Colossus of Rhodes, 81 x 41 in. The Frayling Archive. RSL427. Click image to enlarge.

Sergio entered the Italian film industry in 1946, at the age of eighteen. Between the opera film La Traviata (1947) and the epic Last Days of Pompeii (1959), he served a long apprenticeship - mainly in Rome - as an assistant director on about thirty-five feature films. Some of these - Quo Vadis, Helen of Troy, The Nun's Story, Ben Hur - were American blockbusters financed by frozen dollars (earned by movies in Italy and spent there to avoid taxes) during the colorful era dubbed by Federico Fellini "Hollywood on the Tiber". Leone later said that he learned from this twelve-year apprenticeship a fascination with realistic appearances in movies, combined with an enjoyment of big-budget action sequences and an ambition to create spectaculars of his own. He worked on the second unit of Ben Hur (1959), responsible for the famous chariot race; and in his own first film as a credited director, The Colossus of Rhodes (1960), he included a memorable sword duel on top of the giant statue, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The Films of Sergio Leone

The Western, Leone-style