Once Upon a Time in America

Once Upon a Time in America; crime drama, Italy / USA, 1984; D: Sergio Leone, S: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld, James Hayden, Larry Rapp, Danny Aiello, Burt Young, Jennifer Connelly, Joe Pesci

The life of Jewish gangster David Aaronson, alias Noodles: in the Bronx of the 20s of the 20th Century, while they were still tweens, Max and Noodles photographed a cop having sex with a prostitute who is a minor and thus successfully blackmailed him not to interfere with their alcohol smuggling business during the Prohibition era. They entered the mafia by giving them the idea how to push the goods thrown into the river during police raids back to the surface of the water thanks to sacks of air filled with salt. When a local mafia youngster Bugsy killed one of their friends for interfering with his business, Noodles killed him and spent 12 years in prison. Then he smuggled alcohol with Max, but his beloved Deborah left him after he raped her, and became an actress. After the end of Prohibition era, Max decided to rob the New York Federal Reserve Bank, so Noodles phoned the police to save his life, since the risk was too high. Noodles fled New York upon hearing that Max died in the police raid. Thirty five years later, Max returned to New York and went to a dinner invitation of State Secretary Bailey, who turns out to be Max, who survived under a different identity. Max stole all his savings and took Deborah as his mistress, and thus offered Noodles to kill him. Noodles refused and left his estate.

Even though the epic, 4-hour long crime drama "Once Upon a Time in America" abounds with brilliant scenes and was critically acclaimed, it is an overrated and overlong film, a film that is "brilliant in a wrong way", and does not have that special control that is needed from a director that shoots his dream project and is thus in love with every scene to the point of excess and overindulgance, thus the whole movie ultimately gets crushed by its tedious tone and starts going on one's nerves after a while. The opening act is excellent and filled with great match cuts and careful scene transitions by director Sergio Leone: for instance, Noodles (Robert De Niro), in an opium den, remembers how three of his friends were killed in a police raid, including Max, and as their corpses are covered in body bags, there is a match cut to a coffin being carried at a party, with the word "Prohibition" on it. Throughout this time, the sound of a phone ringing is heard off-screen, Noodles goes to an office, sees a phone and picks it up, but the sound of ringing is still heard, until finally, in the next scene, a police officer picks up the phone in the police precinct—meaning that the viewers were hearing the sound from three sequences in advance. When Noodles decides to escape from New York, he goes to a bus station, there is a giant wall with a glass door in the middle, promoting people to visit Coney Island. As Noodles goes to look at himself closer in the glass door, he suddenly has grey hair, turns around and walks away from the same wall, in the same bus station, the song "Yesterday" by the Beatles plays in the background, signalling that thirty-five years have passed in one match cut. They all form a very good starting point for a story and manage to absorb the viewer into their world.

But despite his talent, somewhere in the middle, Leone loses the focus and point of the gangster story after a while, and problems start to show up. On the one hand, he wants to show unglamorized gangsters who are repulsive, violent and backward, by showing disturbing situations, like when Noodles rapes a woman, Carol, on her agreement so that his gang could convincingly steal the diamonds in a staged theft, and later on they take out their penises so that she can recognize the perpetrator, while putting back their bandit scarves on their faces. Other examples of mysogyny include that the first character killed in the film is a woman, Eve, and the infamous sequence where gangsters pressure Danny Aiello's macho cop character by swaping his baby boy for a baby girl in the maternity ward, which he takes as the biggest insult. On the other hand, Leone contradicts himself by including Ennio Morricone's melancholic music which tries to give some sort of an undue, sickening emotional dimension and sentimental depiction of the gangster as a tragic, misunderstood hero. It feels unearned and disingenuous. If he wanted to stay true to his motto, Leone should have presented the story as cynical and cold as possible, since no emotions can be conjured up from Noodles, a killer, robber, and rapist who takes it out on Deborah (in a clumsy sequence where the driver of the car just keeps driving the entire time of the rape behind him, as if that does not bother him), and then meets her again thirty-five years later without even giving any apology. It would have been better if Deborah was the main protagonist after this scene, and not Noodles anymore. It is an wildly ambitious, sharp film about the empty lives of gangsters, filled with great ideas here and there, but the dialogue is conventional, and the characters are sometimes empty and vague. As film critic Donald Clarke observed, "to this day the misogyny remains indigestible". It is not that primitivism and bad behavior should not be depicted on film. They should. But even in that case, the director is obliged to depict this primitivism and bad behavior in a tasteful, measured manner. Here, it is done in a tasteless, botched way. 

Grade:++