Accuracy of Sergio Leone\'s \'Man

¶ … ACCURACY OF SERGIO LEONE'S

'MAN WITH NO NAME' TRILOGY

In 1939, director John Ford brought to the screen one of the most enduring and influential films of the 20th century -- Stagecoach, starring John Wayne as Ringo, the proverbial Western outlaw with a well-concealed heart of gold beneath a rather rough cowboy exterior. Although Stagecoach was by no means the first film to portray the American West as a place of mysterious beauty filled with characters both good and bad, it did introduce American movies audiences to the cinematic magic of the Western genre which some seventy years later continues to be exploited by U.S. And foreign filmmakers alike. However, in the early 1960's, the American Western was transformed by a new paradigm, created by a little-known Italian film director named Sergio Leone who single-handedly re-stylized and re-invented the Western genre with three so-called "Spaghetti Westerns" -- A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), starring Clint Eastwood as the enigmatic 'Man With No Name,' a cold-blooded, laconic bounty hunter and Leone's cinematic icon of the American anti-hero.

Although much has been written by scholars and film historians concerning Leone's 'Man With No Name' trilogy over the last forty-odd years, mostly centered on the usual trappings of cinematic extrapolation related to direction, cinematography, production values, and the artistic rendering of character, literary themes, motifs, and genre iconography, little has been done related to the historical accuracy of these three films. As Daniel Edwards relates, Leone via his "Spaghetti Westerns" with Eastwood in the title role went to great lengths to make his

Spanish locations (all three of the films were shot in Spain) "look as much like the American-Mexican geographical region as possible," yet due to Leone's "expansive wide-screen vistas," his trilogy landscapes possess a "slightly alien feel, thus creating a setting that appears to be European yet does not look American either" ("Sergio Leone," Internet). In other words, Leone created a surrealistic diorama overflowing with American Western iconography that resembles the historical background of the "real" American West, injected with familiar American cinematic imagery related to costumes, physical attributes, architecture, transportation devices, weaponry and even geophysical patterns, such as deserts, wide-open plains, mountains, and typical urban settings reminiscent of an American Western town.