The Street was a creep’s Greyline tour through the Grade A and B obsessions that the movie mind had consolidated into genres. All you had to do was call out WAR! and the Harris had it. That’s why I’m concerned now. I’ve been cruising the marquees now and coming up empty.
“Sergio Leone is responsible. I’d like to shove a harmonica into Leone’s mouth for what he did to the Street. He understood that in times of no foreplay, the souped-up revenge themes he craved were not to be found in the pageantry of John Ford. Ford’s long shots weren’t nearly visceral enough. So Leone came copping from the maniacal and self-centered Kurosawa, to create a cinema of scowling cracked lips and wide-screen nosehairs. With one overwhelming pan-shot in ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ he swept away the waning genres. Eli Wallach is foraging through a vast graveyard, because he knows that one of those tombs contains all the money in the world. Leone’s camera swirls madly. There is a crescendo of Jew’s harps and trumpets. The shot might have lasted a week, but it ended when Wallach fell drooling and exhausted at the Man with No Name’s feet. It was awesome, Yeatsian. Who could watch another cavalry charge after that?
“It wasn’t long after that the Times Square stopped showing American Westerns. Leone had bulldozed all the Hathaway and Hawks prototypes into the cloying arms of television. But that’s not all. He had created a hero who was too big for any genre to contain. It used to be that there were reasons and limits to the exercise of vengeance. The hero would chase the bad guy and set right the damage he had done and at the end of the film things would be back in place, ready to be upset again during the second half of the double bill.
“Leone’s films don’t work that way. You never feel that Clint Eastwood has avenged himself because his paranoia tells him there are still people out there who deserve to be killed. This makes inescapable sense on 42nd Street where most of the audience is very street wise and knows that there are no hard and fast, good and bad guys, that everyone is a potential enemy. A man who kills everybody according to the theory that a good offense is a good defense, is a personality to be reckoned with. It was easy to transport the Eastwood character from riding the range to stalking the streets. A convincing case can be made for Sergio Leone as the godfather of the new genres that came to prominence after the Man with No Name hit it big on the Street.