Mcclain, Sergio Leone & the Death of the Western
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Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the “Death of the Western” in American Film Criticism william mcclain I am showing the Old West as it really was . Americans treat westerns with too much rhetoric. —Sergio Leone (qtd. in “Hi-Ho, Denaro!” 57) when italian director sergio leone’s A in his noted book on the Italian spaghetti West- Fistful of Dollars arrived in the United States ern, describes American critical reception of the in early 1967, the American film industry and spaghetti Western cycle as to “a large extent, the critics who observed it were in a state of confined to a sterile debate about the ‘cultural ferment. Critics could sense that the American roots’ of the American/Hollywood Western.” He cinema was changing and that its old pieties remarks that few critics dared admit that they and genres, often spoken of in the same were, in fact, “bored with an exhausted Holly- breath, were in a vital sense dying out. Among wood genre.” Pauline Kael, he notes, was will- them, the Western was perhaps the great- ing to acknowledge this critical ennui and thus est barometer—the genre long seen as most appreciate how a film such as Akira Kurosawa’s uniquely American, most assuredly linked to Yojimbo (1961) “could exploit Western conven- the national character and mythology, seemed tions while debunking its morality” (39). This to be evolving into a new, rougher beast. And revisionist project, Frayling argues along with for critics, Sergio Leone’s films were clearly part many others (e.g., Bondanella 255), was the of the problem. Leone’s Dollars trilogy, starting key to Leone’s success and, to some degree, to with A Fistful of Dollars (1964, US release: Janu- that of the spaghetti Western genre as a whole. ary 1967) and continuing with For a Few Dollars The term “sterile debate,” however, effaces More (1965, US release: May 1967) and The the almost venomous hostility that greeted Le- Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, US release: one’s Dollars trilogy in American critical circles. December, 1967), was neither the entirety Critics found the Dollars films deeply prob- nor the beginning of the “spaghetti Western” lematic on a number of levels: their unusually cycle in Italy,1 but for Americans Leone’s films graphic and cynical violence, their ambivalent represented the true beginning of the Italian relationship to historical and generic “real- invasion of their privileged cultural form (Liehm ism,” and their relationship to the history of the 186). Hindsight tempts one to simply question Western genre as a whole. However, film critics critics’ judgment: after all, Leone’s films have of the time were not merely displeased by these been vindicated by continued popular and criti- films’ perceived aesthetic flaws: they were bit- cal interest, and their place in the now sturdy terly resistant to what they saw as an existential family tree of post-studio revisionist Westerns threat to the Western genre and to some extent suggests their healthy influence on the evolu- their understanding of the American cinema tion of the Western genre. Christopher Frayling, as a whole, for in Leone’s films critics found echoes, and perhaps causes, of deeply disturb- william mcclain is a doctoral fellow at the Uni- ing trends in domestic film culture—trends that versity of Southern California’s Annenberg School would later culminate in what would be dubbed for Communication and Journalism. the “New Hollywood.” However, Leone’s films 52 journal of film and video 62.1–2 / spring/summer 2010 ©2010 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois seem to have had a uniquely distasteful ele- characters, shots, locations, sets, and the ment for American critics of the late 1960s be- like—thus stressing the semantic elements yond their place in broader shifts in American that make up the genre—and definitions that film culture, for whereas films such as Bonnie play up instead certain constitutive relation- ships between undesignated and variable and Clyde (1967) split critics into hotly conten- placeholders—relationships that might be tious camps, the Dollars films were simply called the genre’s fundamental syntax. (Alt- generally excoriated. Our goal here is not to say man, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach” 634) that critics of the period were defending critical good taste against the barbarians at the gates An approach so firmly rooted in the film text or that they somehow didn’t “get it.” Rather, we and inter-text, however, is not without its seek an understanding of a moment in the his- shortcomings, as Altman himself observes in tory of the American popular critical institutions his later book Film/Genre. Thus he introduces wherein critics attempted to resist aesthetic a third term to his genre equation: pragmatics. change, refused to acknowledge emerging In short, pragmatic analysis appreciates that artistic norms as legitimate, and in so doing genres are continually