News

Henry Fonda. Charles Bronson. Jason Robards. Rory Calhoun. Richard Harrison. Luciano Stella. Philippe Leroy. James Coburn. Tony Russel. Henry Silva. Ty Hardin. These are all the actors who passed on the lead role in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Finally, a young actor on the TV show Rawhide was offered the part because he could ride a horse. Clint Eastwood took the role of the Man with No Name for $15,000. It made him a star.

In the story, a gunslinger rides into the town of San Miguel on the Mexican-US border. Two rival gangster families, one Mexican, one American, are locked in a power struggle, terrorizing the town. When a contingent of soldiers bearing gold to buy arms at the US border is waylaid and massacred by the Mexican clan, the Man gets involved, playing one side against the other for his fistful of dollars. That this man helps a beautiful victim escape her jailers shows a small chink in his armor – “I knew someone like you once,” he tells her. But otherwise, this violent and amoral protagonist is only on his own side. Starring alongside Eastwood is Johnny Wels, German actress Marianne Koch (with one line of dialogue), W. Lukschy, Jose Calvo, S. Rupp, Antonio Prieto, Carol Brown, Benny Reeves, and Joe Edger.

Fistful was shot in Spain, mostly outside Madrid and in Almeria, in 8 weeks for $200,000. Leone had a distinctive visual directorial style of panoramic sweeps and carefully framed close-ups. Eastwood assembled his own costume – his black jeans came from a shop on Hollywood Boulevard, the hat from a shop in Santa Monica, and the trademark cigars from a shop in Beverly Hills. The poncho was bought in Spain. Leone did not speak English and Eastwood did not speak Italian, so they mostly communicated through Eastwood’s stuntman Benito Stefanelli. The shoestring budget did not allow for fancy trailers. Eastwood said in an interview, “We had no electricity. We didn’t have a trailer with a toilet. We just went out behind the rocks.” All footage was shot silently, with dialogue and sound effects added later in post-production. Eastwood did not dub his own voice until the movie opened in the US in 1967. He was dubbed in Italian by Enrico Maria Salerno.

The “spaghetti western” was released in Italy in 1964. It was three years later that it screened in the US because of a lawsuit filed against the filmmakers by Akira Kurosawa for breach of copyright. He claimed that Fistful plagiarized his 1961 movie Yojimbo. And the plot did indeed bear striking resemblances. Kurosawa prevailed in the lawsuit and was awarded 15% of worldwide receipts plus exclusive distribution rights in some Far Eastern countries. He ended up making more money from this movie than from Yojimbo.

When it did open in the US, the director and a few cast and crew members gave themselves Anglicized names to broaden the appeal for this little-known genre. Leone called himself Bob Robertson. Gian Maria Volonte was Johnny Wels. Benito Stefanelli was Benny Reeves. Bruno Carotenuto was Carol Brown. Ennio Morricone, the composer, chose the name, Dan Savio. The title card in the movie is just Fistful of Dollars.

According to an interview Eastwood gave The Deseret News in 1990, he had no idea that a movie he read about in Variety called Per un Pugno di Dollari was a huge success in Europe. “Magnificent Stranger” was the title of his movie in production. He only realized it was his movie when he saw his name on it.

The film opened to mostly negative reviews in Italy, but admissions all over Europe made it a hit. When it opened in America, the critics were unkind as well. Philip French of the Observer had this to say: "The calculated sadism of the film would be offensive were it not for the neutralizing laughter aroused by the ludicrousness of the whole exercise. If one didn't know the actual provenance of the film, one would guess that it was a private movie made by a group of rich European Western fans at a dude ranch... A Fistful of Dollars looks awful, has a flat dead soundtrack, and is totally devoid of human feeling.” But again, audiences voted with their wallets and the film earned $14.5 million, including the take from its re-release in 1969.

