PART 11
Throughout his first Western, “A Fistful of Dollars”, Leone has his cowboys taking potshots at a knights rusty suit of armour as shooting practice. It seems incongruous but it sets the mood for his trilogy which will be an ironic potshot critique of the Western genre as he reappraises the American frontier and its cowboys. The suit of armour is a figure of mockery for the cowboy gangs, but it’s also a sheet of metal armour that Clint Eastwood wears under his American poncho that saves him in the final shootout where it gives him the appearance of invincible supernatural powers. Underneath the poncho he is a knight fighting for Right and Order in a boisterous, disorderly, reckless, male dominated world. This deliberate analogy between cowboy and knight continues in “For a Few Dollars More” where we have regular close ups of his wrist gauntlet, and in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” where we have constant close ups of his spurs.
In contrast to the riotous cowboy gangs, Clint Eastwoods cowboy/knight is reined in with restraint, ever watchful, balancing his need for money with his duty to the Good. He remains enigmatic, nameless and strangely laconic, more a force than an individual. He arrives from nowhere, engages in battle and then moves on.”The Heart” he says, “dont forget the heart” to the cowboys who are shooting at him, and when he lifts his poncho to reveal his armour the bullet holes form the shape of a heart. It’s the heart that matters in this battle. The evil Frank of “Once upon a time in the West” is shot through the heart, literally and metaphorically. His role weakens when his emotions are awakened by Harmonica and Jill. This is the cowboy/knight of storyland, not the campfire cowboy of the American ranch.
With their distorted images, grotesque violence and lyrical interludes, these Westerns are Otherworldly, hallucinatory. The characters have non specific generic names like “Blondie, old man, boy, Harmonica, Good, Bad, Ugly”, not appearing as individuals but as archetypes. Places are also generic; the station, the family ranch, the town, the wasteland, the hostelry where wayfarers gather. Camera angles are oblique causing distortion. Moments of extreme brutality are accompanied by intense lyricism, so in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” the torture scenes are cut and pasted with the incongruous beauty of a male choir of prisoners singing harmoniously like angels. These juxtaposed extremes are part of Leone’s cinematic style, awakening the audience to fresh insights. Likewise when the Ugly runs through the graveyard it is beautifully choreographed like ballet, not the fumblings of a materialistic thief. Our expectations are constantly being challenged in a world that is surreal, dreamlike with shifting boundaries.
Most perplexing is the climax of these films where men face their final showdown with Clint Eastwood. It usually takes place in a mandala like circle with participants standing on the circumference .In “For a few Dollars More” two characters face each other, waiting until the third character, Eastwood, appears.”Now we start” says Eastwood, and they begin to move round the circumference vying for position and changing places until Eastwood stands firmly in the middle. The confrontation is about wronging a woman and avenging her honour. Obsession for this same woman motivates both the man of evil (rapist) and the man of good (brother). Eastwood mediates between them like a referee in a dual, a difficult role because in this world no one is entirely Good or Evil. It’s all mixed up. In “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” three men are again positioned on the edge of a circle, and again Eastwood is in control by removing the bullets from one man’s gun to ensure the right result. It’s a triello, a three way duel, relating to a tripology that goes back as far as human expression, to the triple spiral engraved inside Newgrange, Ireland, 4000BC. The camera focus is on the eyes judging each other because the eyes are the “window of the soul” and this is soul drama.
These geometric formations are choreographed in sharp contrast to the chaotic brutality of the frontier world. It’s more like theatre with stage actors like Jason Robarts and Gabriele Ferzetti. Here something is being put in order, the law and order of universal principles. This is not the manmade laws of civilization (towns and sheriffs etc are periphery).These are cosmic laws in which man is merely playing his part in a drama of the Soul. The scene moves symmetrically with the music in crescendo towards a unifying moment with huge close ups of a face or eyes (microcosm) framing landscape vistas that seem to stretch on forever (Macrocosm).It is so unnatural and unnerving that it compels our attention. Then the gun fires. It’s no ordinary gun.
