Sergio Leone

Started by Spike, July 22, 2003, 07:55:44 AM

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SHAFTR

More Leone This Summer (source: IGN)

2/23: A fistful of Special Editions planned.

February 23, 2005 - Ask and ye shall receive. A reader wanted to know if the other two films in Sergio Leone's Man With No Name Trilogy -- Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More -- would ever come out on DVD. I said I'd seen info on a spaghetti western web site but couldn't remember the title.

Enter a helpful Insider with the address: www.fistful-of-leone.com. There I found all the details. A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dynamite (a.k.a. Duck You Sucker) will be released in Europe on April 18 and in the U.S. in the summer.

Like The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, all three films have been fully restored (presumably by Lowry) and will have missing scenes restored. Here are the details for each title:


A Fistful of Dollars: Special Edition

Fully Restored Version
Audio Commentary
A New Kind of Hero - Documentary
A Few Weeks Off in Spain - Interview with Clint Eastwood
Cinque Voci
Featurette
Not Ready for Primetime - Featurette
Additional Scene - The Network Prologue
Restoration, Italian Style
Double Bill Trailer for A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More
Radio Spots
Collector's Gallery


For a Few Dollars More: Special Edition

Fully Restored Sound and Picture
Audio Commentary
A New Standard - Documentary
Back For More - Clint Eastwood Interview
Tre Voci - Interviews with Sergio Leone
Original American Release Version - Featurette on Alternative Versions
Restoration Notebook
Locations Comparisons
Rare Double Bill Trailer
Collector's Gallery
Radio Spots
Original Theatrical Trailer


Fistful of Dynamite (a.k.a. Duck You Sucker): Special Edition

Fully Restored with Extended Footage
Audio Commentary
Bigger, Louder, Deeper - Documentary on Leone
Sergio Dontai: The Screenwriter Remembers Duck You Sucker
The Autry Exhibition: Sergio Leone Comes to the USA
Visions And Versions: A Visual Analysis of Duck You Sucker
Finding The Original Version: Restoring Duck You Sucker
Locations Comparisons
Radio Spots
Trailers
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Alethia

i can't stop smiling.

MacGuffin

From thedigitalbits.com:

Leaks out of MGM in Europe have revealed that the studio will release a trio of long-awaited 2-disc Sergio Leone special edition DVDs in the U.K. on 4/18. These include A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dynamite. We've checked with our sources and learned that these same special editions HAD tentatively been scheduled to street from MGM here in the States in December. Do you sense a BUT coming? You're right. BUT... now that Sony is busy gobbling up MGM Home Entertainment, any decision to release these special editions in the U.S. is going to have to be made by them. Eventually. In other words, these DVDs have been caught in the thick of the merger, and there's a fair possibility that it's going to be a while before we see them here. We're checking with Sony to see what they say... but we'd be surprised if they commented at this point. We'll let you know in any case.

In the meantime, click here to see R2 cover and the outstanding list of extras for these discs at the A Fistful of Westerns website.
http://website.lineone.net/~braithwaitej/mainsite/mainpage.htm
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Alethia

fuck sony, i'm buying the R2's.

MacGuffin

We've got a follow-up on that Sergio Leone SE DVD story we posted in The Rumor Mill yesterday. We've contacted Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and learned pretty much exactly what we expected: The deal to purchase MGM just closed, so they're only just starting to address the logistics of assuming responsibility for MGM Home Entertainment's catalog and DVD release slate. It's too early to know if the titles MGM had previously slated for release later this year (including the A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dynamite special editions) will street as planned, or will be delayed. Rest assured we'll keep you up to date on this in the weeks and months ahead. Cross your fingers, Leone fans.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Alethia

Quote from: MacGuffinCross your fingers, Leone fans.

or just buy the r2s that come out in like 3 days!  if u can watch an r2, that is.

MacGuffin

The good, the bad and Leone
Christopher Frayling’s "Once Upon a Time in Italy" shows why Sergio Leone, master of the spaghetti western, should be ranked among the 20th century’s great filmmakers. By Richard Schickel



Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone
Christopher Frayling
Harry N. Abrams: 240 pp., $40

Modernist, postmodernist or merely mannerist? It's hard to know how to label Sergio Leone, but of this much I'm certain: It is time to pry open the portals of the Pantheon and permit him to enter that company of filmmakers — Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Kurosawa (feel free to season the list to taste, with others who speak with special urgency to you) — who in the middle of the 20th century expanded (exploded, really) the expressive and stylistic possibilities of world cinema.

