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This was a murdered movie, now brought back to life on home video. Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America", which in its intended 227-minute version is an epic poem of violence and greed, was chopped by ninety minutes for U.S. theatrical release into an incomprehensible mess without texture, timing, mood, or sense. The rest of the world saw the original film, which I saw at the Cannes Film Festival. In America, a tragic decision was made. When the full-length version (now available in cassette form) played at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, I wrote:

"Is the film too long? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it takes real concentration to understand Leone's story construction, in which everything may or may not be an opium dream, a nightmare, a memory, or a flashback, and that we have to keep track of characters and relationships over fifty years. No, in the sense that the movie is compulsively and continuously watchable and that the audience did not stir or grow restless as the epic unfolded."

The movie tells the story of five decades in the lives of four gangsters from New York City -- childhood friends who are merciless criminals almost from the first, but who have a special bond of loyalty to each other. When one of them breaks that bond, or thinks he does, he is haunted by guilt until late in his life, when he discovers that he was not the betrayer but the betrayed. Leone's original version tells this story in a complex series of flashbacks, memories, and dreams. The film opens with two scenes of terrifying violence, moves to an opium den where the Robert De Niro character is seeking to escape the consequences of his action, and then establishes its tone with a scene of great power: A ceaselessly ringing telephone, ringing forever in the conscience of a man who called the cops and betrayed his friends. The film moves back and forth in a tapestry of episodes, which all fit together into an emotional whole. There are times when we don't understand exactly what is happening, but never a time when we don't feel confidence in the film's narrative.

That version was not seen in American theaters, although it is now available on cassette [and DVD]. Instead, the whole structure of flashbacks was junked. The telephone rings once. The poetic transitions are gone. The movie has been wrenched into apparent chronological order, scenes have been thrown out by the handful, relationships are now inexplicable, and the audience is likely to spend much of its time in complete bewilderment. It is a great irony that this botched editing job was intended to "clarify" the film.

Here are some of the specific problems with the shortened version. A speakeasy scene comes before a newspaper headline announces that Prohibition has been ratified. Prohibition is then repealed, on what feels like the next day but must be six years later. Two gangsters talk about robbing a bank in front of a woman who has never been seen before in the film; they've removed the scene explaining who she is. A labor leader turns up, unexplained, and involves the gangsters in an inexplicable situation. He later sells out, but to whom? Men come to kill De Niro's girlfriend, a character we've hardly met, and we don't know if they come from the mob or the police. And here's a real howler: At the end of the shortened version, De Niro leaves a room he has never seen before by walking through a secret panel in the wall. How did he know it was there? In the long version, he was told it was there. In the short version, his startling exit shows simple contempt for the audience.

Many of the film's most beautiful shots are missing from the short version, among them a bravura moment when a flash-forward is signaled by the unexpected appearance of a Frisbee, and another where the past becomes the present as The Beatles' "Yesterday" sneaks into the sound track. Relationships are truncated, scenes are squeezed of life, and I defy anyone to understand the plot of the short version. The original "Once Upon a Time in America" gets a four-star rating. The shorter version is a travesty.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Once Upon a Time in America movie poster

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

139 minutes

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Once Upon a Time in America Reviews

It isn’t just the echoing moments that keep you absorbed. It’s those reverberant dreamland settings and Leone’s majestic, billowing sense of film movement; the images seem to come at you in waves of feeling.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2023

Once Upon a Time in America is a tremendous work that captures the animating ambition and sorrow at the heart of the American Dream.

Full Review | Oct 22, 2021

...sprawling subject matter that's employed to admittedly erratic yet often striking effect by Leone...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 16, 2021

...an epic of blinkered nostalgia.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2020

The cinematographic style has evolved, but it's still unmistakably reminiscent of his earlier projects.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 6, 2020

A stratosphere-scraping citadel of cinema, nearly everything about Leone's last film - and greatest masterwork - speaks to the grand illusion of the American Dream.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2018

The movie's four hours long, but no one had the time to write a single real character.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2018

Complex gangster epic has strong violence, sex.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 10, 2017

This would-be epic schlep, dragging almost 50 years of chronology over a sluggish 140 minutes, is far too slight of text and ponderous of presentation to sustain more than nodding-off dramatic interest.

Full Review | May 5, 2017

Adding 22 minutes only enhances Leone's brilliant saga of guilt and betrayal

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 11, 2015

A tale of haunting introspection, unremitting power and potent symbolism. "America" ruminates on the corrosive effects of greed, violence, objectification and pain, and forces us to face despicable acts of a stand-in for our nation's worst impulses.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2015

While Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America" is not quite the masterpiece that some make it out to be due to its excess, there are still plenty of things to recommend about it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 29, 2014

The film, photographed by Tonino Delli Colli, is striking to look at, especially its New York street scenes, which were shot in Manhattan, Montreal and a back lot near Rome. The acting is stunning.

Full Review | Apr 22, 2014

Just gasp at the scale, at the immaculate period reconstruction and at that incredible opening with its endlessly ringing phone.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 22, 2014

A striking tale of loyalty, love, friendship and ambition, Once Upon A Time is a work of technical beauty and sombre emotion.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 22, 2014

Sergio Leone explores the seamiest byways of urban Americana through the story of two gangsters who start their partnership as Brooklyn kids in 1921 and tragically end it in the late '60s.

A work of tremendous intellectual depth and emotional range

Full Review | Original Score: 84/100 | Aug 8, 2013

Here was a filmmaker who specialized in pure, blistering images, and this operatic earthiness just doesn't play as well as the horrifying, salacious stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 21, 2012

Sergio Leone's languid, lovely and lengthy ode to Lower East Side mobsters (more specifically, mobster films) ...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 20, 2012

Sad and vast yet compelling throughout, this remain Leone's most towering achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 17, 2012

The Cinema Fix presents

CLASSIC FILM REVIEW: ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984)

Directed by: Sergio Leone

Produced by: Arnon Milchan

Screenplay by: Sergio Leone, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini

Based on: The Hoods by Harry Grey

Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, William Forsythe, Jennifer Connelly, Elizabeth McGovern, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Tuesday Weld, Treat Williams, William Forsythe, Richard Bright, James Hayden, Brian Bloom, William Forsythe, Adrian Curran, Darlanne Fluegel. Larry Rapp, Mike Monetti, Richard Foronji, Robert Harper, Dutch Miller, Gerard Murphy, Amy Ryder, Julie Cohen etc.

Music: Ennio Morricone

Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli

CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS

If you were, like me, thoroughly absorbed by Martin Scorsese’s recent directorial gangster epic, The Irishman (2019) , you should definitely check out another incredible gangster drama, Once Upon A Time in America (1984). It is directed by acclaimed Italian filmmaker, Sergio Leone, he of “Spaghetti Western” fame. Indeed, Once Upon A Time in America (1984), was the first feature film he’d made since A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) . Sadly, it was to be his final film.

With a director’s cut running at a behemoth 250 minutes and original theatrical release lasting 229 minutes, Once Upon A Time in America (1984), is certainly a marathon viewing experience and fitting epitaph to Leone’s cinematic craft. Yet, the film rarely feels over-long or slow because there are so many memorable scenes, fascinatingly complex characterisations, incredible intrigue and enough narrative density present to satisfy any audience member with the patience to let it absorb you. Structurally, the film is epic in nature too as it cross-cuts between three, arguably four, separate timelines in: 1918, the 1920’s, the 1930’s and 1968. Interestingly, I watched it via Amazon Prime in two sittings and is so long even the original ‘Intermission’ card remains.

Leone and his amazing production cast and crew took almost a year to film Once Upon A Time in America (1984). It’s reported to have had somewhere between eight to ten hours of footage on completion. He originally wanted to release it as a two-part epic, but the studio insisted it was distributed as one film. The almost-four hour theatrical release was received to great critical acclaim in Europe, however, a severely chopped down 139-minute version was put out in America. It was a critical and box office bomb. American critics however, lauded the European version, lamenting the non-release of Leone’s full cinematic vision.

