Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2012 March 23 • Friday

Christopher Frayling's Sergio Leone: Something To Do with Death is one of the best film books I've ever read. It combines Leone's life story with a meticulous examination of his films and influences. It's the sort of book that is so thoroughly researched and solidly constructed that it makes most other biographies I've read look slapdash by comparison. (Some of them really are slapdash, of course.)

There's more about the movies than the man and while Frayling is certainly sympathetic to Leone, as well as being a great admirer of his work, Leone himself comes across as alternatingly childlike and childish.

Frayling was one of the first critics to take Leone's movies seriously—Graham Greene was another—and he is excellent on the films, pointing out the recurring theme of circularity and suggesting that at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood rides off to the town in A Fistful of Dollars, thus beginning the trilogy again. (This would explain why Clint Eastwood finds, in the third film, the poncho that he wears in the first two, something that has always puzzled me.)

Frayling writes extremely well about Ennio Morricone's music also. And I was startled to learn that it took Leone so long to realize Once Upon a Time in America that Morricone had composed the score seven years before shooting began!

This leads to a touching comment from Morricone regarding Leone's unrealized idea for a movie about the siege of Leningrad. Leone spent the last years of his life working toward this goal, which would presumably have satisfied his longstanding dream of remaking Gone With the Wind. Morricone notes that for the first time in their long relationship, they didn't discuss the score while Leone was trying to get the movie off the ground, and this was probably because Leone didn't believe he would live to make Leningrad.

Leone died quickly and quietly, at the age of 60, while watching I Want To Live! on television.

Frayling's original manuscript of this book was apparently more than half a million words long. He mentions, in an introduction to this 2012 edition—the first edition was published in 2000 and was J. G. Ballard's "book of the year"—that he might be tempted to release his original "director's cut" of the book.

I hope he does. It would be very appropriate, very much in the spirit of Leone.

And it might explain why Robert Mitchum's name is in the index of this book but nowhere else.