The foregoing will be stale news to the Leone cult; these cinephiles have always known that he was the movies' unlikely great man — a chubby, bombastic, motor-mouthed figure with a short fuse and an equally short filmography, confined almost exclusively to westerns, who somehow administered a galvanic shock to a genre that was virtually moribund. This may come as new news, however, to those who believe that elevated filmmaking, to be worthy of high critical discourse, demands elevated subjects; that westerns must be made on American soil, not on Spain's rainless plains by a bunch of feckless Europeans; and that they require overt statements of a traditional morality if they are to be taken to the ever-patronizing hearts of those who insist on defining movie art in essentially literary terms.

Leone's cause was not helped by the vicious critical response to his first three westerns when they were released in the United States in the 1960s. Renata Adler, in the New York Times, for example, thought "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" should be retitled "The Burn, the Gouge and the Mangle." It didn't help that the pictures' success in Europe had been largely populist and that they achieved their huge grosses here mainly in the "animal houses," where male adolescents went to get off on lowbrow action fare. Like his first star, Clint Eastwood, Leone has withstood vast amounts of early calumny. In this struggle, Christopher Frayling has been his most reliable ally. Frayling is the author of a definitive biography of the director, as well as a thorough study of the spaghetti western, which was a preoccupation of Italian filmmaking in the decade after Leone pioneered it. It helps greatly that Frayling speaks in measured tones and that he is rector of the Royal College of Art in London, a school of visual art, which means he approaches Leone's work from the correct perspective.

"Once Upon a Time in Italy" is the handsome and generous companion volume to an invaluable exhibition, centered on Leone's westerns and curated by Frayling, at the Autry National Center's Museum of the American West in Griffith Park through mid-January. One would like to think that the imprimatur of a museum show might finally secure Leone's place in the critical-historical mainstream, but I somehow doubt it. There's still a lot of prejudice (and indifference) to overcome.

In his introductory essay, Frayling firmly places Leone among the postmodernists, which is all right with me, since his films stress major post-modernist themes: They are self-conscious and knowing comments on the past; they are ironic in tone; and most important, they always emphasize style over substance.

Taking these points in order, we see that Leone, who had an encyclopedic knowledge not merely of the West portrayed in movies, but also of the real West, was always quoting from previous westerns. In "Once Upon a Time in Italy," Frayling includes a six-page chart of all the homages to other films that Leone offered in "Once Upon a Time in the West." As important, all his major characters are clearly descended from classic western figures. What, after all, is Eastwood in these pictures but the mysterious stranger who wanders into a godforsaken community, stays around long enough to clean the place up, then rides off? The difference between him and his predecessors is that he is much less voluble about his motives than they generally were.

Silences of this sort are the hallmark of Leone's irony. He's saying that the only reliable guide to morality is behavior, that modernism's emphasis on psychological explanation doesn't carry much weight in a fundamentally anarchical postmodernist world. That's why most of his characters squint in silence at the world through appraising eyes. In Leone's West, all alliances are expedient (see Tuco and Blondie in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"), all final judgments rendered at the end of a gunfight. Such a world tends to make a man quiet — too quiet even to laugh aloud when his worst suspicions about his fellow man prove true. A thin smile will have to do.

Above all, Leone was a great stylist. In our fictions today, it is not what you say but how you say it that counts most. It may be that the most telling film clip in the Autry exhibition is not from a western at all but from Leone's first film, a sword-and-sandal epic called "The Colossus of Rhodes," in which he staged a swordfight on the humongous shoulder and arms of the title statuary — a truly arresting visual idea. In his westerns, it is Leone's manner that keeps us interested while everyone glowers sullenly at everyone else. It begins with his settings: All those stark, sun-baked towns rob the region of the Edenic potential implicit in the traditional western, which required only the removal of a few nasty serpents for it to become a full-scale paradise. Nothing's ever going to grow in Leone's West.

Beyond that, there's Leone's use of the camera — tight close-ups of faces, eyes, shooting irons and twitching trigger fingers fill the big screen in alternation with the broadest imaginable panoramic shots — very disorienting to audiences used to less-vivid contrasts. And that says nothing about the way he ignored the conventions of the American western's shootouts. He was famous for liking three-man, as opposed to two-man, gunfights, but he also liked to tie together, in a single shot, a gun being fired and its victim falling. Genteel American convention had always insisted on a cut between those two occurrences and on the victim falling forward, whereas, in reality, he would have been blasted backward by the impact of the bullet.