For a filmmaker who was drawn to stories set in the America, Leone would generally film in European studios and locations. While some exteriors for Once Upon A Time in America (1984) were shot on location in Florida and New York, many of the interiors were recreated in Rome’s Cinecitta. Furthermore, a Manhattan restaurant was built in Venice, and incredibly, Grand Central Station was rendered at part of the Gare du Nord in Paris. Having said that, Once Upon A Time in America (1984), is so carefully and exquisitely designed and filmed, you would not notice. While possessing more than an air of European arthouse sensibilities, the film, based on a novel called The Hoods , represents Leone’s and his co-screenwriter’s tarnished vision of the American dream. Most significantly is the theme of a loss of innocence. 1920’s New York is presented through the eyes of these Jewish working-class children, many of them sons and daughter of migrants from Europe. These are tough times and the story explores the collision between young innocence and adult corruption by society and humanity. Once Upon A Time in America (1984) is also a story about friendship, loyalty, passion and crime.

The narrative revolves around the lives of young gang of Jewish friends growing up in Brooklyn called: Noodles, Max, Patsy, Cockeye and little Dominic. It’s majestic storytelling of the highest quality as we flit between past, present, now and future. Robert DeNiro’s older Noodles reminisces both from 1930 and 1968. There is a sense that he may be projecting from the hazy and drug-addled glow of an opium den. That is open to interpretation though. Thematically, the framework hangs a history of childhood friendships, juxtaposing it with the same people as adults and their victories, losses and betrayals. Further themes include: love, lust, greed, crime, broken relationships, Prohibition, union corruption; as well as focusing on the rise of mobsters in American society.

Noodles as portrayed by an imperious Robert DeNiro is calm on the outside, however, his often-rash actions show him as impetuous, emotional and wild on the inside. James Woods’ Max is much more careful, calculating and ice-cold in his business. But the two forge a friendship as teenagers which continues in adulthood. Their childhood gang subsequently becomes a renowned bootlegging and criminal outfit. Leone does not ask us to like or find sympathy for the characters, but rather respect that they are a product of a ruthless era. Sure, they could have got day jobs, but they decide to become criminals and very successful they are too. Even after Noodles gets out of jail for killing a rival, Max has saved a place for him in their illegal liquor trades. Only later does the true deception occur. Ultimately, while their stories are incredibly compelling, these men are violent lawbreakers who spill blood, bribe, threaten, kill and rape, all in an attempt to rise up the ladder of the American capitalist system.

I don’t want to spoil any more of the story, but safe to say the cast in this classic film are amazing. Along with DeNiro and Woods’ brutally convincing performances a whole host of young and older actors are directed beautifully by Leone’s careful hand. The standouts for me are Jennifer Connelly in a very early role. She portrays the younger Deborah, while Elizabeth McGovern is the older version of the same character. Connelly is a picture of angelic innocence and Noodles is smitten with her from the beginning. It’s sad therefore that when the adult Noodles’ is rejected by Deborah, his reaction is both toxic and unforgiveable.

Undeniably, sex and violence are powerful features in Once Upon A Time in America (1984). Sex especially is rarely, if at all, romantic or part of loving relationship. There are two brutal rape scenes in the adult years. Even when they are kids the character of younger Peggy is shown to use her promiscuity as a weapon to blackmail a police officer. There are some tender moments though, notably during the scene where young Patsy seeks to lose his virginity with Peggy. Her payment would be a cream cake, but Brian eats the cake and saves his innocence. Yet such scenes are fleeting as mob rule, violent robberies, fiery death and murder ultimately dominate the character’s bloody existences.

As I say, the actors all give memorable performances and the supporting cast including the likes of Treat Williams, Danny Aiello, Tuesday Weld and Joe Pesci are extremely strong too. A special mention to James Hayden who portrays the older Patsy. He doesn’t have the most dialogue compared to the characters of Max and Noodles; however, he has a quiet power which steals many scenes via strength of personality. The fact that Hayden died of a heroin overdose, in 1983, after completing filming only adds to the cult of tragedy. Dead at 30 years of age, James Hayden never got to see any completed version of Once Upon A Time in America (1984).

Given this review is getting near epic proportions itself I will begin to wrap up by heaping praise on the incredible production design. The costumes, locations, vehicles, props and era are slavishly and beautifully recreated. So much so you can almost smell the smoke as it drifts up from the Brooklyn streets. Moreover, the film is superbly photographed by Tonino Delli Colli. The music! I haven’t even mentioned the sumptuous score by the legendary Ennio Morricone. His score is a masterful symphony of haunting laments for loss of love, friendship, loyalty and life. Much indeed like Once Upon A Time in America (1984) itself, as a whole. In conclusion, if you haven’t seen it, I urge you to do so in the knowledge that Sergio Leone has transplanted that same brutally elegant vision of the Wild West to the American gangster genre with unforgettable emotional resonance and power.

Once Upon A Time In America Review

01 Jan 1984

139 minutes

Once Upon A Time In America

Let's get our heresies out of the way early on; the film that Once Upon A Time In America is often compared to is, of course, The Godfather. They share superficial similarities: both are epic in scope and exceedingly long. They both have at their heart a history of immigrants and the lure of criminality to the poor; they both traverse decades and they both paint a picture of the birth of 20th century urban America.

Leone's film is arguably the better of the two - if the less popular - eschewing, as it does, the soapy melodramatics of Coppola's family saga in favour of less audience-friendly, but more intriguing, ambiguity and symbolism.

Superficially, it is a gangster film. There are gangs and guns and drive-bys; speakeasies and Prohibition. But in the midst of the familiar trappings, Leone investigates the more resonant, enigmatic themes of time, identity and the reliability of memory. And he does it with incredible technical skill.

Leone is above all a master visualist and his movie is drenched in imagery pregnant with meaning. In the early portion of the film, we follow the adolescent Noodles and Max as they exuberantly roll drunks, torch newspaper stands and form the friendship that will become one of the film's central thematic pillars. Here the looming Manhattan Bridge seems to offer a way out of the poverty stricken ghetto, but nobody ever crosses it.

Later in the film, before the gruelling rape sequence, Noodles dines in a vacant ballroom - an infantile, sociopathic vision of loving gesture, and of course it reveals Noodles as a man who must own the object of his love completely. After it, he stands in a dishevelled tuxedo against a blue-grey seascape, a scene as drained of colour as Noodles now is of redeeming moral worth. But, to get to the point, what is it all about?

Since its release, the complex structure of the movie has left audiences and critics slightly baffled. It's a movie that seems to offer no real resolution. Or at least no easy one. Who took the money from the case at Grand Central Station? How does Max survive what appears to be his murder? And what happens to him in the end? Does he fling himself into the garbage truck after Noodles' final visit? If he does, then the film takes on an unambiguously judgemental tone. The man who came from trash, and reduced a culture to trash, finally reduces himself to trash. Or does any of it actually happen at all?

One fascinating reading of the film, suggested by Leone and investigated by Christopher Frayling in his biography Something About Death, is that the film takes place - in its entirety - in one moment in 1933. Noodles enters the opium den after his betrayal has left his friends dead. He lies on his cot and, in a single moment signified by the enigmatic smile that concludes the film, remembers his past and dreams a possible future.

In the end, Once Upon A Time In America, like all great art - and that is surely what it is - stubbornly resists a final, authoritative interpretation. It places us resolutely alongside the mystified Noodles, desperately searching for a coherence to his life which is probably unobtainable.

Movies | 20 03 2021

Movies | 11 05 2016

Cast & crew
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Metacritic reviews

Once upon a time in america.

