:35:00
He took the Hollywood Western,
:35:02
and in the case of Fistful of Dollars,
two Westerns he was very fond of:
:35:06
Shane, with Alan Ladd, made by George
Stevens, and Edward Dmytryk's Warlock,
:35:11
a complicated Western
made in the 1950s with Henry Fonda.
:35:15
He was taking those two films, reworking
them in this Italian and Spanish context,
:35:20
and doing exactly
as the Sicilian puppeteers did.
:35:23
Take the puppet show, take the Western
as a given, adapt it to the local culture.
:35:28
And there are the two puppets sitting
there, lying against the gravestone.
:35:51
West German actor playing Baxter,
:35:54
conversing with Spanish actor
playing his wife Consuelo.
:35:58
And officials and sheriffs
and bank managers and bank tellers
:36:03
and schoolteachers
and hotel clerks in Leone's films
:36:06
tend to be treated with some derision.
:36:08
A very traditional commedia dell'arte
approach to officialdom,
:36:12
where the official
is probably on the take, corrupt.
:36:16
There was the odd corrupt
sheriff in Hollywood movies,
:36:19
but they were taken as the exception.
:36:21
In Leone's Wild West,
all officialdom is on the take.
:36:25
It's dog eat dog.
And where life has no value,
:36:29
people like the stranger
are the ones that give it value.
:36:32
A monetary value.
:36:47
Now, Leone had made various films
in the late '50s and early '60s
:36:53
in the sword-and-sandal genre.
:36:56
He'd been an assistant director
on the chariot race for Ben-Hur,