Home › Sergio Leone, ranked.
Sergio Leone made six feature films and every one of them is essential. He invented the spaghetti western as a genre, transformed Clint Eastwood into an international star, created one of the most fruitful creative partnerships in film history with composer Ennio Morricone, and in Once Upon a Time in America made one of the great American crime films — despite being Italian, working with an American cast, shooting partly in New York and partly in Rome.
Three hours. Henry Fonda cast against type as Frank, the most cold-blooded killer in Leone's filmography. Charles Bronson as Harmonica, a man whose motivation is gradually revealed. Jason Robards as Cheyenne. Claudia Cardinale as Jill McBain. Leone and Morricone made their masterpiece — a film about the end of the frontier, about the replacement of the outlaw by capitalism, about the way the past catches up with the present. The opening sequence alone, twelve minutes of pure cinema without dialogue, is one of the great openings in film history.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach as three men competing for a buried cache of Confederate gold during the Civil War. The most formally virtuosic of the Dollar Trilogy films — the cemetery finale, the three-way standoff, the intercut of the battle with the three men watching from a hillside. Morricone's score is one of the most imitated in cinema history.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
Advertisement
Van Cleef and Eastwood as competing bounty hunters going after the same man. The most plot-driven of the trilogy and the most emotionally direct. The pocket watch that links Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer to the villain is one of the great reveal mechanisms in Leone's work.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
Leone's American film. Four hours in the American cut, which is the only version worth watching. Robert De Niro and James Woods as Jewish gangsters in New York from the 1920s to the 1960s, told in a non-linear structure built around memory, nostalgia, and the question of betrayal. The most melancholy film Leone made.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
Leone remade Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo in Spain with Clint Eastwood and invented a genre. The Man with No Name. The poncho. The cigar. The film is rougher than the two that follow it but the template is already complete.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) is his masterpiece. The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is his most beloved.
Leone did not speak English well. He communicated with his actors through interpreters and through gesture, which some actors found frustrating and others found liberating.
Spaghetti westerns are Western films made by Italian directors, primarily in Spain and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Leone's Dollar Trilogy essentially invented the genre.