The gun is an image of power linked to consciousness, and maybe that’s why gunlaws have such emotional significance. The gun shot makes some characters unconscious by killing them, but it also wakes others up with its explosive discharge, so it awakens or puts to sleep forever. It takes away our consciousness if it kills us, but it makes the gunman more conscious of his own power. Beyond its use as a firearm its significance is in how the gunshot controls consciousness because the empowerment of the gun is in its ability to alter consciousness. In these Westerns the gunshot takes the evil character to a moment of illumination or clarity, a moment of self-awareness or truth that changes everything and restores order. As they face death and lose consciousness they see things as they really are and are released. Full clarity can only occur at the moment of death when Consciousness meets the Unconconsious, and Harmonica bides his time for the right moment. There is no triumphalism, just acceptance as each plays their part and leaves the stage. (“All the worlds a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, says Jaques in As You Like It”). These climactic moments are the raison d’etre.”I always enclose the final sequence, the denouement of my films, within the confines of a circle, the arena of life, the moment of Truth at the moment of death”, says Leone.
In this menacing male world, women and children scurry about and seem to get in the way. The men seldom know how to deal with them. Often two men are in contention for the same woman which starts the conflict. Often it’s the same child character appearing in different films, as sometimes the same actor is playing different characters in different films (Lee van Cleef). The usual continuity doesn’t seem important. Womens sexuality confines them to the extremes of mother or prostitute, archetypes with strange powers to fascinate or repel. It’s the cruelly parted mother and child Eastwood defends and re-unites in “Fistful of Dollars”, restoring order.
Music and Laughter act as counterpoints for attention. A childs playful laughter often interrupts scenes of brutality, yet that same laughter in adult cowboys seems maniacal. And winding through all the films is powerful soul music that is both alluring and disturbing; the locket melody that activates memory in “For a few dollars more”, the harmonica music that works on the memory of Frank in “Once Upon a Time in the West”, the lyrical choir singing in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as the men remember their own torture, the whistling clip clopping music of “Fistful of Dollars”, the banshee soprano of Edda dell’Orso. Music and memory are connected, triggering each other.”It’s an element of the action”, says Leone,” with harmonies and counterpoints; lyrical, humourous, tragic, baroque.” This music enraptures, draws us in to a place that is both perilous and magical, and ultimately transforming, like the music of Ariel in “The Tempest”, another soul drama. This music was never background but played on set during filming. (Ariel is an Arabian gazelle as depicted on the urn found in The Alhambra and an important image in sufi psychology. The gazelle figures prominently in Arthurian Romances too).
So Leones Trilogy gropes towards the realisation of its own form and it’s unclear to what extent he was aware of this process, or if that’s even necessary. The Trilogy is ultimately outward, physical and ironic...qualities that made it accessible to an audience. ”One upon a Time in the West” took him one step further into regions which were inaccessible to most of the audience. We are no longer moving towards a soul drama, we are in it, immediately, from scene one. It’s internal, mythical and intense. The tone is epic from storyland, and hence its title.
The opening sequence is a surreal dream landscape with a different sense of perspective and time, using a mannered contrast of light and shadow. The screen opens onto a door that opens to show a man standing in silhouette. The notice says “Keep Out” but the men are already in. The camera shows us shadowed portals through which we see the bright colours of a desert or rail track but we are not sure if we are looking out onto a real place or looking in to something played on a stage or screen. We are being disorientated.
