:37:00
he worked on Helen of Troy,
he worked on Quo Vadis.
:37:03
He'd made The Colossus of Rhodes.
:37:05
He completed the film
The Last Days of Pompeii,
:37:08
after his mentor, Mario Bonnard,
the director, fell ill.
:37:11
So he'd dealt with a very
masculine world of mythology,
:37:15
set in ancient Greece or Rome,
:37:17
and he certainly had difficulties
in locating female characters in his films.
:37:24
The old thing about "Madonna and whore"
goes very much for Leone's early films.
:37:29
The characters are very saintly,
like the Marianne Koch character, Marisol,
:37:34
or they're trollops, as a lot of the
characters in For A Few Dollars More are.
:37:38
The central family in this film,
with the mother played by Marianne Koch,
:37:42
in case you hadn't got the point,
are called Julio, Marisol and little Jesus.
:37:47
The baby we saw is called Jesus,
his mother's called Mary, Marisol,
:37:51
and his father's Julio, or Joseph.
:37:53
So we've got a Holy Family in this story.
:37:56
One kind of family are the good guys,
:37:58
the stranger looks after
them and protects them.
:38:01
But the other kind of family is factions, the
Rojos and the Baxters, which is a Mafia,
:38:06
a clan, a faction, the dark side of
family life - two visions of the family.
:38:12
Female characters, Leone's uneasy with.
:38:14
He doesn't really know how
to fit them in, so they're treated as...
:38:19
In the factions, as one of the boys.
:38:21
Basically, it's a kind of
adolescent view of sexuality,
:38:25
which you imagine was pitched
at the audiences in southern Italy,
:38:29
who had a low boredom threshold
:38:31
and talked unless something
happened every ten minutes.
:38:35
It's that kind of audience
that this film was pitched at.
:38:38
Hence there's action every ten minutes.
:38:41
Hence you keep the audience
on their toes all the time,
:38:44
assume the audience needs
to be entertained constantly.
:38:47
And I think the sexuality of the movie
makes that assumption as well.