Two sequels of sorts, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, were both released in 1967, again starring Eastwood and collectively known, with Fistful, as the ‘Dollars Trilogy.’ Fistful is now recognized as the film that revived the Western genre. In 1975, the film was shown on ABC TV with a 4 ½ minute prologue added to justify its violence. Written and directed by Monte Hellman, it featured Harry Dean Stanton, as a warden offering a prisoner a pardon if he cleaned up the gangs in San Miguel. Eastwood’s face taken from archival footage represented the prisoner. This prologue preceded a few television screenings of the film and was subsequently removed. Fans can see it on the special edition DVD.

Funding for the 2014 restoration of the film was provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation. It was restored by Cineteca di Bologna and Unidis Jolly Film at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with MGM. The restoration was from the original Techniscope 2-perf camera negative deposited at the Cineteca di Bologna by Unidis Jolly Film. Cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri supervised the color correction using a 1965 Technicolor print as a reference. The music was remastered using original 35mm and 16mm magnetic soundtracks deposited at Deluxe in Los Angeles by MGM. The final mix included the remastered music, the 35mm, and 16mm music and effects magnetic soundtracks, and two English-language optical track negatives. Opening and closing titles were restored from a combined first-generation interpositive. DCPs (digital files) and a 35mm print of the restoration were created for screenings. While the title card ‘Bob Robertson’ had been replaced by Sergio Leone, the other pseudonyms were retained.

Fistful had its world restoration premiere at Cannes in 2014 hosted by Quentin Tarantino; its U.S. premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s “To Save and Project” Festival of Film Preservation, and a special screening as part of the HFPA’s first Restoration Summit in 2019, at the downtown movie palace Theatre at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles.

Luchino Visconti was and is best known for his epics. The Film Foundation has facilitated four Visconti restorations. Senso, Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard, restored by the Cineteca di Bologna, unfold on grand historical canvases—Senso and The Leopard at the time of the Risorgimento and Rocco during Italy’s mid-century economic boom. Vaghe stella dell’Orsa, known here as Sandra and restored by Grover Crisp and his team at Sony/Columbia, is unlike any other Visconti film, or any other film for that matter. The action is largely confined to intrigues and conflagrations between six principle characters in a decaying villa in the ancient Tuscan town of Volterra, whose history dates back to the pre-Roman Etruscan civilization. The narrative is inspired by the story of Electra and her brother Orestes, who plotted and carried out the murder of their mother Clytemnestra to avenge her murder of their father. In Vaghe stella dell’Orsa, the Electra and Orestes figures played by Claudia Cardinale and Jean Sorel are returning to their home for the unveiling of a statue dedicated to their father, who was killed in Auschwitz. They both suspect their gentile mother (Marie Bell), now confined to a mental clinic, of having betrayed their father to the Nazis, and her second husband (Renzo Ricci) of aiding and abetting her. Their mother and stepfather in turn accuse Sandra and Gianni of an incestuous relationship— in her mad ravings their mother attributes it to their “Jewish blood.” For Sandra and her deeply disturbed brother, their secret codes and meetings and ingrown physical intimacy are the outward manifestation of a blood pact that protects them from a hostile universe. Sandra’s British husband (Michael Craig) can only observe the endless internecine war of attrition with amazement and growing sadness. If I’m taking pains to lie out the dramatic and thematic particulars, it’s because they’re so densely layered and yet achingly present and felt. For most of the great European directors of the era and for Visconti in particular, politics and aesthetics and psychology and history all flowed together in the same river. Visconti the dramatist knew how to isolate each of these forces while Visconti the director knew how to incarnate and intensify and them within the flow. You can see links between Vaghe stella dell’Orsa and Through a Glass Darkly, but Bergman is zeroed in on questions of madness and the supernatural. You can see links with Muriel and La Guerre est finie, but in Resnais’ films every emotion is tightly held beneath the surface. “It’s along the same lines as those thrillers in which everything appears very clear at the beginning and very obscure by the end,” said Visconti of his film, “as always happens when people attempt the difficult task of understanding their own reactions, feeling absolutely sure they have nothing to learn but ending up face to face with agonizing existential problems.” This kind of lucid understanding of complex issues is largely missing from the cinema now, and that’s a real pity. On cursory examination from the depressingly common contemporary standpoint mandating that everything be boiled down to one adjective or category, Vaghe stella dell’Orsa would appear to be hopelessly “dark,” no matter how “sexy.” As if anything less than an easily comprehensible affirmation were a threat to our security. All I can say is that I find this film a deeply unsettling experience—thrillingly so. That’s why, a few years back, I found myself going back to see it and re-see it four nights in a row.

