New York Times: Jun 68

Henry Fonda, tapping his temples, said: "This guy is wonderful. He gets right inside you, right here behind the eyes." Jason Robards, sketching roughly the operative area for major brain surgery, said: "Some kind of genius. He climbs right into your skull." , Claudia Cardinale wordlessly clasped her incomparable left breast and shook her head in wonderment, and Charles Bronson grunted "Great" and scratched his stomach.

You could have been forgiven for thinking that they were talking about a particularly agile new virus, but the object of all this admiration was a short, fat, bespectacled, Italian film director named Sergio Leone.

Leone's reputation as a director rests principally on a series of Westerns made on the Continent - "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" - and there are those who would say that his movies are more than a little unhealthy. Cheaply produced in Italy and Spain and using mostly European actors, they have been remarkable chiefly for a haemorrhage of catch-up violence and a naive standard of characterization that makes good men recognizable by their white hats and baddies by their black ones.

His work in progress, "Once Upon a Time ... In the West," seems to make no dramatic departure from this undemanding formula but it marks an important step forward, at least for Sergio Leone. This time he has a $5-million budget, a distinguished international cast, and, although most of the filming will take place in Spain, the not inconsiderable cachet for a spaghetti Western of shooting on location in Monument Valley, Arizona, for several weeks in July.

In those spurious Western badlands that have sprung up around Almay in Southern Spain to cater to the thriving trade in European cowboy pictures, Leone moves about in the heat, sweating profusely in a shiny shirt and shapeless slacks that have long given up the battle with his bulging waistline. With his pear-shaped head and thick-rimmed glasses, he looks like an unsuccessful accountant whose car has run out of gas many miles from a gas station.

Putting together a scene, however, he loses this air of perspiring anxiety. His English is minimal but he more than makes up for the deficiency with a command of mime that Marcel Marceau might envy. Before each shot he takes his cast minutely through the action, presenting a remarkable spectacle as he draws fast from the hip, bursts through the swinging doors of a saloon or stalks an adversary, gun in hand, round the papier-mâché shanties. I was privileged to see him climb on to a bed, remove his spectacles, adjust his paunch and make violent love to Claudia Cardinale before handing over the task to Henry Fonda.

Fonda, like everyone else in the picture, finds Leone's directorial style irresistible. "The guy's not just an enthusiast," he told me, "he's right every time. You don't want to do things any differently." Fonda, as leader of a gang determined to rob and murder settlers with land on the route of the approaching railroad, shoots down in cold blood a father and his four young children and this, he is happy to point out, is just the opening sequence. "I don't know what this is going to do for my image," he said, "but frankly I don't care. This man Leone is beautiful." .

Amid so much uncomplicated devotion, it seemed ungenerous to tax Leone with . the question of excessive violence in his pictures but he responded calmly to the suggestion that he sells no more than immature sex and blatant sadism wrapped up in the hallowed Western formula.

"I am bringing back the action Western," he said, talking amiably through the interpreter who was on hand to fill in the rare gaps in Leone's command of pantomime. "The cowboy picture has got lost in psychology. There have been too many attempts to explain the motives of both the heroes and the bad men and to make them understandable and acceptable in modem terms. The West was made by violent, uncomplicated-men and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures."

Leone describes himself as an ardent disciple of John Ford and certainly cannot be faulted on the detail and authenticity of his Western. or his feeling for the period. It is perhaps this amount of care that has lifted him out of the ruck of Continental directors who discovered some five years ago that they could bypass Hollywood and turn out cheap - and profitable - cowboy pictures of their own.

Leone's credentials as a director are also considerably more respectable than those of most of his competitors. He is the son of an Italian director well known in the days of silent pictures and he worked as an assistant on 58 films while he was learning his trade. He recalls, with some pride that he worked with William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann and Raoul Walsh and wonders, shyly, if perhaps they will remember him. He was past 30 and apparently quite happy to remain an assistant when he was offered "The Last Days of Pompeii." Fearful lest his career be ruined along with Pompeii, he directed the picture under a pseudonym but emerged a little more confident when the film did splendidly at the box-office.

His real name first appeared on "The Colossus of Rhodes," which was followed by a series of costume dramas. Now his Western trilogy - "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"- has made $l3-million in Italy alone, and in England and on the Continent his pictures are regarded as an acceptable substitute for the authentic Hollywood product.

After "Once Upon a Time In the West," his ambition is to make the definitive film about America in the days of Prohibition. It is interesting to speculate on what actors will then bound over to Europe, breathless with enthusiasm, to watch Leone play all the parts, simultaneously, in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.