Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Italy / USA, 229 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Harry Grey, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone, Stuart Kaminsky, Ernesto Gastaldi
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editor: Nino Baragli
Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld, Burt Young, Danny Aiello, William Forsythe, Joe Pesci, Louise Fletcher, James Hayden, Darlanne Fluegel, Larry Rapp, Richard Bright, Jennifer Connelly, Scott Schutzman Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Brian Bloom, Adrian Curran

Director and cowriter Sergio Leone's final film as a director (and his first in 13 years) initially looks like a departure from his earlier movies. In many ways Leone's whole career was about departures. He reinvented the Western in the '60s as an operatic, lugubrious, and explosive play of set pieces, composed as artfully as anything by Michelangelo Antonioni, and incidentally lending cinema history a title trope in Once Upon a Time in the West that hasn't been used up yet. Not only did Leone ape that title for this movie, but many others have used it since as well, with memorable "once upon a time" pictures for Mexico, Anatolia, Rio, Mumbai, China, and more (including next year, from Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood). I still haven't figured out what it signifies exactly, beyond a certain dreamy fairy tale yet cynically knowing epic nostalgia, with violence.

If Westerns are about the impulse to get further and further from civilization, about Huck Finn's eternal yen to light out for the Territory, then Once Upon a Time in America is about the first stop that immigrants from Europe made on the quixotic journey and the place where many of them pulled up and stayed, the teeming ghettoes of New York and other Eastern cities at the turn of the century. The story involves four youths who come of age with approximately Prohibition, three Jews and a Pole (approximately) who fight for social position in New York with Irish and Italians ahead of them in line and WASPs entirely out of reach (except, sometimes, their women). They commit petty crimes, battle for turf, and eventually graduate to bootlegging. It sounds like a typical gangster picture, and indeed as a marathon it sits comfortably next to the first two Godfather movies and Goodfellas. But it's a Leone picture and also strays at will into just plain weird stuff.



I think what most sets it apart from other American gangster pictures is that Leone, perhaps as an Italian national, can more naturally grasp the details of the outsider status that is imposed so forcefully on immigrants and refugees—now and since forever. Yes, on the one hand, as anyone who has given it a second's thought surely understands, the US is a nation of immigrants by definition. The only ones with rightful claims are Native Americans, and even they may not have been here as long as, say, the Chinese in China. And yet the virulent hatred that we see of immigrants and refugees today is not new in America either. It's as if it were all some kind of hazing ceremony that occasionally grows toxic and must be cauterized: a process of getting to this country (how hard that was and is remains woefully miscalculated), and then surviving for a generation, with or without formal citizenship, until your kids and grandkids can in turn begin to argue for closing the door on further immigration.

The four principals in Once Upon a Time in America—Noodles (Scott Schutzman Tiler and Robert De Niro), Max (Rusty Jacobs and James Woods), Patsy (Brian Bloom and James Hayden), and Cockeye (Adrian Curran and William Forsythe)—make their way by brute force and guile, until the end of Prohibition changes the playing field. Sometimes they fall—they go to jail or even die, and eventually they turn on one another. One undergoes a notably unlikely transformation, but that's not seen until the end. They are always outsiders. They feel it painfully and close ranks to create their own inside where they are accepted. Money, as always, changes everything, for better and for ill.

It's a long picture and arguably muddled, with the settings shifting about among (approximately) 1920, 1933, 1967, and points between. As a classic movie in good standing now it also comes in many versions and with a sad story of box office failure. It got a standing O at Cannes in 1984, did not find much success in general release, and endured cuts to try to get it down to a more manageable size. But Once Upon a Time in America is not manageable—its best quality is that it is an unruly beast making its own rules as it goes, like the characters. Noodles, for example, in later life is a connoisseur of opium, if not an addict. One theory of the film indeed is that the whole thing is an opium fantasy. Another example: for no particular reason, a jewelry store insider, Carol (Tuesday Weld), is an unabashed nymphomaniac and masochist. Women are treated badly in all parts of the picture but Carol seems to like it, which is confusing. More: the soundtrack includes Rossini's "Thieving Magpie" (reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, you have to think deliberately) and schmaltzy versions of "Yesterday," though the bulk of course is another swooning score by Ennio Morricone.

At nearly four hours, the length of Once Upon a Time in America is something it shares with the Godfather movies and Goodfellas. But it's not that hard for me anyway to sit for it. In many ways it appears slow and aimless, but Leone's art as a director is such that I enjoy seeing him work out things like the look and feel of New York a hundred years ago. Much of the movie is about the characters, and the circle of characters around them, slowly and patiently putting together the portraits in all their complexities and dead ends. Some of it is preposterous but that's often when the movie is most entertaining. As a vision of the superpower America, it's right on the mark and few others are much like it, even the second Godfather movie, which also tells the immigrant's story. It makes me grieve all the more for Leone's unfinished project of an adaptation of Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, which would have been his vision of the superpower Russia. As I am an American, Minnesota born, and generally sympathetic to all things American, I'm glad Leone got to us first. He got a lot of things exactly right.