In this place the characters move slowly and laboriously as if in a trance. For ages we follow the natural but amplified sounds of a fly trapped in a gun barrel, of water dripping on a hat, of a squeaking windmill. The pastoral buzz of the fly transforms into the loud screech of the wake-up train. We are at a meeting place in the middle of a featureless nowhere, with three men waiting for another. When the other arrives it is not a man but a musical melody, and when we do meet him he is still not a man. He has the eyes and voice of the dead, impenetrable and fathomless, a spirit figure, ”just a man” he says” of an ancient race”. Cheyenne says, “people like that have something inside to do with death...he’s someone you’d remember”. Harmonica haunts the film with his presence and his music which seems to affect everyone. As a force for Good he confronts this evil world of bullying cowboys, he enables the town to be built around Jill when he unites with Cheyenne to protect the McBain dream of a future, and he terminates the stifling control of Frank. But he doesn’t form relationships or act like a living person.
Harmonica stalks Frank, the evil one, in a way that is more than revenge, creeping up on him imperceptibly, waiting for the right moment to attack, taking his time, showing no emotion. His music curls round the film with a nagging reminder of past deeds in flashback, something at first out of focus, a memory gradually clearing until it becomes totally defined only at the moment of Frank’s death. He is creeping up like Frank‘s conscience, an untarnished childlike element that Frank released. So Harmonica takes the role of his conscience, a natural law and regulation of the psyche, something that “puts things right” from within. In remembering Harmonica, Frank faces and awakens his own conscience. Its conscience that brings Frank to an awareness of what he has done as he decides to face Harmonica himself without coercion, surrendering by choice, entering the arena, circling, each acknowledging the other. As Frank admits, “Morton says I could never have been a business man like him, it wouldn’t have bothered him knowing you were around”. Frank is bothered, and that’s what saves him from himself.
Harmonica is of the soul. He rarely speaks and when he does its often poetry, the language of the soul (“when you hear a strange sound/drop to the ground”).Like Parsifal in the Grail stories, Frank has to get his question right; “Who are you?”( the Grail question is “What ails you?”). But the time isn’t right and Harmonica replies by reminding Frank of all the names of the people he has killed, a generic identity. Something wakes up in Frank but it isn’t enough. The memories work away at him until he is in the right frame of Mind, “Nothing matters now, not the land, the money or the woman. I came to see you; Who are you?” he says.”Only at the point of death”, is the reply. “I know” says Frank and he is now ready as he looks into the largest close-up of a pair of eyes ever shown in cinema as if we are entering into them. (This soul to soul look is known as The Gaze of consciousness in sufi psychology).
The gun fires into Frank’s heart.”Who are you?” asks Frank again. The time is right and the memory clears. In full clarity the musical instrument Frank put into a child’s mouth whilst torturing his brother is put back into the dying Frank’s mouth to sound its final discord (“the false notes”) before the unified moment of death and silence. It’s a shared memory, a moment of connection between two who have been set at variance as extremes. These extremes are not real but mental constructs. There is good in Frank as there is menace in Harmonica. This is the moment we look through the mirage and see things as they really are. In re-connecting, order is restored, revenge fulfilled, and the conscience of a killer has been awakened. Harmonica brings harmony, unity.
Music has always been part of an ordered universe, (see Plato, music of the spheres).Seeing his actions clearly for the first time and realising their consequences, Frank enters the Hell of his own making. The flashback of memory condemns him but also saves him, depending on viewpoint. In the Self, this personal awakening of conscience is the rudiments of Justice in Society.
The first two scenes of this Western are beautifully synchronised to set the stage for this soul drama. As Harmonica, a force for Good steps into the opening scene of intimidation, so Frank, a force for Evil, steps into the second scene of idyllic family life. Each disturbs and disorientates by killing everyone. This is who they are but things are out of Order. Like the station scene, the “Sweetwater” scene is full of amplified natural sound and music, the cicadas clicking, Marie singing “Danny boy”, with similar moments of ominous silence. There are birds in a cage in scene 1 and birds being shot in scene 2, and the bird/flying has been a traditional symbol of the soul since the Ba hieroglyph of Ancient Egypt, which is why the imagery around the soulless businessman Morton is that of a snail leaving slime.
