Once Upon a Time in America
Sergio Leone (1984)
Films made by artists and butchered by studios have an understandably special place in cineaste hearts. The outrage of commercially-driven barbarism renders the quality of the released picture of almost secondary importance; besides, its defects can always be ascribed to its incompleteness. These aren’t exactly films maudits, more films mutilés – Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps the paradigm. Another particularly admired type of work, provided its creator has auteur status, is the film marathon. You sometimes wonder, when audience members break into applause at the end of one of these, if they’re really acclaiming their own stamina.
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America thereby has a dual appeal. When this labour of movie love, years in the making, premiered at the Cannes Festival in 1984, Leone had already made serial reductions to its enormous length – down to three hours, forty-nine minutes. The story moves back and forth between three periods – 1918, the early 1930s and 1968. The version prepared by the Ladd Company for release in US cinemas later in the year not only removed another ninety minutes of running time but reorganised the narrative into chronological order. If the aim was to increase the picture’s popular appeal by making it more straightforward, the result was spectacularly counterproductive. Critics deplored the abbreviated film’s incoherence and Once Upon a Time in America bombed at the North American box office. Unlike The Magnificent Ambersons, however, the excised material wasn’t destroyed: indeed, the 229-minute version was the one released in European cinemas in 1984. A restoration in 2012, more than two decades after Leone’s death, reinstated a further twenty-odd minutes’ worth of cut scenes. This 255-minute film is the one screened this month at BFI, as part of their Ennio Morricone season.
This is the second-longest film I’ve seen in a single session after Bertolucci’s 1900 (311 minutes). There was a strong feeling of mission accomplished at the end – a consequence of having prepared to see Once Upon a Time in America on several previous occasions and always failing even to reach the starting line. (Most recently, it was a Covid-closure casualty at BFI last autumn.) Even so, I was keen to escape rather than applaud, and left NFT1 at the start of the presumably numerous credits and before anyone else had put their hands together, if anyone did. Knowing what the film was about and the plot consisted of, I was wondering beforehand what made it so lengthy. The very early stages suggested a partial, rather dismal explanation: the pauses between lines regularly felt longer than the sentences uttered. But either I soon got used to this tempo or it changed; at any rate, I stopped noticing it. I came out baffled as to how the film lasts the best part of an hour longer than The Godfather: Part II. Unlike Coppola’s masterpiece, Leone’s monster doesn’t tell a highly complex story or express a large vision. I see that I described 1900 as ‘a curate’s egg but also a banquet’. Once Upon a Time in America is epic only in duration.
There are two particularly obvious points in common with 1900. Leone, like Bertolucci, chronicles a relationship formed in boyhood and which persists through the adult lives of the two men concerned. In both films, one of them is played by Robert De Niro. In Leone’s story – based on The Hoods a 1952 novel-cum-autobiography by Harry Grey, the pen name of ex-gangster Herschel Goldberg – De Niro is David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson. As a young teenager (played by Scott Tiler), Noodles is one of a group of Jewish street kids in New York City who commit petty crimes under the supervision of local crime boss Bugsy (James Russo). These embryo hoods also include Max Berkovicz (Rusty Jacobs) – and it’s the friendship between him and Noodles that’s the heart of the film. Max, Noodles and three other lads – Cockeye (Adrian Curran), Dominic (Noah Moazezi) and Patsy (Brian Bloom) – start operating independently of their overseer. In the climax to the 1918 narrative strand, Bugsy shoots and kills Dominic; in retaliation, Noodles fatally stabs Bugsy, wounds a bent cop in cahoots with him, and goes to prison.
At the start of the 1930s strand, Noodles (now De Niro) is released from jail and met by Max (James Woods). He and the other two surviving members of the teenage gang (William Forsythe is Cockeye and James Hayden Patsy) are successful bootleggers. Noodles rejoins forces with them. The end of Prohibition in 1933 is a turning point for the gang. Max proposes partnership with the Teamsters’ union; Noodles says no. Then Max wants to rob the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Noodles refuses to be part of the planned robbery. He is (surprisingly?) persuaded by Max’s girl Carol (Tuesday Weld) to turn police informer about a lesser offence – the idea being that all four men will thereby serve a short jail sentence and Max will be prevented, at least temporarily, from getting other big, bad ideas. Shortly after making the phone call, Noodles is horrified to learn that the police have shot Max, Patsy and Cockeye dead. He leaves New York City for Buffalo, and life there under a false identity.