100 The A.V. Club Keith Phipps The A.V. Club Keith Phipps A film of fatally flawed heroes, oversized passions, nation-building, and, inevitably, violence, America follows its characters from childhood to old age by way of the kind of grand-scale filmmaking that wouldn't be seen again until Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. [2014 re-release]
100 Chicago Reader Dave Kehr Chicago Reader Dave Kehr It’s a funny, rousing, brilliant piece of work.
100 Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert An epic poem of violence and greed.
100 Empire Adam Smith Empire Adam Smith While The Godfather delivers certainty and a comforting dramatic resolution, Once Upon A Time In America delivers a profound kind of mystery. While Coppola's film delivers answers, Leone's asks questions. It lingers and plays on the mind; its meanings shift and change like a faded memory or a half-remembered dream.
100 Entertainment Weekly Entertainment Weekly A brilliantly detailed Lower East Side Jewish version of The Godfather.
90 IGN IGN Watching the film takes some patience. You have moments where there's 10 seconds or more of silence in between dialogue. When it gets violent, it's not the psychotic glee we're used to from Quentin Tarentino and his acolytes, it's simply the way things were in that life, unvarnished and brutally honest.
80 BBC BBC A film as epic and rich as Sergio Leone's imagination, Once Upon a Time in America sits at the head table of gangster movies.
75 LarsenOnFilm Josh Larsen LarsenOnFilm Josh Larsen Once Upon a Time in America paints a portrait of the United States as a land of shadows and violence, yet one that nevertheless has an irresistible, romantic pull. [2014 re-release]
67 Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt Although substantially shortened for its United States release, this violent drama still has the feel of an epic, as director Sergio Leone explores the seamiest byways of urban Americana through the story of two gangsters who start their partnership as Brooklyn kids in 1921 and tragically end it in the late '60s. Yet the story has gaps and many of the incidents have a flatness which suggest deeper flaws than cutting and trimming probably account for. [U.S. theatrical release]
60 The Irish Times Donald Clarke The Irish Times Donald Clarke Once Upon a Time in America remains the most “problematic” of Leone’s major pictures. It is enveloping, operatic and slightly mad. We can forgive the confusion and the non- synchronised dialogue. But to this day the misogyny remains indigestible. [2014 re-release]
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The man who redefined the Western had the chance to do the same for the mob movie. When Sergio Leone crossed the Atlantic to make films in America, he was offered the chance to direct The Godfather before Francis Ford Coppola . Paramount wanted an Italian filmmaker, and Leone was a hot name after helming the “Dollars Trilogy” featuring Clint Eastwood ’s Man With No Name. But given the chance to adapt a best-seller for a major Hollywood studio, Leone declined. Reportedly, he felt The Godfather glorified the Mafia, and he had his own preferred take on organized crime. That was Harry Gray ’s semiautobiographical novel The Hoods , about growing up as a Jewish gangster in Prohibition-era New York.

Leone spent more than a decade chasing the project, which would become Once Upon a Time in America . The movie he had passed over, as directed by Coppola, rewrote the script of mobster films, and Coppola would push things further with his experiments with form in The Godfather Part II . Indeed, it beat Once Upon a Time in America to the punch by ten years in juxtaposing different time periods within a gangster story context. Where The Godfather Part II tracks two eras, contrasting father Vito Corleone’s rise with son Michael’s fall, Once Upon a Time in America juggles three periods in the life of David “Noodles” Aaronson ( Robert De Niro )

Robert De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America

Three Different Timelines

There is his adolescence in 1918. The young Noodles ( Scott Tiler ) puts together a small gang of fellow punks to do favors for local strongmen, ogles his friend’s sister, Deborah ( Jennifer Connelly ), and finds a best friend in Maximilian “Max” Bercovicz ( Rusty Jacobs ), who becomes the leader of the gang. Noodles gets nowhere with Deborah, but the gang does seem off to a promising start until a flash of violence lands Noodles in the big house. When he gets out in 1930, all grown up into Robert De Niro, he falls back in with Max ( James Woods ) and the boys as big-time operators in the bootlegging trade. But heaps of money can’t win him Deborah ( Elizabeth McGovern ), and tempting offers from the Mafia test his friendship with an increasingly erratic Max. When a bank heist that Noodles tried to stop goes wrong, he’s branded a rat and forced to flee for his life, guilt-ridden over the thought he got his friends killed. He stays in Buffalo until 1968 when a mysterious message brings him back to New York to settle things once and for all.

Is It All a Dream?

Or does it? Once Upon a Time in America ’s three timelines are all out of sequence. The film begins and ends with Noodles hiding from the Mafia in an opium den, puffing away at a pipe and clearly lost to its effects. Elements of the 1968 story, particularly its open ending, are a bit too surreal to be wholly acceptable as to what “really” happened. While never confirmed, there is a strong implication by the end that the film has been an opium dream, Noodles’ memories of his past mingled with fantasies of a possible future.

RELATED: Coppola’s 'The Conversation': How Surveillance Changes the Watcher

If a dream it is, then it’s a dream on an epic scale. The shot of the young boys walking under the looming Manhattan Bridge is the most iconic image from this movie, but equally impressive are crowd scenes filling the Manhattan neighborhood, and lovingly assembled sequences of nothing but characters’ forlorn expressions and Ennio Morricone ’s haunting music (most of it written before filming and played on set). The structure itself is epic and audacious. It takes time to orient yourself to the film’s nonlinear story, and the tease of unreality without any confirmation – or any firm resolution to the story – is a tall ask, for the filmmaker and the audience.

Leone and his collaborators juggle the timelines with aplomb. The original 229-minute theatrical cut doesn’t feel that long as a whole, though there are diversions here and there that the film could live without. Most of the performances by the adult cast are understated, with flashes of violence and high emotion at key points. The minimal dialogue is cheesy at times, but at other times puts just the right button on emotions largely expressed through picture and score. This can all come to an acquired taste to a first-time viewer, but if you give Once Upon a Time in America some patience and attention, you’ll find it well worth the effort. To watch a master of a craft is always rewarding, and Leone had been a master for years by the time he made his passion project.

Form Over Subject

But it is worth noting that the form is more impressive than the subject here. If Leone really did object to The Godfather’s supposed glamorizing of mobsters (a frequent and unfair charge against the book and the trilogy), it’s curious that he would provide such a sweeping and sympathetic account of a character who is, in some ways, much worse than the likes of Michael Corleone.

Noodles is hard to like. In his youth, he’s a crude, lecherous, often sullen hood. As a man, he’s a thief, murderer, and rapist proud of his limited ambition. What good traits he has always end up landing him in trouble or giving way to his baser impulses. He’s loyal to a fault, which gets him sent to prison and keeps him involved with Max. His early show of inventiveness is put to criminal use and vanishes by the time he grows up. He has a sincere romantic longing for Deborah, but he betrays her affection for him in the most upsetting scene in any Leone film. And his good sense to keep the Mafia and corrupt union officials at arms’ length mean that he doesn’t see certain double-crosses coming.

Max is no better. He, too, is loyal to a fault – unless the 1968 story is real, in which case, Max’s single-minded obsession with business trumps friendship. The other two gang members, Patsy and Cockeye ( James Hayden and William Forsythe respectively) are a little too thinly drawn to inspire much empathy, though Larry Rapp as Fat Moe (Deborah’s sister) picks up some of that slack.

The Narrative Is Too Good for the Characters

These aren’t the enigmatic, archetypal figures of Leone’s Westerns, capable of sustaining an epic despite limited or no development. They aren’t the tragic, Shakespearean figures of The Godfather trilogy, possessed of enough conscience and heart that their descent into villainy is heartbreaking. Noodles and Max aren’t as psychologically fascinating as Tony Soprano or as manic as Henry Hill. They’re run-of-the-mill thugs, granted a beautiful and unusual narrative that seems too good for them.

It's those signs of loyalty and longing for something better that just keep form and subject from feeling totally incongruous, that and the consequences that befall the thugs. Noodles’ selfishness and violence toward Deborah haunt him throughout the film’s second half, and if 1968’s events really do happen, he and Max are equally marred by their lives of crime. There’s regret and nostalgic longing and resignation to go around, but there’s no denying these guys deserve their misery. Although, if 1968 really is a dream, then perhaps Noodles - if only subconsciously - has more insight into what he's made of his life than the other two timelines first suggest.

Rating : A-

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Once upon a time in america, common sense media reviewers.

Complex gangster epic has strong violence, sex.

Once Upon a Time in America Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

As with most gangster movies, there is the usual "

Characters are mostly on the wrong side of the law

Two scenes of a man raping two different women. Me

Full-frontal female nudity. Topless women. Woman's

Very strong language includes uses of "f--k," "s--

A character frequents opium dens; he's shown smoki

Positive Messages

As with most gangster movies, there is the usual "crime doesn't pay" theme. In the very end, one character learns forgiveness, walking away rather than exacting revenge.

