A new book pays tribute to Sergio Leone, one of the 20th century’s most visionary film directors

It’s ironic that the director who rendered the United States better than anyone else was an Italian. But Sergio Leone, whose films include For a Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in America and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, was not a man constrained by geography, culture or language. For him, there was only cinema. Now, a comprehensive selection of Leone’s writing and interviews have been combined with previously unseen images, movie posters and sketches in a new book, Sergio Leone: By Himself. Edited by Leone’s biographer.

Christopher Frayling, the book shows how Leone’s obsession with the greats of cinema helped him develop a style that was both intimate and, well, cinematic. In movies like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Leone’s long, tense close-ups, wide shots and eruptions of action are weaved together with collaborator Enio Morricone’s unmistakable scores.

Film artwork for Leone’s ‘A fistful of dollars’

Leone’s obsession with the greats of cinema helped him develop a style that was both intimate and, well, cinematic

And while Leone found fame with his trio of ‘spaghetti westerns’, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, his purest cinematic visions came with two films that celebrated the home of cinema: 1968’s Once Upon a Time in The West, and Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

These are films that bring together the depth of the novel with the expanse of the greatest landscape photography and painting.

And which tell, via their decades-long character arcs, the story of the United States itself. As Leone said: “My America is a land suspended as if by magic between cinema and epic, between politics and literature; a very special zone of light ... Here, violence becomes almost an abstraction, and the hero is unaware of what Fate holds in store for him.”

Sergio Leone: By Himself is published by Reel Art Press, reelartpress.com