There are two scenes in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West which affect me like grand opera. Both of them feature Claudia Cardinale.
In the first, Cardinale as Jill McBain, descends the train which has just pulled into town. As the other passengers begin to leave the depot, Jill looks up at the station clock with concern on her face. No one is there to pick her up. Ennio Morricone’s music swells on the soundtrack, accompanied with Edda Dell’Orso’s shiver-inducing wordless vocals, as Jill hires a rider to take her out of town. The second scene is much more silent. A close-up of her face, verging on heartbreak, as she says “I hope you come back some day” to one of our heroes. These moments destroy me- so much that I could never watch this film in mixed company, let alone in public, except for treating others with my blubbering.
It would be enough to write about Claudia Cardinale just because she starred in my favourite film of all time. But of course, there was more.
Born and raised in La Goulette, a neighbourhood of Tunis, Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale won the “Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia” competition in 1957. The prize was a trip to Italy, where she would soon win a lot of film roles with many internationally renowned Italian directors. Look at these credits (to name only a few): Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street); Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, Sandra, Conversation Piece); Valerio Zurlini (Girl with a Suitcase). With her bright screen presence, it was no wonder she was nicknamed “Italy’s girlfriend”.
She also had a substantial career in English language cinema, including Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther, Richard Brooks’s The Professionals, and Henry Hathaway’s Circus World, playing the daughter of John Wayne and Rita Hayworth!
Claudia Cardinale was once a life partner to Franco Cristaldi, who produced some of her own films, including The Red Tent, and then married director Pasquale Squittieri, with whom she made several films, including Claretta (1984), which won her the Nastro d’Argento Award for Best Actress. She had previously won two David di Donatello awards for Best Actress, in Damiano Damiani’s The Day of the Owl (1968) and Luigi Zampa’s A Girl in Australia (1971).
She would still appear in such international productions as the all-star adventure film Escape to Athena (1979), The Salamander (1981), Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), Marco Bellochio’s Henry IV (1984), Diane Kurys’s A Man in Love (1987), and Manoel de Olivera’s Gebo and the Shadow (2012). It was a delight to see her in a cameo, as herself(!) in the excellent 1996 Tunisian film, A Summer in La Goulette.
Offscreen, Claudia Cardinale supported feminist causes, was awarded the Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’OMRI (Order of Merit of the Italian Republic), a UNESCO goodwill ambassador for the Defence of Women’s Rights since March 2000, and was a goodwill ambassador for the UNESCO World Water Day for 2006.
Still, my memories of Claudia Cardinale are dominated by Once Upon a Time in the West. As the only female lead in all of Sergio Leone’s filmography, her character Jill McBain is the not-so virtuous “damsel in distress” who becomes the Cradle of Civilization. Ms. Cardinale lends Jill a fiery presence with equal parts tragedy. Those eyes say it all.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.