defined, used, and rede- attempted to defend the Western genre as an fined by “multiple users of various sorts—not institution against Leone’s illegitimate revision- only various spectator groups, but producers, ism and the wider developments it typified. distributors, exhibitors, cultural agencies, and Ultimately, this holding action reveals not only many others as well—pragmatics recognizes a great deal about the Western but also poten- that familiar patterns, such as genres, owe their tial insights into the nature of film criticism and very existence to multiplicity” (Altman, Film/ the concept of genre itself. Genre 210). The difficulty arises from the fact that we As such, one might be tempted to place Alt- are dealing with the Western genre in conflict man’s pragmatics in the tradition of Todorov’s with itself, but it is the Western in separate, analysis of historical versus theoretical genres contemporaneous spheres: the understanding (Todorov, The Fantastic) or Steve Neale’s insis- of films that seemed to lay claim to a genre and tence on the importance of Hollywood’s own the critical construction of the genre itself. If we discourse—perhaps most famously in his cri- wish to truly understand this conflict, we must tique of previous critics’ understanding of the of necessity remain at least agnostic as to the melodrama (Neale, “Melo Talk”). Rather than “true” nature of the Western genre, or for that locating genre in film texts (singularly or col- matter the legitimacy of various methods of de- lectively), Neale asserts the importance of the fining it. As such, Rick Altman’s semantic/syn- “indication and circulation of what the [film] tactic/pragmatic approach to the construction industry considers to be the generic frame- of genre provides a solid method for analyzing work—or frameworks—most appropriate to the critical understanding of the Western and its viewing of a film,” as embodied by Hollywood’s relationship to Leone’s films. In his oft-antholo- address to its audience through advertising gized essay on the topic, Altman describes the and publicity (Neale, Genre and Hollywood 39). semantic/syntactic approach to genre as one In the case of the melodrama, Neale challenges that seeks the constituent elements of genres critics’ identification of the melodrama with within film texts themselves and in primarily “feminine genres” such as the woman’s film linguistic terms: through a historical investigation of Hollywood industry discourse of the 1920s through the While there is anything but general agree- 1950s. Based on his findings, he asserts that ment on the exact frontier separating seman- for Hollywood of that period the term melo- tic from syntactic views, we can as a whole drama was understood to refer to action and distinguish between generic definitions that depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, adventure films—decidedly masculine genres journal of film and video 62.1–2 / spring/summer 2010 53 ©2010 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois (Neale, “Melo Talk” 69). For Neale, this means As we shall see, the creation and understand- that critics’ association of melodrama with ing of genre is not a disinterested, ahistorical women’s films was simply mistaken, overruled process, but neither should it be characterized by Hollywood’s own authority. Thus, Neale, like as somehow cynical. Rather, the creation of Todorov, ultimately returns to a single, bedrock genres in critical discourse, and the assertion generic location. Whereas Todorov ultimately of authority over them, must first and fore- asserts the primacy of traditional understand- most be seen as a Foucauldian move to create ings of genre, Neale regards the focus on Hol- knowledge and thus simultaneously to assert lywood’s discourse as a corrective for critics’ power, authority, and control over textual inter- tendency to efface the complexities of genre as pretation and a field of textual objects. As such, it functioned historically. However, Altman ar- film critics claim the power not only to describe gues against the tendency of most genre theo- the genre but also to legitimate changes to its reticians who ultimately rely on such an “exclu- character and canon. In fact, Altman observes sionary discourse” whereby genres are located that the “regenrification process,” the move at the level of “the author(s) or the text(s) or by critics to redefine a genre extensively and/ the audience or generic institutions . within or intensively, is one of the most essential a fundamentally monological framework. parts of the “critical arsenal” (82). In the case a surprising situation, given the range of vari- of Leone’s Dollars trilogy, critics essentially ables used to define individual genres” (Film/ employed the opposite tactic. As we shall see, Genre 85). No single location can ultimately by rejecting Leone’s films as Westerns, despite claim preeminence as the “true” location of a the films’ prima facie claim to that status, they genre, and genre, therefore, legitimately and attempted to de-generify them.