Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy

With Christopher Frayling having already published a study of the Euro-western in general, Spaghetti Westerns and a biography of its foremost practitioner, Sergio Leone, Something to do with Death, the obvious question is whether this book will have anything new to offer.

The answer is a qualified yes, for while Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy has plenty of previously unseen posters, stills and production sketches, to give it a strong visual appeal – it is probably worth a look for these alone – much of the text comes across as little more than a retread of old material.

After a brief introduction by Estella Chung, associate curator of popular culture at the Autry National Centre's Museum of the American West, establishes we're dealing with Leone's West rather than his America, Frayling's opening chapter, "Sergio Leone and the Western" presents an overview of the director's life and western career.

This is followed by a chapter on "The Western Films of Sergio Leone", presenting short reviews of the Dollars Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West and My Name is Nobody along with a more useful scene-by-scene breakdown of Leone's "Citations of American Westerns in Once Upon a Time in the West".

The next section, a collection of interviews with Leone himself (dating from 1982); composer Ennio Morricone (1989); actors Clint Eastwood (1985), Lee Van Cleef (1978), Eli Wallach (2001/02) and Claudia Cardinale (2000); production designer Carlo Simi (1998); cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli (1998/2002) and writers Luciano Vincenzoni (1999/2000), Sergio Donati (1998/2000) and Bernardo Bertolucci (1988) is more substantial and worthwhile, with the interviewees painting an often contradictory and sometimes unflattering portrait of the man and his methods.

Shorter, but also worthwhile, is Frayling's translation of a 1983 piece by Leone, "To John Ford from One of His Pupils, with Love", written on the 10th anniversary of the American director's death.

The next chapter, "The Leone Legacy" examines the director's place in cinema history. While bringing things up to date from broadly comparable material in Frayling's earlier books via references to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill and Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico, again feels largely refried.

The afterword, "A Conversation with Martin Scorsese About Sergio Leone" sees the American director discuss his hate-love relationship with Leone's work and and his memories of meeting him in the 70s and 80s.

The book concludes with "Leone in America: A Scrapbook Collection", newspaper cuttings from the Dollars films assembled by the Grant brothers as teenagers in late 60s America.

Overall, this is a nice coffee table type book, lovely to look at but a touch insubstantial as an in-depth study of the director or the genre he will forever be associated with. It has its good and bad, but definitely isn't ugly.

It could, of course, be said that there are other books for these. True, but while one has no complaints about Something to do with Death, Frayling appears unwilling to revisit the spaghetti western as a whole to give filmmakers like Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima due attention or to respond to more recent research like Christopher Wagstaff's Forkful of Westerns. A case of too much work for too little reward and taking the easy option, perhaps?