People thought when they first saw these films that they were more violent than anything they'd seen before. Maybe they were — but only marginally so. What made them seem more transgressive was the way Leone would extend time — another postmodernist trope — as his combatants stalked and circled one another, indulging themselves in, as it were, endless foreplay, before their rather efficiently managed climax was achieved. And then, of course, there are Ennio Morricone's scores to consider. Orchestrating Fender Stratocaster guitars, moaning choruses, penny whistles, jew's-harps, mariachi brass and the kitchen sink, he eschewed traditional symphonic themes, signaling disorienting postmodernist intent as powerfully as Leone's camera did.

Leone was a disappointed lover of the Old West as it was refracted in the films of traditionalists like his beloved master, John Ford. He once said that contact with real U.S. soldiers during and after World War II disabused him of the notion that Americans were any more noble or principled than anyone else. He brought that weariness and cynicism, not so different from the attitudes of his countrymen, Fellini and Antonioni, to a hallowed place where it had never been before.

Frayling's book — rich in interviews with Leone's creative collaborators, out of which an amusing collective portrait of the artist as an instinctively smart and playful child emerges — fails only in its attempt to make a case for Leone as a model for later filmmakers. He really wasn't. The western is well and truly dead now and the anxiety of influence prevents direct imitation of him in other movie contexts. He's admired by many directors for the intransigence with which he pursued his vision, but like most major artistic innovators, he is sui generis, a man standing outside the mainstream's rush, entire unto himself.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

MGM confirmed that they're finally planning Region 1 versions of those three Sergio Leone DVD special editions that were released last year in the U.K. (A Fistful of Dollars, A Fistful of Dynamite and For a Few Dollars More) sometime in 2007, to be distributed by Fox.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

MGM just released details on their LONG-awaited 8-disc box set, The Sergio Leone Anthology box set, due on 6/5 (SRP $89.98 - the individual 2-disc sets will also be released separately for $26.98 each). The set will include 2-disc Collector's Editions of A Fistful of Dollars (100 mins), For a Few Dollars More (132 mins), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (178 mins) and Duck, You Sucker! (157 mins, a.k.a. A Fistful of Dynamite). Each film is presented in fully-remastered anamorphic widescreen video. Audio will be English Dolby Digital 5.1 and Spanish and French Dolby 2.0 Surround (for Duck, You Sucker! and For a Few Dollars More), English Dolby Digital 5.1 and Spanish Dolby 2.0 Surround (for A Fistful of Dollars) and English Dolby Digital 5.1 (for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). All four films will feature subtitles in English, French and Spanish and will be Closed Captioned. Here's a list of the extras you can expect on each:

A Fistful of Dollars will include audio commentary by film historian Sir Christopher Frayling, 5 featurettes (A New Kind of Hero, A Few Weeks in Spain, Tre Voici, Not Ready for Primetime and Location Comparisons: Intercutting Film Clips with Current Footage of Locations Used), the network prologue (additional scene), 10 radio spots, a double-bill trailer for the film and an 8-page booklet.

For a Few Dollars More will include audio commentary by Sir Christopher Frayling, 5 featurettes (A New Standard, Back for More, Tre Voici, For a Few Dollars More: The Original American Release Versions and Location Comparisons: Intercutting Film Clips with Current Footage of Locations Used), 12 radio spots, the original theatrical trailer, a double-bill trailer and an 8-page booklet.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly will include audio commentary by film historian Richard Schickel, 3 documentaries (Leone's West, The Leone Style and The Man Who Lost The Civil War), 3 featurettes (Reconstructing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Il Maestro: Ennio Morricone and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Il Maestro: Part Two), deleted scenes, the extended "Tuco torture" scene, The Socorro Sequence: A Reconstruction, the film's French trailer, the original theatrical trailer, a poster art gallery, 4 Easter eggs, 5 collectible postcards and an 8-page booklet.

Finally, Duck, You Sucker! will include audio commentary by Sir Christopher Frayling, 6 featurettes (The Myth of Revolution, Sergio Donati Remembers Duck, You Sucker, Once Upon a Time in Italy, Sorting Out the Versions, Restoration Italian Style and Location Comparisons: Intercutting Film Clips with Current Footage of Locations Used), 6 radio spots, the original theatrical trailer and an 8-page booklet.

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

tpfkabi

i just now found out about the Leone Special Editions...

:shock:

how is Duck, You Sucker!?
I am Torgo. I take care of the place while the Master is away.