Positive Role Models

Characters are mostly on the wrong side of the law, treating women poorly, etc.

Violence & Scariness

Two scenes of a man raping two different women. Men threatening women. Guns and shooting. Stabbing. Characters die, dead bodies. Bloody face, bloody wounds. Punching, fighting. Brass knuckles. Choking with chain. Kicking in private parts. Raging/yelling. Newsstand set on fire. Urinating.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Full-frontal female nudity. Topless women. Woman's naked bottom. An older man has sex with a teen girl; his naked bottom is shown thrusting. Teen sex; strong material regarding teens and sex (a boy rubs up against a girl, shows her his privates -- not seen -- and "pays" her with pastries in exchange for sex). Man kissing/rubbing his face in a woman's cleavage. A man and woman kissing, making moaning sounds. Sexual artwork on walls. Strong sex talk, strong sexual situations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Very strong language includes uses of "f--k," "s--t," "c--k," "p---y," "bitch," "bastard," "a--hole," "ass," "goddamn," "damn," "piss," "screwed," and "tush," plus "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A character frequents opium dens; he's shown smoking and drifting off. Regular social drinking and smoking (cigars). Main character very drunk in one scene, passes out.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Once Upon a Time in America is an epic gangster movie, considered a classic, and in a league with the Godfather movies and GoodFellas . It has a complex structure, and it's a slow burn, but for mature viewers, it's a great piece of filmmaking. It contains extremely strong violence, including two disturbing scenes of rape, as well as many scenes of guns and shooting, stabbing, fighting, blood and death, and more. Full-frontal female nudity is shown as well as other female toplessness. Teen sex is an issue; young characters trade pastries for sex with a teen girl. Some sex talk, and sexual situations are quite strong. Language is also strong, though not constant, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "c--k," and most other words under the sun. The main character frequents opium dens, and gets very drunk (and passes out) in one scene. Characters drink and smoke socially throughout. This review pertains to the most up-to-date, restored version, running 251 minutes. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Kids say (14)

Based on 10 parent reviews

Sergio Leone's epic gangster masterpiece.

A really really long well told story, what's the story.

In ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, David "Noodles" Aaronson ( Robert De Niro ) has to get out of town. He goes by a train station locker to retrieve what he thinks is a suitcase full of money, but the money is gone. In flashback, Noodles is a boy on the streets of New York. He falls in love with the pretty Deborah ( Jennifer Connelly ) and meets his lifelong friends, Max, Cockeye, and Patsy, with whom he embarks upon a life of crime. After a tragic death he goes to prison; when he gets out, his gang has reached adulthood, and prospered through illegal booze during Prohibition. Max ( James Woods ), Cockeye (William Forsythe), and Patsy (James Hayden) continue to do business while Noodles tries to win back the grown-up Deborah ( Elizabeth McGovern ). When Prohibition ends, Max begins to plan a big robbery. Noodles makes a hard choice, but years later, he receives a mysterious invitation. Who sent it, and wherever did the locker full of money go?

Is It Any Good?

Sergio Leone 's final movie, in the works for a decade or more, is a true epic, a great, sprawling folly, filled with big and small moments, rage and regret, noise and quiet, pugnaciousness and poetry. Based on a novel by Harry Grey, Once Upon a Time in America was infamously chopped to pieces upon its original 1984 American release, and, after a disastrous reception, was restored to a 229-minute version by year's end. In 2012, it was further restored to 251 minutes (just a tad shy of Leone's preferred 269-minute version). The complex structure includes many flashbacks and flash-forwards as well as an opium-fueled sequence or two, so it requires strict attention.

Although it's punctuated with scenes of brutal violence, including two hard-to-watch rape scenes, the movie is an overall slow burn with many sequences so quiet and reflective that they could be dreams. Many of Leone's touches, such as his use of silence to delay violence, are still here, but more refined for the urban landscape. Ennio Morricone contributes a beautiful, melancholy score, led by a flute that Forsythe's character plays on-screen. The cast, also including Joe Pesci , Burt Young , and Treat Williams , is uniformly excellent. ( Louise Fletcher appears exclusively in restored footage.) Once Upon a Time in America is an essential entry in the gangster genre, worthy of mention alongside the Godfather movies and GoodFellas .

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Once Upon a Time in America 's violence . How strong is it in relation to the story? Does it seem excessive? What effect does it have?

How is sex shown in the movie? Is it violent in nature, or loving?

How is alcohol important to the plot? What was Prohibition and how did gangsters profit from it? How are drugs used in the movie?

What's the appeal of the gangster genre? Are gangsters role models in any way? What lessons are learned?

Is it easy or hard to watch a very long movie like this one? How different is it from watching a season of a television show?

Movie Details

In theaters : June 1, 1984
On DVD or streaming : January 9, 2002
Cast : Robert De Niro , James Woods , Elizabeth McGovern
Director : Sergio Leone
Studio : Warner Bros.
Genre : Drama
Run time : 251 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong violence including a scene of rape, sexual content, language and some drug use
Last updated : June 6, 2024

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Saturday 19 March 2016

Movie review: once upon a time in america (1984).

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Latest Content

The Ending Of Once Upon A Time In America Explained

Imagine what it takes for a film to be hailed by some as the greatest work of a career that includes "A Fistful of Dollars," "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," and "Once Upon a Time in the West."

If Italian master Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns were epics of space, never failing to situate their cowboys and conmen against the wider expanse of the "Western" desert that frames their exploits and hunger to survive, then his 1984 gangster film "Once Upon a Time in America" is an epic of time, constantly leaping back and forth between versions of its characters during three distinct periods of their lives: as young petty crooks in 1918, hardened gangsters in the early 1930s, and older men, long out of the game, in 1968.

It's a sprawling, brutal look at the immigrant experience and the American dream, with protagonists far more anti than hero. And yet, it was panned upon its release in America, victim to studio-mandated cuts that took the film out of Leone's control and chopped it nearly in half for release in the United States , according to the New York Times . The rest of the world got something closer to the director's original vision, a sprawling film with a runtime of about four hours . The U.S. got the demo version, which colored reaction to it there for decades and left audiences utterly confused by what they had seen.

That might be close to what Leone intended, but not in a good way. The film's original ending, Leone's vision, layers a pair of mysteries on top of one another, but leaves it to the audiences to determine the answers, along with how they might dovetail or diverge. Here's how it does it.

What's the setup for Once Upon a Time in America's ending?

First, some background. The audience's point of view character throughout the film is the gangster Noodles Aaronson (Scott Tiler, then Robert De Niro). After forming a gang with his friend Max (Rusty Jacobs, then James Woods) when they were still up-and-coming near-kids on the Lower East Side, Noodles is arrested for stabbing a local boss.

By the time Noodles is released, the gang has blossomed into a successful bootlegging operation. However, their success is short-lived, the empire collapsing after the repeal of Prohibition a few years later. Noodles is convinced by Max's girlfriend Carol (Tuesday Weld) to rat the gang out on a lower offense, which will send them to prison for a smaller time but lessen the risk of more severe consequences. The plan fails, however, and Max and Noodles fight, with Noodles knocking Max out cold before the police arrive. When he comes to, he learns that his friends have all died in a shootout with the cops. He escapes, numbs his pain in the opium den the audience first saw in the film's opening scene, and flees to Buffalo, where he lives out his life in hiding.

Or he does, until someone from his past finds him in 1968. He learns that Max faked his own death with the help of the cops and spent the last 30 years rising in the Teamsters Union under the identity of Christopher Bailey, going so high he became the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. But now, Max has made enemies of the wrong people, and so he's contacted Noodles to kill him before the Teamsters can.

Does Max die at the end of Once Upon a Time in America?

Which is where the first of the film's double mysteries comes into play. Noodles refuses the assignment; to him, Max died with the rest of the gang, and this is some other person to whom he owes nothing. He leaves Bailey's house, but Max, or somebody, follows him in the dark. As Max walks toward him, a garbage truck passes between the two men, and when it drives on, Max is nowhere to be seen. The camera instead follows the truck, showing the back where a spinning blade chops and compacts the refuse.