The station and the ranch are both isolated ,fragile signs of civilization in a hostile wasteland. So the two worlds of Good and Evil are presented to us through the archetypal figures of Harmonica and Frank. With eyes that express no human emotion, they are the same though opposite. It’s also deliberately disconcerting that the good man appears sinister and the bad man is played so gracefully by the usually heroic Henry Fonda. We realise this is a dangerous world where appearances are deceptive and truth difficult to judge. Its not the familiar black/white world of the old Hollywood Westerns. They have already passed by those familiar Monument Valley landmarks of John Ford Westerns so carefully inserted by Leone, riding on towards something else less easily defined and more dangerous, Leone’s own “Heart of Darkness”. Umberto Eco called it “the sublime cinema of frozen archetypes”.
In this world, evil is not absolute, but about imbalance; the drug induced psychosis of Indio, the extravagances of the “crazy Irish widower McBain”, the business obsessions of Morton, the rantings of Tuco, the inhumanity of Frank or Colonel Mortimer, (Morton and Mortimer are names derived from Mors, French for death). Leone said “I have created a new style of Western with picaresque people from a Spanish tradition placed in epic situations.” This place is nowhere and everywhere like the soul, beyond human morality or thought, amoral.
Into this sterile, deathly male dominated landscape of extremes steps a woman called Jill. It could be any old Jill of the “jack and jill” variety, or even jillaroo, although it’s actually Claudia Cardinale! What matters is that this woman is a numinous fusion of prostitute and wife (every man’s dream perhaps!).As a whore from New Orleans, she looks like a Goddess and enchants everyone, “the biggest whore and finest woman, reminds me of my mother, a remarkable woman” says Cheyenne. She arrives at Flagstone like a princess out of a storybook with a stagecoach drawn by white horses to cross her path. She is stunningly exotic in her oriental arabesque paisley shawl, a figure from the East. She even brings out the tenderness in Frank in an encounter that softens him, (one of cinema’s most tender love scenes involving evil). Harmonica serves Jill in another way by making her dreams come true. She comes to a motherless McBain family to make it whole again, bringing everything to life, awakening the men.
In this role she carries the water, literally and metaphorically. When she boils the water for Cheyenne’s coffee it reminds him of his mother. “Get me some water from the well”, says Harmonica. She is the Lady of the Well (not Lancelot’s Lady of the Lake this time!) who controls the water supply that gives life to a new town and to the men. So she brings wealth and well being, a creative energy that is vital and free flowing. With this water she rejuvenates those around her, and in the final scene we see her carrying water out to refresh the men who are building the railroad. With this water she constantly purifies herself too, “a tub of water for filthy memories”. The Well, which was the opening scene of a senseless massacre destroying people, becomes the closing scene of meaningful rejuvenation bringing people together. As generic woman, she is the creative lifeforce of the film. She represents Hope for a future and this new town will grow around her, a better civilization.
Water and women are traditionally connected, the star of hope figure in the Tarot who is pouring water, the female figure of Temperance or water carrier (Aquarius), the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian Romances who holds the power of Excalibur, or Jung’s anima in touch with the waters of the unconscious. With each contact Jill makes the men more conscious and alive. Two men join forces to further their self-interest against her; the physically crippled businessman Morton, and the emotionally crippled gunman, Frank. Their weapons are guns and money, “the only weapon that can stop that (gun) is this (money)”, says Morton. On the other side, two men join forces altruistically to empower her; the physically wounded Cheyenne and the emotionally wounded Harmonica (wounds are important in the knight stories too). Like the old knights, their weapon is the service of love; love of a brother slaughtered, love of a woman, love of justice (Justice is traditionally portrayed as a woman holding the scales of balance). Love motivates them beyond money and guns. It’s a power Frank and Morton fail to recognise in their deathly, cut-off existence, though Frank does begin to understand this when he encounters Jill, ”now I understand the men of Orleans..” he says.