Thirty-five years later and still guilt-stricken, Noodles returns to Manhattan after being informed, by letter, of the imminent redevelopment of the cemetery where his brothers-in-arms are buried. Returning to old haunts naturally stirs up flashbacks (one of them heralded by ‘Yesterday’ on the soundtrack!). The letter he receives, asking him to approve arrangements for the trio’s reburial, proves that someone knows Noodles’ identity. This turns out to be Max, who isn’t dead at all. (Not too surprising: when Leone shows the three corpses lying in the street, Max’s is especially unidentifiable.) Max’s name is now Christopher Bailey and he’s the US Secretary of Commerce. Noodles reads news reports about a major corruption scandal with Bailey at its centre but without realising who the latter really is. In due course, Noodles discovers plenty more. Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), the love of Noodles’ life, is now (a) a famous actress and (b) Bailey’s mistress. Max has a son, David, who, as Noodles sees, is the image of his father (he’s played, like the teenage Max, by Rusty Jacobs). Now the penny drops as to Bailey’s identity. The stage is set for a climactic reunion where Max – faced with ruin and the risk of assassination by the Teamsters’ union that Bailey got into bed with – asks Noodles to kill him. Noodles won’t do so and makes his exit. As he’s leaving Max/Bailey’s mansion, he hears a garbage truck start up and sees Max, at the mansion’s gated entrance, starting to approach. The truck then obscures Max from view; once the vehicle passes, there’s no sign of him. Noodles watches garbage writhing in the auger at the back of the truck.
The links between organised crime, organised labour and corrupt police and politicians, although important to the plot, don’t develop much dramatic substance. Leone does little, despite the principals’ distinct ethnicity, to root their psychology or motivations in the community in which they grew up. The Jewish elements are mostly names of characters or outside stores and other businesses on Manhattan’s East Side; there’s a Star of David in the plate glass of a restaurant that’s a key location throughout. Noodles, Max et al aren’t carrying on a tradition (I missed any references there may have been to their parents, other than to Max’s father’s insanity) – so there’s nothing comparable to The Godfather films’ description of synergy between blood family and Mafia Family, or to the Corleones’ problematic code of honour. Leone doesn’t feel the need to pursue these kinds of connection; he sees his characters’ associations differently. They’re kin to the dramatis personae of Hollywood gangster movies past – that’s the tradition and community to which they really belong.
Not only is Once Upon a Time in America steeped in this mythology; it means to be a series of reflections on it – or even a kind of reverie. Late on in the 1930s section, early in the narrative as a whole, Noodles, pursued by a trio of thugs, is holed up in an opium den, hidden within a Chinese wayang theatre. The place is also where the film ends; Leone, in both sequences, shows the shadow play of wayang puppets on the theatre wall. Everything that comes in between – the scenes of Noodles’ recent and more distant past, and decades into his future – has been interpreted by some serious students of the picture as going on inside the protagonist’s head. Leone himself, in an interview published in 1987, confirmed ‘the validity of this interpretation, saying that the scenes set in the 1960s could be seen as an opium dream of Noodles’[1]. I don’t get this. It’s true the visual style has its woozy aspects – there’s a sluggish rhythm and a lingering over images, even in scenes of mayhem. And perhaps Noodles’s fantasy accounts for some of the improbable details in the plot: for example, Christopher Bailey is making newspaper and TV headlines but without any photographs that would reveal his identity to Noodles. But the dream theory opens up unhelpful questions as to how much of Noodles’s past is memory, how much invention. As for his future: if this is all a dream, how does he manage to envisage the look of the late 1960s with such uncanny accuracy?
Whatever the level of unreality on which the film may be operating, Leone must surely have intended more convincingly real performances than some of those he gets. He was used to directing Anglophone actors speaking English dialogue but much less experienced in supervising naturalistic acting. (This wasn’t what he needed from Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef in the Dollars trilogy of spaghetti westerns. I don’t know the subsequent Once Upon a Time in the West, whose cast included far better actors, like Henry Fonda and Jason Robards.) The kids in the 1918 part of Once Upon a Time in America are weak – a serious problem since this is where the main characters’ blood-brotherhood develops and is most clearly expressed. (The 1930s part is more about tensions within the group.) Scott Tiler and Rusty Jacobs, because they’re in such crucial roles, are a particular liability. They act – and react – dutifully, effortfully. There’s no fluency in their characterisation.