The image of the truck doing its work definitely seems a little bit leading. Someone who's already hired his friend to kill him and been rebuffed might take the next opportunity available to do the job himself. Or perhaps the truck was part of an assassination plot, and Max didn't have a choice. But alternatives are possible too. Max could have fled, Or it might not even have been Max. Supposedly, according to Cinephilia & Beyond , Woods himself didn't know what happened to his character in this end. Leone, to preserve the ambiguity, reportedly filmed the scene with Woods' stand-in rather than the actor.

How much of Once Upon a Time in America might have been Noodles dream?

The question might be moot. The final sequence of the film, after Noodles watches Max's vanishing act, returns to a younger Noodles in the opium den after the "death" of his friends in the 1930s. He partakes of the drug, and the film ends with a blissed-out smile drawing across his face.

One theory, put forth on OtakuKart.com , holds that this could be the young Noodles realizing what Max is up to and deciding to play his part in it. He "finally understands the master plan of Max to escape from the miserable gangster life, etc." But the site Aural Crave puts forward another theory, one more often echoed: "Maybe it's inside that smile that Noodles imagines what we see in the movie, like an unconscious projections of his wish that his friend is still alive, and he [shouldn't] have any remorse about his death."

The sequence then suggests that everything that happened after Noodles entered the den –– his escape to Buffalo, his return to New York, Max's rise to prominence and impending fall –– was a product of an opium-induced dream. Noodles' version of a happy ending is his friend surviving long enough to reveal a 30-year betrayal, and then once again coming under Noodles' power by making that request. Perhaps the ambiguity of Max's final fate is Noodles' own indecisiveness. He's not sure whether he wants his friend to survive or not; he just knows he doesn't want to be the one to kill him.

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Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

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Review: once upon a time in america.

As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.

Part of the allure of any spaghetti western has to be its otherworldliness, the sense that, with its dubbed English, acrylic-red blood, stock company of decidedly non-American faces, and expanses of red desert, it’s happening in an entirely separate realm of human experience, even if it takes place in California. Sergio Leone, the grandmaster of the genre, codified these as legitimate storytelling techniques, never as interested in verisimilitude (historic or otherwise) as he was in visceral storytelling—a pulpier idea of genre cinema than the mannered Once Upon a Time in America would suggest. Even in this 229-minute prestige picture, Leone’s camera cuts almost pathologically on screams, gunshots, and punches.

The Italian mafia had been pretty thoroughly explored on screen by the time the auteur returned behind the camera, for the first time in over a decade. So in a reverse angle on American history, the Italian Leone set out to tell a story of Jewish mobsters, chiefly Noodles Aaronson (Robert De Niro) and Max Bercowicz (James Woods). The screenplay hopscotches from the ’30s to the ’60s to the late teens and back again, but all you really need to know is that growing up poor as dirt, Noodles and Max will make their bones working for Bugsy (James Russo), a Cagney-esque hood whose influence eventually becomes cumbersome.

Leone and his crew built a Lower East Side that seems to go on forever, simultaneously majestic and epochal, yet squalid and filthy. The camera’s details are brilliantly, impulsively in sync with the characters’ preadolescent world: pathetically corrupt adults, the chubby-cheeked faces of immigrant children, young Noodles’s attempts to get girls to show him their vaginas. Ennio Morricone’s score trills with intrigue as young Noodles and Max get mixed up in petty crime, counterbalancing their new risks against a melancholy, tinny piano theme that suggests America as a churning work in progress, ceaselessly plowing forward with or without them.

That’s the closest Leone ever gets to outright moralizing. In one scene around the film’s midpoint, the guys rob a jeweler and Noodles rapes his secretary (Tuesday Weld) on a table while Max and their accomplice, Patsy (James Hayden), chuckle over the loot in the other room. Leone’s camera zooms feverishly into Noodles’s face as he steps away, and again onto the secretary’s as she gasps for breath, capping the scene. Whether this is cruel exploitation or gritty drama is an open question, but the movie never misses a chance to remind viewers that America was just as brutal a place in the 1930s as it was in the Old West.

As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness. Several jobs and three decades later, Noodles (now played by De Niro) revisits New York. He stops at the mausoleum housing his fallen partners. Noodles being the audience’s vessel for contemplation, his introspective scenes—the movie’s tonally heaviest—reveal Leone’s weaknesses. As Noodles steps into the tomb, Leone’s camera makes endlessly, possibly pointlessly, choreographed long maneuvers, and the music swells, turning its soapiest. Here was a filmmaker who specialized in pure, blistering images, and this operatic earthiness just doesn’t play as well as the horrifying, salacious stuff. For all its details, its lushness of mood and feeling, the film remains stubbornly basic in its grand design, and thus a rare breed of classic-style studio epic: a decidedly Italian melodrama, despite its Hollywood stars and behemoth international budget. But does sheer bigness make a film better?

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Steve Macfarlane

Steve Macfarlane is a film curator and writer from Seattle, Washington. His writing has appeared in BOMB , Cinema Scope , Hyperallergic , The Brooklyn Rail , and other publications.

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Review: The Impossible

One of the Best Movies About America Was Made By an Outsider

Sergio Leone's crime epic Once Upon a Time in America gracefully depicts the brutality of our country, particularly for immigrants brave enough to enter its borders.

Architecture, Stage, Performance, Arch, Event, Performance art, Performing arts, Scene, Shadow, Musical,

American-born filmmakers have long devoted themselves to capturing the essence of our nation on film. Classics like On the Waterfront or The Last Picture Show are iconic for their honest, nuanced portrayal of a country that is as broken as it is proud. But sometimes it takes an outsider to expose the truth of a place, and no film has encapsulated the glorious, menacing tragedy of our country quite as ravishingly as Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in America .

A stratosphere-scraping citadel of cinema, nearly everything about Leone’s last film—and greatest masterwork—speaks to the grand illusion of the American Dream. Narratively, it is steeped in the rich, aggressively violent history of the early days of our immigrant-hating nation, depicting quite brutally the underpinnings of male-oriented corruption that render many of today’s power structures. Contextually, the film as a cultural moment speaks to the agony and ecstasy of Americana, a great movie that was infamously botched upon release in one of the most shameful studio mishaps of our time, shortly preceding the heartbreaking death of Leone—which raised many to believe that the intensity and tragedy of America itself is what brought the Italian auteur to heart failure.

Originally a nearly six-hour epic, the 229-minute film spans an entire lifetime of Jewish immigrants-turned-mob bosses. Led by Robert De Niro and James Woods, Leone charts their rise from the Jewish ghettos of turn-of-the-century New York City to a life of lavish excess, corruption, misogyny, and betrayal as stilted grown men. Told in a kaleidoscope of unchronological fragments, the film presents the emotional passage of these two men, Noodles and Max, as they recklessly tear their way through an unmerciful society of systemic oppression and cruelty. It is smarter, superiorly affecting, more artfully shot, edited, and scored than any film of its ilk—a bonafide champion of the form, tragically overlooked in our culture.

Hat, Headgear, Flat cap, Photography, Portrait, Fashion accessory, Cap, Suit, Fedora,

When the movie premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, it received a 15-minute standing ovation. But at its U.S. premiere later that year, it was discarded by critics and audiences alike, with some calling it the worst film of the year. After Leone had delivered his 229-minute cut, the American distributors at the Ladd Company shortened the film to a measly 139 minutes against the director’s will, which, according to the lore, was done by an assistant editor from Police Academy . It was an act so contentious and poorly executed that the unbelievable soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, without argument one of the best in all of cinema, was disqualified for Academy Award consideration because the producers failed to properly credit him in their new cut of the film. In fact, the film itself, after getting such exceptional praise in France, didn’t receive a single nomination here in the States at all.

It wasn’t until 2012 that American audiences got to see an approximation of Leone’s grand, nearly four-hour vision, when Martin Marin Scorsese managed to restore most of the film for a Cannes screening and DVD/Blu-Ray re-release.