- Kent Jones

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

SENSO (1954, d. Luchino Visconti)
Restored by StudioCanal, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale, and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata. Restoration funding provided by Gucci, The Film Foundation, and Comitato Italia 150.

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960, d. Luchino Visconti)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Titanus, TF1 Droits Audiovisuels and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

THE LEOPARD (1963, d. Luchino Visconti)
Restored in association with Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata, Pathé, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Twentieth Century Fox, and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

SANDRA (1965, d. Luchino Visconti)
Restoration by Sony Pictures Entertainment in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee di Venezia and The Film Foundation.
 

In an op-ed in the New York Times upon her death in 1955, Martin Scorsese wrote this about Ida Lupino: “I never met Ida Lupino, but I always wanted to. Her tough, emotional acting is well remembered, but her considerable accomplishments as a filmmaker are largely forgotten. She was a true pioneer; the six films she directed between 1949 and 1953 are remarkable chamber pieces that deal with challenging subjects in a clear, almost documentary fashion, and are a singular achievement in American cinema.”

Star of 60 films and director of eight, Ida Lupino was a trailblazer in the studio era, writing and directing movies made by her own independent production company, The Filmakers (sic), which she set up with her second husband, Collier Young.

The Bigamist is her best-known work, a film noir movie – a genre of black and white dramas with an antihero protagonist, fast dialogue, and tawdry storylines. It starred Joan Fontaine, Lupino herself, Edmund Gwenn, and Edmond O’Brien. In a matter of art reflecting life, the screenwriter/producer was the aforementioned Collier who was now married to Fontaine after divorcing Lupino. It was the only film in which she directed herself. And possibly the only instance of a woman directing her ex-husband’s current wife. Another echo of her own life: she was pregnant with third husband Howard Duff’s child at the time of her divorce with Young, a storyline of The Bigamist.

Fontaine and O’Brien play a couple in San Francisco who want to adopt a child. He is a salesman for the company they run together and is forever on the road; she buries herself in work to forget her childlessness. During an investigation of their backgrounds, their adoption agent, played by Gwenn, finds out that O’Brien has been living a double life with a wife (Lupino) and child in Los Angeles. The storyline is simple. There are no subplots, no extraneous characters, no nudging the audience’s feelings in a particular direction with a crashing score underlining bad behavior from a villain. The sensitive portrayal of a betrayer and lawbreaker by O’Brien engages the audience’s sympathies in a way they don’t see coming. From the start of the film to its ambiguous finish, it is a perceptively directed film dealing with an inflammatory subject that would have been handled very differently with a male director at that time. Even the poster falls short of the breathless headlines of film noir, stating simply: “Wanted by Two Women” above the credits.

A couple of interesting bits of trivia: in the story, O’Brien’s character meets Lupino’s on a bus tour of the stars’ homes in Beverly Hills – Jack Benny’s and Jimmy Stewart’s homes on Roxbury Drive are pointed out by the bus driver, along with Edmund Gwenn’s as the star of Miracle on 34^th Street. And Lupino’s landlady is played by Fontaine’s mother, Lillian Fontaine.

