One of the defining characteristics of 20th-century culture was the blurring of the lines between "high" and "low" art, words that now, unlike a century ago, need to be offset by quotation marks. In the field of cinema, perhaps no figure symbolizes the change quite as readily as Italian director Sergio Leone. Directors of the French New Wave may have toyed with the conventions of the American genre films they loved, but it took Leone to bring their advances back to the masses, breaking down the old myths of the American western, mocking them, and building new myths of his own. The popularizer, if not quite the inventor, of the "spaghetti western" (a term he disliked), Leone populated his Old West with grizzled, cynical antiheroes and men without names prone to confrontations that joined the form of the western to the feel of opera. With each film, from 1963's A Fistful Of Dollars through the sadly underappreciated Once Upon A Time In America, Leone's filmmaking grew more complex, delving deeper into the mysteries of movie-mythologized America from the perspective of an outsider who viewed it with as much distrust as love. Umberto Eco once said that his was the first generation to discuss with equal intelligence and enthusiasm the works of William Shakespeare and Mickey Mouse, and he could have easily described it as the first to understand a Leone film. Considering the director's towering influence, it's odd that British writer Christopher Frayling's biography is the first in any language. In terms of clarifying the specifics and motivations of Leone's career, it will likely set the standard for years to come. But, while he remains a sharp critic and historian, Frayling's skills as a biographer are limited: He provides an excellent account of the cultural conditions that allowed for Leone's unique vision and a detailed look at the production details of each film, but he doesn't really bring to life his central character outside of some elementary Freudian analysis of his parental relations (thankfully abandoned early on) and the frequently conflicting accounts of friends and coworkers. Something To Do With Death effectively sets the stage, but it leaves Leone as unknowable as one of his protagonists.