Anna Daniels
Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns were progressive pastiche. His “Man with No Name” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood expressed a wry distrust of the authoritative, cinematic history laid down by Ford and his cohorts. Eastwood played a mercenary in the first movie, but after working from Akira Kurosawa’s ronin-of-the-people model on “A Fistful of Dollars,” the director veered off in a viciously cynical direction with his next two movies. Then came “Once Upon a Time in America.” Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” is widely cited as the most important revisionist Western coming out of the Ford-driven classical era, but Leone’s elegiac saga is, aesthetically and emotionally, the film that fed off the disillusionment of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to create a bold new grammar for the nearly irrelevant genre.
Leone spoke to the importance of Ford’s final masterpiece prior to his untimely death in 1989 at the age of 60.
“The Ford film I like most of all — because we are getting nearer to shared values — is also the least sentimental, ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.’ We certainly watched that when we were preparing ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’ Why? Because Ford finally, at the age of almost 65, finally understood what pessimism is all about. In fact, with that film Ford succeeded in eating up all his previous words about the West — the entire discourse he had been promoting from the very beginning of his career. Because ‘Liberty Valance’ shows the conflict between political forces and the single, solitary hero of the West … He loved the West and with that film at last he understood it.”
Written by: Slash