.css-f6drgc:before{margin:-0.99rem auto 0 -1.33rem;left:50%;width:2.1875rem;border:0.3125rem solid #FF3A30;height:2.1875rem;content:'';display:block;position:absolute;border-radius:100%;} .css-1aglugu{font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-roboto,Lausanne-local,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1aglugu b,.css-1aglugu strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1aglugu em,.css-1aglugu i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1aglugu:before{content:'＂';display:block;padding:0.3125rem 0.875rem 0 0;font-size:3.5rem;line-height:0.8;font-style:italic;font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-styleitalic-roboto,Lausanne-styleitalic-local,Arial,sans-serif;} What distinguishes Leone’s epic from the other great American films is its startling dedication to the portraying reality of this country.

What distinguishes Leone’s epic from the other great American films is its startling dedication to the portraying reality of this country. Unlike the sympathetic, ever-glorifying quality of mob films like Goodfellas or The Godfather (the latter of which Leone actually rejected the offer to direct in favor of this film), the gangsters in Once Upon a Time in America are just downright appalling. Whereas The Godfather construes benevolent figures like Clemenza or Marlon Brando’s puppy dog-like Don Corleone, Leone envisions mobsters for who they truly are: chauvinistic, sociopathic, emotionally splintered plagues to society.

In this way, the film becomes surprisingly prescient again today, because Once Upon a Time in America is as much a crime epic as it is an intricate exploration of entitled young men who might today call themselves incels: aggressively masculine, dismissive of women, yet violently obsessed with achieving sexual dominance.

Face, Head, Nose, Forehead, Cheek, Eye, Human, Smile, Art,

Fitting in to the ever-burdensome history of American cinema’s fascination with sexual violence against women, Once Upon a Time in America features a vicious rape sequence that illustrates terrifyingly the wicked dangers of this form of male behavior. While I’d never advocate for films that indulge in this sort of tired rape narrative, it feels only natural that a movie immersed in American history and culture would have such a fascination with violence against women.

Face, Eyebrow, Forehead, Nose, Cheek, Chin, Head, Lip, Skin, Close-up,

There are three eras of our nation portrayed non-linearly in the film: the hard Jewish ghettos of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1920s, the Great Gatsby -esque exuberance of the 1930s Prohibition, and then the dark, gang-ridden streets of 1968 New York, post-modernity. Leone seeks to capture each era of New York with poetic truth on camera and in spirit. The early days of De Niro’s Noodles are full of childlike wonder for the Big City that so many have used as a synecdoche for our country as a whole. The wide shot of Noodles’s gang walking in Lower Manhattan with the massive Manhattan Bridge looming in the background has become iconic, with the old bridge looking almost like a hulking giant of fairy tales. Later, when De Niro’s character is released from prison, the Prohibition era of New York is portrayed almost like a playground for men of power, with rich decor, gaudy costumes, and grandiosity spilling into every frame.

And then Leone’s vision for the New York of 1968 is foreign and strange, perhaps reflective of what his view of the country may have felt like, being an aging Italian native making films in an industry that had deeply shifted from its auteristic roots, with frisbees whizzing around the city like UFOs and Rockwell-esque bar scenes amidst darkened corridors appearing almost like dreams.

The deeply mysterious ending of Once Upon a Time in America has puzzled viewers for decades. The film, which begins on an image of De Niro as a young man in 1930s New York silencing the terror of his tormented criminal life by suckling on a long pipe in an opium den, also ends with the same scene—although this time, Noodles is lying with his face up, smiling at the camera. Was it all a dream? Or perhaps a nightmare?

Face, Head, Forehead, Skin, Nose, Lighting, Cheek, Sleep, Mouth, Ear,

One cannot help but wonder what this ending may have meant to Leone, a filmmaker who was as profoundly influential to American cinema and culture in general as he was indebted to it. His obsession with cowboys in the American west, and the lawlessness of a country that, from its earliest days, was relentless against the weak and uninitiated, may have imbued the director with this mystifying sense of narrative and moral ambiguity.

Leone died shortly after the film was released in its ruinous form by studio producers keen on presenting a more traditional movie for the multiplexes. His colleagues and collaborators have spoken at length in interviews about how the changes to Once Upon a Time in America deeply hurt the last great Italian auteur, with James Woods even going as far to say that Leone died of a broken heart. Today, in light of what the film tried to accomplish, and how it was treated upon release by a changing 1980s culture where the divide between the Raging Bulls and the Rocky IV s was ever-widening, the ending feels exceptionally haunting. Whatever the meaning, it feels only natural that a film about the American dream should end with something resembling a nightmare.

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Once Upon a Time in America

By Pauline Kael

Just about all the incidents in this three-hour-and-forty-seven-minute film echo scenes in Hollywood gangster movies, but the director, Sergio Leone, inflates them, slows them down, and gives them a dreamy obsessiveness. He transmutes the lower East Side settings of those gangster movies to give the genre a richer, more luxuriant visual texture. His widescreen view of a group of Jewish kids who start with petty crime and move into big-time racketeering is set in 1921, 1933, and 1968, but not in that order. His theme is the betrayal of the immigrants’ dream of America, and the story begins and ends in an opium den where Noodles (Robert De Niro) puffs on a pipe while episodes of his life of killings and rapes and massacres drift by and a telephone rings somewhere in the past. This epic is a compendium of kitsch, but it’s kitsch aestheticized by someone who loves it and sees it as the poetry of the masses. It isn’t just the echoing moments that keep you absorbed—it’s the reverberant dreamland settings and Leone’s majestic, billowing sense of film movement. With Jennifer Connelly, who’s marvellously vivid as the young Deborah; Darlanne Fluegel as the beautiful streamlined blond Eve; and Tuesday Weld, who brings a gleam of perversity to the role of a moll. (Museum of the Moving Image; Sept. 4 and Sept. 6)

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Once upon a time in America - my opinion on why it's the best movie of all time (+explanations)

Once upon a time in America (1984) is Sergio Leone's last movie.

I consider it as the best movie of all time (and was surprised by the numbers off people who dislike it on this sub).

I know this sentence means all and nothing, but I'll try explain.

I first want to explain to you I see 3 different things :

-The best movie

-The greatest

-My favorite.

I think The Godfather/Casablanca/Citizen Kane can compete for the "Greatest movie off all time" spot. Because of their success technically, in popularity and in the critics. They have a great "universal" dimension.

Once upon a time in America doesn't have it (maybe because the industry killed the movie by shorting it and changing the cut).

This movie can be difficult to watch. It's long, the rythm is slow, but there is a reason for it.

Leone want you to feel the characters feeling, and their evolution with the time.

Every scene, every line is make like Leone wanted to reach the perfection.

The ambiance, the story, the final scene, everything can be understand differently by the spectators.

The story of love, friendship, betrayal, transition from childhood to adulthood, all in one movie, but before all a story which show as time goes by, and how you can't change what you did.

The story, based in 3 different decade (probably 20', 30/40' and 60/70'), follow the life of kids in NY in their rise in the mafia to their end.

The performance of almost all the actors is incredible (you can have 2,3, maybe 4 very good performance in a movi). But this is on another level. James Wood, Joe Pesci, Elizabeth McGovern, Robert De Niro, Tuesday Weld, Jennifer Connelly...

The sets, the ambiance is awesome.

But the most impressive is surely the number of beautiful scenes (Noodles and Max meeting, the cake, yesterday, the babies, noodles and deborah, the docks, the smile...).

4 hours on the downfall of a man, who refused to choose between his bestfriend and his love and lost them both.

The combination of this with the music of Ennio Morricone (probably the best whole soundtrack ever made for the cinema, listen to it on YT), make look this movie like an opera.

I didn't want to explain too much about the story (for the people who didn't see it), but try to watch it in the longest possible version if you can.

What are your thought ?

Why “Once Upon A Time In America” Is One Of The Greatest Films Ever Made

Released in 1984, “Once Upon A Time In America” proved to be director Sergio Leone’s final cinematic statement. Most famous for films like “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly” and “Once Upon A Time In The West”, he spent over ten years planning “America”. Loosely based on a novel called “The Hoods” by Harry Grey, which was purported to be based upon real events, “Once Upon A Time In America” is a film that truly surpasses and transcends its genre trappings, addressing issues and ideas that are at the fabric of life such as loyalty, friendship, betrayal , vengeance, survival and the concept of time.