In the press book of one of her earlier films, The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino said this of her work in a male-dominated world:

“I retain every feminine trait. Men prefer it that way. They’re more co-operative if they see that fundamentally you are of the weaker sex even though you are in a position to give orders, which normally is the male prerogative, or so he likes to think, anyway. While I’ve encountered no resentment from the male of the species for intruding into their world, I give them no opportunity to think I’ve strayed where I don’t belong. I assume no masculine characteristics, which can often be a fault of career women rubbing shoulders with their male counterparts, who become merely arrogant or authoritative.”

The title of the article from which this quote is taken was “Ida Lupino Retains Her Femininity as Director.” It’s easy to see why she didn’t want to threaten male directors with her ambition in an era where sexism was rampant in Hollywood and where it still exists, to an extent, to this day.

She wrote the following in an article in the DGA’s magazine Action in 1967 entitled “Me, Mother Directress” in which she explained why she turned to directing:

“For about eighteen months back in the mid-Forties I could not get a job in pictures as an actress ... I was on suspension ... when you turned down something you were suspended ... I had to do something to fill up my time.”

She was referring to her fight with Warner Bros. who tried to force her into films she didn’t want to make, particularly with Humphrey Bogart who she couldn’t stand after working with him in High Sierra.

Because of Scorsese’s admiration for Lupino, The Bigamist was selected by him as one on a long list of must-restore movies. While it is now in the public domain, the restoration process was done by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Republic Pictures, with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. It was preserved in cooperation with Republic Pictures from the original 35mm acetate picture and soundtrack negatives.

The Bigamist was distributed by The Filmakers after RKO (owned by Howard Hughes), did not renew their distribution deal. The production company folded two years later as Lupino and Young couldn’t afford to distribute their own films, lacking the financial wherewithal of the studios. The movie is included in the book “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die” edited by Steven Schneider.

This would be the last film Lupino directed for more than 12 years. She made a career as a television director in her later years.

Back in the 90s, there was a stunning series of MGM silents programmed by Bruce Goldstein at Film Forum here in New York—one remarkable film after another, from Stroheim’s Merry Widow to Rex Ingram’s Mare Nostrum and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to what was for me the great revelation of that series, He Who Gets Slapped, later restored by the George Eastman Museum with the help of The Film Foundation. This was the very first MGM film to go into production (but not the first release) and the first title to feature the MGM lion in its logo, the first film under Irving Thalberg’s supervision, and most importantly of all the American debut of the great Swedish director Victor Sjöström. I vividly remember the powerful gravitational sway of He Who Gets Slapped, based on a play by Leonid Andreyev (known for a time in this country as “the Russian Edgar Allen Poe”). It’s an unusually potent melodrama of male humiliation and degradation, one of many in the early 20^th century, and it has a dramatic starkness and a visual purity that are hair-raising. What did Sjöström and his great star Lon Chaney, brought to MGM from Universal by Thalberg, find together? How did they harmonize to the point where they seemed creatively conjoined? Such a thing can’t really be explained, just seen, absorbed, marveled at. Sjöström found the same kind of relationship with Lillian Gish in the two great films they made together, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind, and three decades later Ingmar Bergman found it with Sjöström as an actor in Wild Strawberries.

It is possible to see He Who Gets Slapped. There’s a Warner Archive DVD and you can find it on a few streaming platforms. But to discover it on the big screen is far less likely than it was in the 90s. Repertory cinema has been in a fragile state for a long time, but right now it’s more vulnerable than ever—Film Forum, which I mentioned before, has been closed since March and is still awaiting guidance on reopening. 35mm prints are now as rare as Grecian urns. A majority of titles are now “owned” by corporate entities for which the very question of cultural patrimony seems either irrelevant, inadmissible or unheard of—hard to say which. We’ve never been able to take the ongoing availability of cinema for granted. Now, on about six different fronts, we all have to fight for it as if our lives depended on it.

- Kent Jones

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924, d. Victor Sjostrom)
Preserved by the George Eastman Museum with funding provided by The Film Foundation.