Cumbow goes through each of Leone's films in sequence, discussing plot, character relationships, camera angles and approaches, and how all that ties into various themes of ideas Leone is exploring. So in addition to comparing and contrasting A Fistful of Dollars to Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Cumbow discusses the repeated notion of threes in the film. The Baxters, the Rojos, "Joe" in the middle. Or the Rojos (3 brothers), the Baxters (mother-father-son), and the innocent civilians (Silvanito, the coffinmaker and the bellringer).
There are a few things in those chapters where I can tell Cumbow missed something. In the chapter on A Fistful of Dollars, he wonders why, during the prisoner exchange, Ramon's guy doesn't simply gun down Silvanito when he emerges with a shotgun to defend Marisol's husband and child. Well, the answer is Joe pushes himself off the wall of the cantina to stand beside Silvanito, hand resting on his pistol in an obvious warning.
That said, I never realized prior to this book how incidental Eastwood's character really is to For a Few Dollars More. It's about Mortimer and Indio, and Monco is the man on the outside (which is kind of funny, considering he ended up being the man on the inside in he and Mortimer's attempt to trap Indio.)
I end up disagreeing with almost all of Cumbow's interpretations of Duck, You Sucker, and it's not even a case where I can say I see how he came to that conclusion, because I think he's just flat-out reading the material wrong. When Mallory, after Juan freed the political prisoners, describes him as a, 'grand hero of the revolution now,' Cumbow says he does so, 'rather earnestly.' Impolitely, that's bullshit. James Coburn is grinning like the Joker. He laughs at Juan's anger, pointing out he never said anything about there still being gold in the Bank of Mesa Verde. He only asked if Juan still wanted to get in. It's the payback to Juan shoving him back into the Revolution by tricking him into blowing up his boss.
Which is another error. Cumbow asks why, if Mallory says one revolution (meaning Ireland) was enough didn't he take up another profession? He did. He was looking for silver for Aschenbach, the German mining guy. He was out, and Juan, unwittingly, because he's more focused on the fact one of Huerta's captains got blown up, forced him back in. The Mesa Verde bank job is Mallory's revenge.
That aside, the movie-specific chapters occupy half the book, the second half being devoted to an overview of the filmography as a whole. A chapter on the "moral geometry" of his films, as well as chapters about significant collaborators, Ennio Morricone for example, and another about the actors he used.
Actually, Morricone's music gets an entire chapter of its own. It's a difficult chapter, because I can't always "hear" the right piece in my head (I don't really know which ones go with which names), but the discussion of things like the importance of bells to Morricone's pieces, given their religious connotations, was intriguing.
Especially compared to how religion is often portrayed in Leone's films. There are often churches, or parts of churches, and they usually have bells. But rarely, if ever, are those churches being used as a house of worship. In For a Few Dollars More, Indio uses an abandoned church as his base, (and several of his gang announce their arrival by shooting its bell.) The monastery where Tuco's brother lives in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has become a hospital for war wounded. In Once Upon a Time in America, religion (in this case a synagogue) is what draws people from their homes, allowing Max and Noodles to rob them. Bells might be significant for marking death or places of God, but God's rarely present in Leone's world. (Cumbow would probably disagree with that, given his entire chapter titled, "Sergio Leone, Catholic Filmmaker.")
There's also a chapter about recurring themes. So more delving into Leone's use of threes - which recurs across his films - but I found the bit about trains the most engrossing. The further into his films you get, the more trains factor heavily. Entirely absent in A Fistful of Dollars, used briefly by Mortimer at the beginning of For a Few Dollars More, and Tuco for his escape from the big Union sergeant in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
But in the later films, which move forward in time so that Duck, You Sucker and Once Upon a Time in America are firmly in the 20th Century, trains are critical and ubiquitous, symbols of eras defined by commerce. Once Upon a Time in the West is really all about trains and the changing of the times. The types of men who headlined Leone's early movies are on the way out, being pushed aside by businessmen planning to lay down rails that clearly mark our boundaries or paths. Cumbow notes it's similar to how American westerns about cattle ranching depict barbed wire, a constriction of the open lands (that we took from the Native Americans) and freedom (ditto.) Cumbow doesn't make that comment, I'm just editorializing.
It was a really informative book. I think my dad found a copy that was Cumbow's dissertation. It looks like it was done on a typewriter (and there's a couple of places I think he means to refer us back to earlier pages in the book, but forgot and left it blank), but it's well-written and aside from the occasional misread of a scene, feels very well-researched.
'In the more primitive ethos of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, those who dig work for those with loaded guns. But in the incipient modern world of Once upon a Time in the West, the gunman is hired boy to the businessman. Money talks. Morton says it is the only weapon that can stop a gun - but he's right only to a point. He and McBain are both visionaries, albeit at opposite ends of the capitalistic scale, and both are doomed to fall victim to men with loaded guns. Nevertheless, it is their values that survive: both the town and the railroad continue to grow.'
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