I. THE INTERNATIONAL 100 (great inter-nation cinema)

“I took away your whole life from you. I’ve been living in your place. I took everything. I took your money, I took your girl. All I left for you was 35 years of grief over having killed me.”

Sergio Leone read Harry Grey’s novel The Hoods in the mid-60s and met with the author after Grey saw and enjoyed the Dollars trilogy. However, after Coppola’s first two Godfather films and Bertolucci’s five-hour film 1900, Leone sought a certain scope, scale, and lead actor, that being Robert DeNiro. When Leone first approached DeNiro in 1975, DeNiro felt uncomfortable playing a rapist and a gangster so soon after playing Vito Corleone. For his part, Leone never felt comfortable with any other actor who could look 25 on camera. After winning his second Oscar in 1981, DeNiro felt ready for the role, and, as with The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull, DeNiro was very actively involved in choosing his castmates. DeNiro and Leone landed a laudable, even incredible American cast which was not quite as impressive as Leone had imagined: he had hoped for gangster-era stars like Henry Fonda, James Stewart, or James Cagney. The film pays direct homage to many classical-Hollywood crime films, including Little Caesar, Bullets or Ballots, Dead End, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, The Lady from Shanghai, Cry of the City, White Heat, The Big Heat, and The Killing. In many ways, Once Upon a Time in America is meant as an elegy to all of them, a looking back that’s less nostalgic and more hard-won knowledge. By 1981, producer Arnon Milchan managed to convince a considerably large consortium of investors that the return of Leone to epic territory was a very big deal, and actualized by far Leone’s largest budget as well as location shooting in Italy, France, and the United States which ran almost a year, from June 1982 to April 1983.

Leone well knew his film would be compared with The Godfather Part II, but Noodles isn’t exactly an American success story like Vito or Michael Corleone; he’s closer to Luca Brasi, or maybe Tom Hagen in exile. Still, Leone knew that his World War I-era Lower East Side squalor needed to look even more realistic than Coppola’s, and working with his usual crucial contributors, especially Delli Colli on camera and Carlo Simi on production design, I would argue that Leone accomplished this at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. I want to circle back to Godfather and Hollywood references after explaining the plot, like so:

