Once Upon a Time in America

I've had Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America on my DVR for a long time, since TCM ran it as part of the spotlight on the Roaring 20s two years ago. I'd been a bit reluctant to sit through another four-hour movie, but it's on TV today, at 10:49 PM on StarzEncore Suspense, so I gritted and bore it to do a review here.

The movie starts with a prologue, in 1933. Somebody's looking for "Noodles" (Robert DeNiro) in New York City. They're so desperate to find him they're willing to kill people who won't give them the information leading to his whereabouts. It turns out that Noodles has picked up a yen for opium at some point along the way, and he's in an opium den (in Chinatown, I'd guess), where the proprietors are willing to usher him out to keep the bad guys from finding him. Noodles makes his way to a bar owned by "Fat Moe", who has been keeping a key there for some time. Noodles gets the key, goes to the train station, and eventually takes the first train out of town.

Flash forward to 1968. Noodles is returning, because he's gotten a letter from the local synagogue that the place has been sold off, necessitating the removal of the graves to someplace else. And since this creates obvious religious issues, the survivors need to be notified. However, while the synagogue and cemetery were sold off, this actually happened some months earlier, leading Noodles to realize that somebody has found where he's been hiding all these years and wants him back in New York for, well, reasons. Also in 1968, there's a cabinet secretary David Bailey who is about to get into serious legal problems due to his relations with a corrupt Teamster boss Jimmy O'Donnell (Treat Williams).

We then flash back to around 1920, when Prohibition was about to be introduced, which really jumpstarted organized crime in America. Noodles is young and one of those street thugs who would work for the somewhat higher-up people in the syndicate. Together with friends Patsy (James Hayden), Cockeye (William Forsythe), Dominic, and Max (James Woods), the five start a sort of mini-gang of their own that's going to become bigger as Prohibition and the 1920s roar on.

But it's not all a bed of roses. Noodles has a girl his loves in the form of Fat Moe's sister Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), but she has dreams of becoming an actress. Meanwhile, Max falls in love with platinum blonde Carol (Tuesday Weld), who Noodles thinks is going to mess up all of the gang's operations.

The movie keeps switching back and forth between the Prohibition era and 1968, until Prohibition is repealed and the gang has to pull one last job which winds up breaking up the gang and leads to Noodles' leaving town which we saw in the opening. Then we spend the last bit of the movie in 1968 where Noodles has been invited to a party at Bailey's Long Island mansion which should wrap up all of the loose ends.

It didn't really occur to me until about the time the movie was ending that I was also reminded of Whistle Stop, which I blogged about a few days ago. The reason is that both movies start off very slowly until the get to the finale that is supposed to be the main conflict of the movie. Whistle Stop is a B movie, but also only 81 minutes. Once Upon a Time in America, however, is about 229 minutes, at least the 2012 restoration print which is what I believed TCM showed and what is likely showing up on StarzEncore this evening and was pretty darn close to the original European theatrical release. That means there's a lot to sit through. Once Upon a Time in America, however, has much stronger production values, as well as much stronger acting, none of which should be surprised since this wasn't conceived as a B movie at all.

But is Once Upon a Time in America good? Well, there's the rub. Apparently when it was first set to be released in the US, the studio was antsy about releasing a movie that long, so they cut out a lot and then re-edited everything else into chronological order, winding up with a movie that ran about 140 minutes, and was a box-office flop. Critics who get paid to do this stuff, pretentious lot that they mostly are, had seen the 229-minute version and unsurprisingly praised it. I, however, am somewhere decidedly in the middle.

It's easy to understand why some people would love this. And the movie is clearly of a high technical standard. But at the time time, I can also see that the movie needed a much tighter script. I'm reminded of the comment I made about Erich von Stroheim's Greed: there was a good 140-minute movie to be made from the story, but Stroheim gave the studio a 10-hour film, making editing it down to 140 minutes a near impossible task. Likewise, Sergio Leone originally came up with something a lot longer than even the 229-minute cut, and that too probably made it extremely difficult to cut it down. Also to be fair to the studio, there are two rape scenes that probably would have required editing to avoid an X rating in the 1980s.

So certainly, give Once Upon a Time in America a go, but be warned that it's not going to be for everybody.