The eyes have it

Sergio Leone loved the close-up. His spaghetti Westerns, four of which are showing at the Music Box this week, get so close to the actors’ grubby, unshaven mugs that you can count their pores. Even actors who only get a few minutes of screen time have juicy close-ups. (Woody Strode claimed, plausibly, that he had more close-ups in his ten-minute appearance in Once Upon a Time in the West than he’d had in his entire career in Hollywood.)

In most films before Leone, the facial close-up serves the dual functions of giving the audience a good look at those glamorous stars we paid to see and letting us read the emotion in an expression. Leone uses close-ups to different ends. His actors don’t look glamorous (Though you can still enjoy the stern classical lines of Clint Eastwood’s visage or Henry Fonda’s ice-blue eyes, they’re both filthy). More importantly, their emotions are emphatically not on display.

That’s because Leone’s Westerns are like a giant three-handed poker game, with the players trying to read each other while giving nothing of themselves away. And it’s always a three-handed game. Though we might assume that the basic unit of the Western is the showdown, a one-on-one contest of good and evil, Leone’s Westerns work on triangulation. In A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood plays the leaders of rival families against each other. In For a Few Dollars More, he and Lee Van Cleef are bounty hunters after the same outlaw. The triangle in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is, of course, built into the title. It’s echoed in Once Upon a Time in the West, with the mysterious stranger (Charles Bronson), the cynical but lovable outlaw (Jason Robards) and the embodiment of evil (Fonda).

Not that any of his characters are angels (It’s deliberate irony that Van Cleef’s character in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is known as Angel Eyes). Though a few of his characters do good things (Eastwood saves a family in Fistful, Robards and Bronson help Claudia Cardinale keep her homestead in Once Upon a Time), they’re all cynics who rise above regular mediocre men because of their skill and their ruthlessness. Looked at as a group, Leone’s Westerns suggest a dark, mythic past in which morality takes a back seat to ability. The heroes of these films are the survivors. And the question posed by every close-up is, who will the survivors be?

Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns play at the Music Box starting Friday. For specific showtimes, see Indie & revival, or go to musicboxtheatre.com.