns and the making of them. It will also be a marvellous insight into the background of the film 'once upon a time in America'. A film that is a far deeper and more powerful experience than the Godfather or 'Goodfellas', rightly acknowledged classics of the 'gangster' genre.

Wonderful
Prof. Frayling has written the first - and most likely definitive - account of Leone's life. It is everything that a fan could want, casting light on the conception and gestation of his films and offering generous insight into them.

This is no hagiography; Frayling (very gently) deflates the myth that Leone created about himself to produce a book which informs, enlightens and entertains.

It goes without saying that this is an essential purchase for anyone who loves Spaghetti Westerns and the work of Il Maestro.

Definitive Biography But....
This is the definitive Leone biography. Meticulously researched with access to the key players either directly or through secondary sources. Particularly worthy of mention is the way the author brings the subject back to life by weaving quotes from Leone skilfully into the narrative. This book has the goods on the movies, how they were made and the source material that inspired them. However, and this is the only serious quibble with this book, one wonders if it is necessary to go into such detail regarding the plot outline particularly of Once Upon A Time In America which is repeated a couple of times through the book. Perhaps the author wishes to convey the agonizing lengths to which Leone had to go to bring this epic project into being but this over-detailing tends to interrupt the flow of an otherwise well paced narrative and leave one with a lingering suspicion that this is so much padding. However, this quibble aside this book is the definitive Sergio Leone biography hardly likely to be surpassed. Would love to see a second edition minus the redundant information.