With a non-Anglophone passion for Americana, Leone reinvented the
western, enlarging the reality of the myths with tougher violence,
crueller humour, and an obsession with faces – a silent movie
sensibility dramatised by Ennio Morricone's most definitive
compositions. Leone believed so much in 'il West' that we never doubt
the authenticity of his strange gunslingers with their mystical
rituals and intimations of mortality, replacing John Ford's
stagecoach community as the force for 'law' in a wild country of the
imagination. From his stars – from the emerging Clint Eastwood to a
veteran Henry Fonda – he coaxed a hyper-iconic presence, but the
Marxist in him made mercenaries of them all.