Once Upon a Time in America begins with the distantly heard radio of Kate Bush singing “God Bless America” in a midcentury apartment as a blond woman discovers her sheet perforated in the shape of a man, turns to see thugs who ask her “where is he?”, resists, and is shot dead. The same thugs interrogate the bloody-faced Fat Moe with a chain and a weight bag who admits that he can be found at Chun Low’s Wayang Theater. In an opium den, we meet Noodles, recumbent, smoking opium, seeing a headline about three of his friends, flashing back through the sound of a ringing phone to police removing three disfigured corpses and to knowing his friends in a speakeasy. The thugs enter the theater which causes a Chinese man to retire to the back opium den and tip off Noodles to escape, which he does, returning to Fat Moe’s apartment and killing a thug who had circled back. Fat Moe tells Noodles that his girlfriend was already killed, and so Noodles takes a key, uses it to unlock a bus depot locker (where we now are in a jump cut), withdraws a suitcase, opens it to find nothing but papers, and buys the next bus ticket anywhere, to Buffalo. Noodles looks at the bus depot mural of Coney Island which transitions to a painting of “Love” and an aged Noodles, telling us we’re now in the 60s. Noodles returns to aged Moe because of a letter indicating the thugs have found him, and the two men realize the other never had a certain million dollars. Noodles says the suitcase was empty, making the money’s whereabouts a 35-year mystery. Noodles looks through Fat Moe’s peephole and flashes back to when he was using it as a street kid to spy on ballet-dancing Deborah, who compares him to a roach on his later approach. In a vividly realized Jewish Lower East Side of roughly 1919, teenage Noodles and his three friends, Patsy, Cockeye, and Dominic, commit petty crimes like burning a newspaper stand and robbing drunks. Noodles confronts another teen thief named Max, but they find a shared interest in foiling a police officer whom they find and photograph in flagrante with a minor named Peggy. In exchange for the plate, Max and Noodles negotiate the no-good cop paying for their virginity being lost to Peggy as well as the same blind eye this bozo gives to local boss Bugsy. On Pesach, Noodles follows Deborah to her now-empty store, chats, hears her poetry, kisses her, and gets interrupted by Max, who brings him into an alley to criticize him kissing Deborah when they might be stealing from empty stores. In that alley, Bugsy and his boys corner the two teens, beat the crap out of them for infringing on his territory, and leave a bloody-faced Noodles futilely begging Deborah to reopen the door. The five-kid gang set up a scheme to smuggle goods across the Hudson using sealed salt bags, and after it works like a charm, they put their profits in a shared suitcase, establish their gang fund, swear to give 50% of proceeds to the case, lock it in the bus depot locker we’ve seen, and swear to give the key to Deborah’s brother, straight arrow Fat Moe, who will know only to give it to them when they’re all together. Under an end of the Brooklyn Bridge, Bugsy finds them and shoots Dominic who says “I slipped” and dies in the arms of Noodles, who goes nuts, stabs Bugsy to death, stabs an intervening cop, and gets hauled off to prison. Back in the 60s, Noodles visits an elaborate crypt for Max, Patsy, and Cockeye, whose plaques reveal they died in 1933, next to a plaque that reveals Noodles paid for the crypt in 1967 and also holds…a key? Noodles takes the plaque’s key to a bus depot, unlocks its locker, and finds a suitcase with a million dollars and a note that this is an advance payment on his next job. Noodles walks the precious suitcase under a modern underpass as a Frisbee flies over his head to match cut to adult Max meeting Noodles coming out of jail and showing him their mortician car representing their successful shared bootlegging business which includes a young naked female “stiff” who comes to available life. At their speakeasy, Noodles meets with Peggy, Patsy, Cockeye, a new colonel named Frankie Minaldi, and even the successfully dancing Deborah, who upon Max’s “Hey Noodles,” says as she did 12 years before, “your mother’s calling.” On a bank job, their double agent, Carol, asks to be slapped and smacked around, and Noodles bends her over and hurts her. Out at the muddy riverbed, Max and Noodles suddenly betray Joe and his gang, and as Noodles drives them away he says if he’d known, he would have said no, because if Frankie can ask for Joe dead, soon they’ll be asked to betray each other. Gangsters torture union boss Jimmy Conway O’Donnell with gasoline and hoses but Max’s gang gets the guns and the jump on them, and they effect a successful trade. In an extended sequence, Danny Aiello plays Police Chief Aiello, sexist father of four girls and a newborn son who gets snatched from the local hospital by the gang including Noodles, who over the phone successfully threatens the Chief to remove his scabs and allow union strikers to resume their jobs. The gang realizes they scrambled the babies, joke about playing God, and reunite with and show all their penises to Carol, who chooses Max. Noodles rents an estuary’s entire extravagant restaurant for Deborah, who worries that he would lock her up and throw away the key and insists on leaving for Hollywood, and then, in maybe the most disturbing scene on this B-list, Noodles rapes Deborah in a backseat. Jimmy calls Noodles for help, an urban battle rages, the gang convenes in Jimmy’s hospital room, and Jimmy’s lieutenant offers them jobs as muscle for teamsters, an idea Max loves and Noodles hates and walks out on. With blonde girlfriends along, Max and Noodles vacation to Miami and learn Prohibition is ending, causing Max to suggest they rob the Federal Reserve, Noodles to answer that he’s crazy, and Max to throw a carapace in Noodles’ face and pace on the seashore. Back in New York, Carol privately asks Noodles to tip the cops to a minor offense rather than let Max attempt the suicide mission of attacking the Fed, and at the speakeasy’s big farewell-to-Prohibition party, Noodles slips into a room and calls police officer Halloran. In 1968, at the Bailey Foundation, Noodles visits the elderly Carol who says Max gave her the idea of calling the cops so that he could die in a hail of gunfire rather than die in an asylum like his father. Noodles meets Deborah in her dressing room, tells her she was right to pursue an acting career, asks about an invitation from Secretary Bailey, hears a teen knocking on Deborah’s door, opens it, and meets David, named after Noodles’ real name, looking like Max as he first met him. Noodles goes to Bailey’s party and goes into the back room where Max, now Bailey, confirms that he faked his death, stole his girl, let him live with guilt for 35 years, and now wants his old friend to exact revenge and kill him before the Teamsters do. However, Noodles says nobody owes nothing and nods out of the Bailey estate, though as he does, a strange garbage truck passes him grinding…just garbage? The film returns to Noodles’ first scene in the opium den, and the final shot, echoing one of Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West, shows Noodles from above, through lace, lying down and blithely grinning.

Once Upon a Time in America can be read as a sort of hidden history of Jews in America, not only in the obvious ways, but also in that Noodles’ friends die or go into hiding in 1933, the year Hitler comes to power, and only really take control of the past during 1967-68, after the events of the Six-Day War and the annexation of the Sinai. In this reading, the 30 year period that leads up to, lives, and then reflects on the Holocaust is denied, elided, ignored in favor of other glories. With its many filmic references, Once Upon a Time in America can also be apprehended as a hidden history of Hollywood gangster films, which started during the inchoate silent era, reached fruition in 1931, 1932, and 1933 with Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface, and then were “killed” by the Hays Code or at least forced to become more respectable for about 34 years, until Bonnie and Clyde came out in 1967 and the rules were ready to be remade again. As with The Public Enemy and The Godfather Part II in particular, Leone insists on the deprivation of the World War I years so that we know why these desperados were so, well, desperate. Setting aside the bookends of 1901 and 1941, The Godfather Part II mostly takes place in two eras, the 19teens and late 1950s; Once Upon a Time in America is remarkable for fluidly moving between three eras and spending about the same amount of time in each. We always know The Godfather Part II will end where it began, with Michael’s later Lake Tahoe choices, but Once Upon a Time in America is intentionally less linear, almost implying life is less an arrow from youth to old age and more a series of incidents, maybe even more of a floating signifier. The Godfather Part II asks us what we owe our ancestors and descendants; Once Upon a Time in America asks us the value of treasuring our youth, of living outside our best selves for 35 years. 

One interviewer asked Sergio Leone if the ending meant that all of the 1960s segments were merely a vision or a fever dream of Noodles, perhaps his way of dealing with the guilt of raping, and Leone allowed that it was possible. Perhaps he said that after realizing his rape scenes went too far or didn’t really address rape’s after-effects.