The Silent Film World of Sergio Leone

To mark the 60th Anniversary of The Good, The Bad and They Ugly (1966) South West Silents is planning a special weekend celebration of the work of Sergio Leone (1929-1989). This Sergio Leone Weekend will take place at the Bristol Megascreen (Bristol’s biggest and loudest cinema) on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th April 2026.

Now, producing an event around Spaghetti Westerns made in the 1960/70s might seem a bit off subject for an organisation dedicated to the silent era. But when you start patting the dust off one’s poncho you begin to realise the distinctive silent film elements of Leone’s work.

From the outset, there is the use of dialogue; or the little use of it to be honest when it comes to Leone.

Sergio Leone’s screenplays/scripts are renowned for keeping the dialogue to a minimum and you can clearly see this in all of the highly celebrated titles that make up his Dollars Trilogy; A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and, most importantly, in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) are very much lean when it comes to dialogue.

"My films are basically silent films, the dialogue just adds some weight” Leone once said; and it clearly shows in his work.

Then there is the ‘silent film heritage’ of the director himself. Leone’s mother Edvige Maria Valcarenghi (1886-1969) was a silent film star who gave up her film career by the time Leone was born in 1929. Leone’s father on the other hand, Vincenzo Leone (1879 -1959), continued his career as an actor, writer, producer and director until the early 1950s.

But it was between the 1910s and the late 1920s that Vincenzo’s output (then credited as Roberto Roberti) is the most profound. Roberti was making a healthy amount of silent films in the Neapolitan film industry alongside other celebrated Italian and Naples based filmmakers such as Giuseppe de Liguoro (1869–1944) and lvira Notari (1875–1946). We will be marking the work of Vincenzo Leone with an event set around his work.

And of course, silent films were never really silent, and neither were the films of Sergio Leone thanks to the incredible talent of Ennio Morricone (1928-2020). So expect the films to be big and loud at the Megascreen between Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th April 2026.

Weekend Line Up:

Saturday 18th April:

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Vincenzo Leone Silent Film

Sunday 19th April:

My Name is Nobody (1973)

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966)