Filmmaker Sergio Leone has proven to be one of the most influential of all directors, both in the short and the long term, despite a relatively small output. His 1964 movie A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS launched not only the career of star Clint Eastwood but also a sub-genre that became known as the “spaghetti western”. Leone would make his “Dollars” trilogy (with FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY) before finally realizing his 1968 masterpiece ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. Following this, Leone would only direct two more films, 1972′s DUCK YOU SUCKER and his final work, 1984′s nearly four hour epic, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. Despite this rather scant filmography, Leone and his style have been paid homage to repeatedly over the years, and the connections to his films across world cinema is remarkable. Last Friday, I finally caught Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA at the Seoul Cinematheque. Coincidentally, on the weekend, I went to see the new (to Korea) Quentin Tarantino film INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and then watched the DVD of Kim Jee-won’s THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE WEIRD. Thus last weekend unexpectedly turned into a mini-course on Leone and his aesthetic.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is a very curious work in many ways, a film I both liked and disliked in almost equal measure. The extreme length and the conversion of Leone’s grand style from the western to the gangster genre are both effective, and the parts of the movie that I most enjoyed where the opening (before the childhood flashback) and the conclusion, where Leone can indulge in his gifts for large canvases with his operatic visual and musical style (aided immensely, as always, by composer Ennio Morricone).  It does feel at times like the great final work of a master director. But unfortunately, for a film made by a man who was in his early 50s at the time, this is also a rather juvenile and immature movie, especially in how it deals of sexuality and women. The film has proven controversial for a rape sequence that has been much discussed and debated, but I tend to agree with scholar Leslie Stern, who condemns the sequence not only for humanizing the rapist, but of using the very act of the rape itself as a source of his melancholy. We are ultimately meant to have more sympathy for the rapist than the victim. This is symptomatic of a greater misogyny, a characteristic that is present in most of Leone but is so prominent here that it really derails the story. Certainly this is not a bad film, and a great historical curiosity, not only as Leone’s last work but as the last of these grand auteur films that would come out of Hollywood from the late 70s/early 80s. Like the 1981 disaster HEAVEN’S GATE by Michael Cimino, this film was cut by almost half and proved to be a difficult sell in the new age of the blockbuster. But as a film, it does not approach the greatness of Leone’s westerns, especially ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.

Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is a much better melding of Leone’s style with a different genre, in this case the WWII sub-genre. Although titled and marketed as a tale of Jewish Nazi hunters, it is in fact not centered on the “basterds” but rather on two other characters: Nazi Colonel Hans Landa and a Jewish woman named Shosanna, who survives the massacre of her family that opens the movie. It was released this summer in North America, and thus has already received a great deal of commentary and discussion in its revision of historical facts. One of the disadvantages of seeing a movie late is that you lose the ability to see and comment immediately and thus without hearing other opinions first. But, then again, nobody comes to any film without certain prejudices, and knowing about the story and controversy in advance allowed me to see it from a different and more distanced perspective. The main debate over the film is the depiction of Jews as the terrorizers of Nazis, rather than as purely victims, which is both historically inaccurate and ethically questionable: is watching Jews murder and torture Nazis not an equal affront to humanity as the opposite? However, I think this can be defended on a number of grounds. First, Tarantino establishes the basterds and Shosanna as resistance fighters battling an occupying force. This adds an interesting twist on the use of “scalping” by the basterds; unlike traditional westerns, where the Natives were simply savages, Tarantino rightly establishes here an affinity between the Native resistance fighters against European invaders and the resistance to Nazi occupation. I do not think we can see the Jewish resistance as equivalent to the Nazis. Rather, it brings up the question of using violence to fight any enemy and how one’s humanity can be lost in the process, a theme of intelligent war films as far back as Powell/Pressburger’s THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP in 1943.

The historical revision I found more of a problem, and one that has been less commented on, is the use of the African French projectionist who works with Shosanna to execute her revenge plan. I could not help but think of a famous analysis by Roland Barthes in his collection MYTHOLOGIES. In an essay titled “Paris Match”, Barthes looks at a photo of an African saluting the French flag and unpacks its ideological significance in defending French colonialism (a picture of the photo and description of Barthes’ analysis can be found here). This ignoring of colonial history is a characteristic of the most famous WWII Hollywood film, CASABLANCA, and can be seen in Tarantino’s film as well. Of course, the caveat is the self-reflective nature of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Like the use of stylistic excess by Leone to comment on the mythology of the western, Tarantino makes his WWII story about WWII films themselves. It is also wish fulfillment, not only in its story of Jewish resistance and the ability to end the war before the worst of the Holocaust took place, but in its ideal of a tolerant, multi-cultural society to oppose the repugnant notion of racial purity. The fact that French society of the time was probably more anti-Semitic than the German society is not of concern to Tarantino. In his ideal fantasy world, his heroes share his values. This includes being anti-racist, but also includes a certain feminist streak that really marks him off from Leone. Ever since the title character of JACKIE BROWN (1997), Tarantino has been creating a number of strong female characters, and while they are still problematic and debatable as feminist figures, they are a far more mature view of women than Leone or most other Hollywood directors give us.

Kim Jee-won’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD is a much more obvious Leone homage, and has been advertised as an “Oriental Western” (or, as Kim Jee-won once dubbed it, a “Kimchee Western”). This seems like an odd mixture, but in fact the first of Leone’s westerns, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, is a very close remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film YOJIMBO (1961). To further complicate things, Kurosawa himself borrowed elements from Dashiell Hammett’s 30s crime novel RED HARVEST. All of this is to say that the western-eastern binary is not as rigid and stable as we may assume, and there has always been a great deal of cross-cultural influence. Unfortunately, Kim takes only the most superficial of ingredients from Leone and instead creates a very standard action film within an exotic setting. It is not a copy of Leone, but it is also not that original itself. The story is set during WWII in Manchuria, and features three Korean characters looking for treasure, not unlike the plot of Leone’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, which was set during the American Civil War. But unlike Leone and Tarantino, Kim focuses a great deal of his running time to action sequences. This is a much more fast-paced work, but because of its lack of attention to character and mood, the result is much more boring, as we sit through action scene after action scene. Because of this, the story and its nationalist metaphor are much less interesting and complex than something like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. It copies Hollywood action films and creates Korean characters that mimic the hyper-masculine and cool personas of other blockbusters. This has been a logical extension of the growth of Korean cinema and its industry, which has competed with Hollywood by, in many cases, becoming it. This is especially troubling when a talented director like Kim Jee-won (whose A TALE OF TWO SISTERS is a very stylish and understated horror film) succumbs to this kind of superficiality. Overall, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD is not a bad film and one that action film fans may enjoy, but it does not represent the best Korean cinema has to offer.

Perhaps the reworking of a film from Korea’s own cinematic past will prove more interesting and less shallow: appararently director Im Sang-s00 (THE PRESIDENT’S LAST BANG) is remaking Kim Ki-young’s THE HOUSEMAID with actress Jeon Do-yeon (SECRET SUNSHINE). Certainly one to look forward to.

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