This is the rarest of rare film where every single filmmaking element such as writing, direction, acting, score, cinematography, production design and the like fit together and complement each other in the most perfect way. It is still the yardstick to which all others must be measured.

“Once Upon A Time In America” is most definitely something of an acquired taste. Long, challenging and rambling, it can very well lose and alienate some viewers. It’s like heavy machinery-not for everyone. However, if one is patient and works with it, going where it takes them, it can be an incredibly rewarding and enriching experience.

For me, it’s the first film that taught me about subtext in cinema, and the way that a shot, a word, a look or a gesture, whether they be physical or spiritual, can say more than a million words ever could. It taught me to dive under the surface of a film, and is still one that resonates with me quite deeply thirty years since its initial release.

From a narrative perspective, it charts the rise and fall of Jewish gangsters in New York over the course of fifty years. It concentrates on three time periods in the lives of its characters, primarily focusing upon David “Noodles” Aranson (Robert De Niro) and Maxamillian Berkowitz (James Woods). First of all, you have 1921 or thereabouts, where the characters are entering adolescence and working their way up the ladder or organised crime. The bulk of the film is set in and around 1933, during the Prohibition period. Finally, there is a latter narrative strand that picks up the story in 1968.

The film features a highly fractured, non-linear approach to tell its story. For the first half hour or so, it jumps continually back in time, confusing the absolute hell out of the viewer but at the same time drawing them in. We first meet Noodles in 1933, fleeing from something that has happened, something that has caused the deaths of those nearest and dearest to him. We also subsequently meet him again in 1968, returning to the neighbourhood in which he grew up, one he fled thirty-five years previously.

In an unhurried style and approach, “Once Upon A Time In America” begins to slowly reveal itself. There is a constant ringing sound of a telephone early in the film. We learn about that phone call and the subsequent reverberations it has on Noodles, further fueling his submergence into drug addiction. We first meet him in an opium den, well and truly in the throes of addiction.

Upon his return, we start to get an extended glimpse into the earlier life of Noodles, Max and their friends when they were children. We also encounter the undying love he holds for Deborah, beautifully played as a child by Jennifer Connolly (in her film debut) and the striking Elizabeth Mc Govern as an adult. It is here that the film really hits upon something in the way it depicts Noodles and his friends, Patsy and Cockeye, trying to rise up the ranks of the criminal world. It also displays how Max becomes part of this crew and something of a blood brother to Noodles.

Not only do you have the personal factor of these kids trying to find a way in a tough and unforgiving world where only the strong survive, it also serves as a commentary of America in its early years and the way it is trying to establish and make something of itself. That personal/world view parallel is something that Leone creates beautifully and never overdoes.

Even though it deals with organised crime, there is a lightness of touch to the scenes where we see the younger selves of the characters in regards to narrative structure and arc. Never has there been an actor matchup between younger versions of characters and their older selves, with another set of actors, that has been so perfectly tuned.

This, however, is corrupted and violated in an irreversible way when Noodles murders his rival, Bugsy, and a police officer in vengeance for Bugsy killing the youngest of the gang, Dominic. There is a stunning sequence where Noodles, in the back of a paddy wagon, waves goodbye to Max and the rest of the gang. It is the first step that takes us towards the lower depths to which Noodles will succumb to as the story progresses.

The story picks up when Noodles is released from jail as an adult. The gang have made good with the rise of Prohibition and their work as bootleggers. Noodles still holds a candle for Deborah, who has avoided the life of crime and become an actress. Conflict arises between Noodles, who is content with what they have, as opposed to Max, who is making connections on both a criminal and political level to further raise their profile and exposure, something Max, on several occasions, doesn’t agree on. This will reach a tipping point, which will cost the lives of those nearest and dearest to Noodles. Also, while an essentially decent man, Noodles is very much torn between this decency and his more base, ruthless side.

This is never more evident than in a remarkable sequence where he finally takes Deborah out on a date. It reaches a shocking, deeply disturbing and irreversible end. This is the first step that sends Noodles hurtling towards the opium dens and escape.

The latter sequences of “Once Upon A Time In America” see Noodles confront his part in the physical and spiritual sense. We also see his connection with one Senator Christopher Baily, who is involved in a scandal during that time.

What makes this film fly above all the others? Apart from the aforementioned combination of cinematic elements, it is the way the story is told that spellbinds the viewer. Leone creates a world that is incredibly easy and seductive to get lost in. This film was made in a day before CGI was a prevalent as it is now. The street scenes set in the early Twenties were done for real, created on studio backlots, an art form that is lost in modern movie making.

Also, composer Ennio Morricone, in perfect ‘simpatico’ with his director, had most of the score written and recorded before a single frame was shot. The soundtrack was played on set, really infusing the making of the film with a sense of character that fit brilliantly.

The ‘rise and fall’ element of the crime story is compelling in itself. However, the way it serves as a microcosm for the ‘growing up’ of America as a country is what really sets it apart. Lifted by some remarkable performances, particularly those of De Niro and Woods, it paints a pertinent and unforgiving portrait of a nation forming itself.

It is, at times, an incredibly ambiguous story. For years, the idea of the ‘dream theory’ has floated around in regards to how one interprets “Once Upon A Time In America”. Think of the first and last time we meet Noodles in this story, the exact location. We meet him in an opium den. This is a gorgeous illustration of the idea of the ‘unreliable narrator’ or the fact that we see the story from the perspective of a blown mind.

The ‘dream theory’ goes as thus. Everything until the death of Max, Patsy & Cockeye is real, as is the pursuit of gangsters from ‘The Combination’ looking for Noodles and slaying or beating anyone who dares to get in their way. However, the latter day scenes in the film, set in 1968, may not in actual fact be reality and could be nothing more than an opium dream Noodles is having.

The surprising scene, such as when Noodles meets Deborah’s son, David, manage to be both plausible and exaggerated at the same time. Ditto the story arc involving Senator Baily. However, at the same time, one notices details that are dead on to that part of the era, such as the cars, television and hippies in the background on one shot set in a train station. Personally, I can see evidence for both interpretations. However, I just like to let that train of thought and interpretation hang there and be ambiguous.

Why isn’t this masterpiece more well-known than it is? That all goes back to the studio on its initial release. In their infinite wisdom, they cut a near four hour film down to nearly two and a half and recut all the scenes into chronological order, thereby creating an incomprehensible mess, totally destroying Leone’s vision and intent.

Thankfully, the full 227 minute cut was the one that was finally seen by the majority of the world. It was a film that should have been up for multiple Oscars, but was handled in an incredibly negative way by its studio, totally unaware of what they had. The score, considered by many to be Morricone’s finest, didn’t even make it for an Oscar nomination because the proper paperwork wasn’t filed!

Now at a time when we’re past all that, thirty years down the track, one can appreciate the film for what it is; nothing short of a masterpiece. It continues to remain a noble, bold and challenging work, looking at some of the big themes and concepts that define life. Although blessed with an at times wicked sense of humour – check out the “Thieving Magpie” scene in the hospital, where the gang, disguised as doctors, change the babies around in the maternity ward in order to blackmail a policeman – there is a complete lack of the ironic, hip humour that defines other gangster films.

Instead, there is this sense of melancholy that permeates the frame, especially after the deaths of the majority of the gang and an older Noodles (a superior makeup job on De Niro) facing his past and all that it entails.

Some accuse the film of misogyny, particularly in relation to its graphic and disturbing rape scenes. While confronting in the extreme, I feel that Leone is simply depicting and describing the ‘world of men’, with his view on women reflecting those views of Max and Noodles. Namely, the extreme view of ‘the madonna or the whore’. To these men, there is no middle ground. They are one or the other, and is something they, as men, struggle with through their lives.

Author Bio: Neil is a journalist, labourer, forklift and truck driver. In a previous life, he was a projectionist for ten years. He is a lifelong student of cinema.