Once the boys are men, the acting isn’t that hot either from William Forsythe and James Hayden (who was dead, at the age of twenty-eight, even before the film was released). James Woods’s looks make Max a relatively distinctive gangster and Woods is a capable actor but Max’s deranged outbursts – he’s terrified of having inherited the madness gene – become predictable. People who’d already made an impression in other roles and/or would do so in the future – Danny Aiello, Joe Pesci, Treat Williams, Burt Young – are even more capable but only Williams among them has more than a scene or two. A definite benefit of the 2012 additions is the recovery of a cameo from Louise Fletcher. As prefatory on-screen text made clear, the additions are easily identifiable because the state of the recovered material affects the colour range and the sound quality. This may even enhance the episode in which the sixty-something Noodles visits the cemetery where his friends are buried: the technical defects make the place more eerie. So does Fletcher’s cemetery director, with a mouth that smiles and eyes that don’t.
Over the course of four hours plus, though, the performances wouldn’t be much without Robert De Niro, especially as the older Noodles. (In his late thirties when the film was made, he’s rather too mature in the 1930s scenes, where his character is around a decade younger.) Now that the elderly De Niro is a reality, a viewer new to the film is liable to under-appreciate how easily and completely he incarnates a senior citizen. It’s just a pity that, in the 1968 sequences, he’s not given much to do except look sadly reflective. It’s a pity, too, that Leone chooses to end with a freeze frame as Noodles, in the opium den, looks straight at the camera. De Niro’s familiar cracked grin in this final shot, conspicuous by its absence in what’s gone before in the film, is a reminder of Travis Bickle and others, at the expense of Noodles. And even De Niro can’t do much with another major failure of Once Upon a Time in America, the enduring romance between Noodles and the love of his life, Deborah.
It’s hardly surprising that sizeable female roles are thin on the ground – or that the few exceptions are women raped, threatened at gunpoint or shot dead (or a combination of these). It’s also hardly surprising, therefore, that Darianne Fleugel (as a girlfriend of Noodles) and Tuesday Weld make rather too much of their opportunities. Even when they’re adolescents, Noodles is crazy for Deborah (Jennifer Connelly), whose family runs the restaurant with the Star of David. She’s the younger sister of Fat Moe (Mike Monetti), whose older self (Larry Rapp) takes over the restaurant. Deborah is already in love with performing and wants to be a dancer. In the 1930s, she (now Elizabeth McGovern) ends up going to Hollywood. In 1968, she’s a celebrated stage actress, whom Noodles watches playing Cleopatra.
Jennifer Connelly, barely a teenager at the time, is in a different class from the other young actors, her face as animated as it’s beautiful: Deborah’s teasing hauteur makes her a kind of Estella to Noodles’s Pip. Elizabeth McGovern is poor, though. Her mask of melancholy rarely changes; the same goes for her voice. The poster for the Antony and Cleopatra she appears in quotes below the play’s title ‘Age cannot wither her …’ The words apply to McGovern’s Deborah in the wrong way: her face, wearing a permanent moue, is that of a petulant adolescent more than Jennifer Connelly’s is. It’s an unfortunate irony that Elizabeth McGovern plays someone who becomes a great actress. It’s another that the connection between the character’s younger and older versions is thanks, at this distance in time, to Connelly’s acquiring, as an adult performer, the same qualities that mar McGovern’s portrait of Deborah.
Ennio Morricone’s score is variously melodic (and the music played on Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute especially lovely) but the variety serves to draw attention to the monotony of much of the action on the screen. Tonino Delli Colli’s lighting and Carlo Simi’s production design are very fine but New York street scenes are often pieces of meticulous recreation waiting to life to happen in them. On the night before Deborah departs for Hollywood, Noodles proposes marriage to her in a de luxe Long Island restaurant that he’s hired for the occasion. (She turns him down and he rapes her in the car journey home.) Their table for two is one of scores but there are no other diners, only myriad waiters and waitresses attending to the unhappy couple. The scene registers in two ways, as Noodles’s Gatsby-ish attempt to impress that Leone presumably intended, and inadvertently. The vast, expensive, empty setting epitomises Once Upon a Time in America‘s fatuous grandiosity.
28 August 2021
[1] The interview is one of several in Noël Simsolo’s Conversations avec Sergio Leone.