Water is a recurring motif in all four Westerns. There is a long discussion about water between Jill and the owner of the hostelry on the way to Sweetwater, a ranch named after its water source. In “Fistful of Dollars” one of the characters dies grasping towards a puddle of water in a parched land. Morton is desperate to see the Pacific Ocean, has dreams about hearing it, staring at a painting of waves. His power relies on a steam engine that is dependent on water. He dies tragically, reaching out for a puddle of water, listening to the sounds of the sea as it envelops him in death, losing consciousness to the waters of the unconscious in that unifying moment when Consciousness and the unconscious meet.
Serge Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” is the culmination of a Trilogy that tells the story of civilization in the New World of the American West through a drama of the soul, ending in a new development with a woman at the centre, a new dynamic based on the right order of things with everything in its place. That is its hope and optimism. The feminine is restored to its rightful place in society, as Ibn Arabi restored it to Islamic Spain, as the knight stories restored it to misogynist Europe, as Jung restored it to modern psychology, so Leone restored it to the cowboy’s Western. In each context, these men realised that the feminine is not a threat to male survival, but central to it. However encrypted, the motifs/imagery of this soul drama are always the same and we find our way by their signs. The location is always a frontier, a place that is also a state of Mind.
No doubt Leone chose to make these films in Spain for practical reasons because it was cheap and looked like the American West. After all, these are “Dollar” films about bounty hunters and ruthless businessmen and the accumulation of money and power in a system that would lead to capitalism. But he also seems to have recognised other links with this location, its knight stories and cowboys.
As an alienated, introverted boy, he escaped into Hollywood films, and also Sicilian puppet shows such as one based on “the Song Of Roland”, a medieval French epic belonging to this mystical tradition of knight stories. It strengthened his Imagination. He says he modelled the clownish Cheyenne and Tuco on figures from these puppet shows, clown figures reminiscent of the trickster Nasrudin, an anarchic character used by sufi storytellers to entertain and raise awareness, a character known to the medieval Saracen culture of Sicily, and surviving in its theatre. So as a child, Leone was already developing his Imagination with these stories.
These knight stories teach the importance of recognition, that what the Self needs comes to you in forms you have to recognise, sent up from the unconscious to the conscious in an encounter. Once recognised, it energises the Self to a process of discovery, like the process of individuation developed as a therapeutic method by Jung. Leone was discovering himself through his Imagination, an imagination that created his Westerns. It was in him, however conscious, as Jungian therapy draws from the image within.
Bertolucci, who worked with Leone on “Once upon a time in the west” says “he was like a child playing cowboys with access to his imagination”, with the Image central to his work as a director, more important than dialogue, with Art the greater influence, a passion he shared with Henry Fonda, particularly for the ominous visual illusions of Chirico. So childhood toys are a visible motif in his Westerns; toy cowboys, toy houses, toy trains, the knight chess piece on Morton’s desk. Ibn Arabi considers the “Active Imagination” as the source of all understanding, so maybe that is the source of Leones work more than anything he found outside himself? ”When I started my first Western I had to have a psychological reason in myself-to make a fable for adults, a fairytale”, he says, once upon a time.....
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Reference:
1)”The Mystical Philosophy of Ibn Masarra and his Followers” By Asin Palacios. (Very rare, years ago I accessed it through British Lending Library Archive, and even then it was a facsimile).
2)”Serge Leone: Something to do with Death” by Christopher Frayling
3) The works of Ibn Arabi, “Bezels of wisdom” etc.
4) “The Origin and Nature of Consciousness” by Erich Neumann, Jungian Depth Analysist, Tel Aviv.
5) For photos of Tabernas Desert landscape of Spain see
6) For then and now comparison photos of “Once Upon a Time in the West” see
7) On the influence of Kurosawa Leone says, “This obsession with moving fast in American Cinema- accelerated dialogue-I found it artificial. The sense of pondering a reply only happened in Japanese cinema. I wanted to achieve this, to make movement seem like caresses...”