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FILM: 'ONCE UPON A TIME INAMERICA'

By Vincent Canby

June 1, 1984

SERGIO LEONE, the Italian director who gave class to the term ''spaghetti western,'' has made some weird movies in his day but nothing to match ''Once Upon a Time in America,'' a lazily haullucinatory epic that means to encapsulate approximately 50 years of American social history into a single film.

Although it's set almost entirely in New York, and although it's about a group of tough, Brooklyn Jewish boys who speak American argot as they grow up to become legendary mob figures, the movie looks and sounds more authentically Italian than your average San Gennaro festival.

We've come to expect this sort of thing from Mr. Leone, whose best westerns, including ''The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'' and ''A Fistful of Dollars,'' are very personal, very Italian meditations on American movies that impressed him as a child. What is not expected is that his name should be attached to a film that makes so little narrative sense.

''Once Upon a Time in America'' is not a disaster on the order of ''Heaven's Gate.'' Having been cut from 3 hours and 47 minutes, which was its running time at this year's Cannes Festival, to its present time of 2 hours and 15 minutes, it plays like a long, inscrutable trailer for what might have been an entertaining movie. It is, I suppose, theoretically possible to remove that much footage from such a lengthy film and still have something coherent at the end, but this version seems to have been edited with a roulette wheel.

Like most films that have been so clumsily abbreviated, this shorter version of ''Once Upon a Time in America'' seems endless, possibly because whatever internal structure it might have had no longer exists. It's a collection of occasionally vivid but mostly unfathomable incidents in which people are introduced and then disappear with the unexplained suddenness of victims of mob murders.

The screenplay, by Mr. Leone and five others, cannot be easily synopsized. It begins in the 1920's in a long prologue set in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the jungle where the five young friends, including Max and Noodles, learn their trade as petty thieves and arsonists. Though this is the most coherent portion of the film, the audience is inclined to become restless waiting for Noodles to grow up to be played by Robert De Niro, Max to be played by James Woods and Deborah, the girl Noodles loves, to be played by Elizabeth McGovern.

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Movie Review: Once Upon A Time In America (1984)
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COMMENTS

Once Upon a Time in America movie review (1984)
Once Upon a Time in America (1984) This was a murdered movie, now brought back to life on home video. Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America", which in its intended 227-minute version is an epic poem of violence and greed, was chopped by ninety minutes for U.S. theatrical release into an incomprehensible mess without texture, timing, mood ...
Once Upon a Time in America
May 5, 2017 Full Review Toussaint Egan Polygon Once Upon a Time in America is a tremendous work that captures the animating ambition and sorrow at the heart of the American Dream.
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Permalink. 9/10. A really gem of a film. sundancekid26 8 November 2006. Once Upon a Time in America was originally released in 1984.It starred Robert Deniro, James Woods, Joe Pesci and Jennifer Connelly. Directed by Sergio Leone, the film featured an alumnus of Leone's crew who had worked on all of his films.
Once Upon a Time in America
3 h 49 m. Summary A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life. Crime. Drama. Directed By: Sergio Leone.
Once Upon a Time in America
Once Upon a Time in America is a tremendous work that captures the animating ambition and sorrow at the heart of the American Dream. Full Review | Oct 22, 2021.
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Edit page. Once Upon a Time in America: Directed by Sergio Leone. With Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams. A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan 35 years later, where he must once again confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.
Classic Film Review: Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Dead at 30 years of age, James Hayden never got to see any completed version of Once Upon A Time in America (1984). Given this review is getting near epic proportions itself I will begin to wrap up by heaping praise on the incredible production design. The costumes, locations, vehicles, props and era are slavishly and beautifully recreated.
Once Upon a Time in America
Once Upon a Time in America (Italian: C'era una volta in America) is a 1984 epic crime film co-written and directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, and starring Robert De Niro and James Woods.The film is an Italian-American venture produced by The Ladd Company, Embassy International Pictures, PSO Enterprises and Rafran Cinematografica, and distributed by Warner Bros. Based on Harry Grey's ...
Once Upon A Time In America Review
31 Dec 1983. Running Time: 139 minutes. Certificate: 18. Original Title: Once Upon A Time In America. Let's get our heresies out of the way early on; the film that Once Upon A Time In America is ...
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
A film of fatally flawed heroes, oversized passions, nation-building, and, inevitably, violence, America follows its characters from childhood to old age by way of the kind of grand-scale filmmaking that wouldn't be seen again until Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. [2014 re-release] 100. Chicago Reader Dave Kehr.
'Once Upon a Time in America' Review: A Narrative Too Good ...
Once Upon a Time in America's three timelines are all out of sequence. The film begins and ends with Noodles hiding from the Mafia in an opium den, puffing away at a pipe and clearly lost to its ...
Once Upon a Time in America Movie Review
Based on 10 parent reviews. moviefan1980s Adult. July 27, 2018. age 17+. Sergio Leone's epic gangster masterpiece. "Once Upon a Time in America" is one of those films that is hard work, but ultimately a very rewarding experience. Loosely based on the novel called "The Hoods" by Harry Grey, the film follows themes of regret, guilt, friendship ...
Movie Review: Once Upon A Time In America (1984)
A New York gangster epic spanning 35 years in the life of two friends, Once Upon A Time In America is Sergio Leone's final film, and a masterpiece of provocative storytelling.The extended director's cut (with restored footage) clocks in at a mammoth 251 minutes, and it's a fascinating viewing experienced, reminiscent of a complex ancient tragedy with central characters both heroic and deeply ...
Once Upon a Time in America critic reviews
Empire. While The Godfather delivers certainty and a comforting dramatic resolution, Once Upon A Time In America delivers a profound kind of mystery. While Coppola's film delivers answers, Leone's asks questions. It lingers and plays on the mind; its meanings shift and change like a faded memory or a half-remembered dream.
The Ending Of Once Upon A Time In America Explained
When he comes to, he learns that his friends have all died in a shootout with the cops. He escapes, numbs his pain in the opium den the audience first saw in the film's opening scene, and flees to ...
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Once Upon a Time in America was the most hard-fought film of Sergio Leone's career. He turned his attention towards adapting Harry Grey's partially autobiographical mobster novel The Hoods at the very beginning of the 1970s, but a combination of rights issues, financing, and the sheer damn scope of the thing meant that 13 years had passed since Duck, You Sucker before the director premiered ...
Review: Once Upon a Time in America
As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness. Several jobs and three decades later, Noodles (now played by De Niro) revisits New York. He stops at the mausoleum housing his fallen partners. Noodles being the audience's vessel for contemplation, his introspective scenes—the movie's ...
One of the Best Movies About America Was Made By an Outsider
Sergio Leone's crime epic "Once Upon a Time in America" gracefully depicts the brutality of our country, particularly for immigrants brave enough to enter its borders.
Once Upon a Time in America
Once Upon a Time in America. Just about all the incidents in this three-hour-and-forty-seven-minute film echo scenes in Hollywood gangster movies, but the director, Sergio Leone, inflates them ...
Once Upon a Time in America: Review and Interpretation
Once Upon A Time In America is a beautifully crafted film with a captivating story that is the pinnacle of escapism. This film didn't only glue my eyes to the screen, it also managed to transport me into a whole different world and time period... a different story. The story and plot are one of the most captivating I've ever seen in a film ...
Once upon a time in America
Once upon a time in America (1984) is Sergio Leone's last movie. I consider it as the best movie of all time (and was surprised by the numbers off people who dislike it on this sub). I know this sentence means all and nothing, but I'll try explain. I first want to explain to you I see 3 different things : -The best movie -The greatest
Why "Once Upon A Time In America" Is One Of The Greatest Films Ever
Loosely based on a novel called "The Hoods" by Harry Grey, which was purported to be based upon real events, "Once Upon A Time In America" is a film that truly surpasses and transcends its genre trappings, addressing issues and ideas that are at the fabric of life such as loyalty, friendship, betrayal , vengeance, survival and the ...
FILM: 'ONCE UPON A TIME INAMERICA'
Once Upon a Time in America. Directed by Sergio Leone. Crime, Drama. R. 3h 49m. By Vincent Canby. June 1, 1984. The New York Times Archives. See the article in its original context from.

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CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS