Once Upon a Time in America (Two-Disc Special Edition)
by Sergio Leone
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Burt Young, Elizabeth McGovern, James Woods, Joe Pesci, Robert De NiroDirector: Sergio Leone
Brand: Warner Brothers
Writer: Enrico Medioli
Writer: Ernesto Gastaldi
Writer: Franco Arcalli
Writer: Franco Ferrini
Writer: Harry Grey
Writer: Leonardo Benvenuti
Writer: Piero De Bernardi
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 229 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-06-10
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Model: 31909
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Ten years in planning, Sergio Leone's epic Once upon a Time in America portrays 50 years of riveting underworld history and offers rich roles to a remarkable cast. Robert De Niro and James Woods play lifelong Lower East Side pals whose wary partnership unravels in death and mystery. Strong support comes from Tuesday Weld, Joe Pesci, Jennifer Connelly, Elizabeth McGovern and the young actors playin
Movie Reviews of Once Upon a Time in America (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Movie Review: Finest Film of the Past 25 Years
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great film -- in my view it is clearly the best film of the past 25 years. Leone's final cut, the one that played to international audiences, not the butchered format foisted on Americans, has been restored. Incidentally, I do recall going to an artsy neighborhood movie house in 1985 (they still existed back then) and seeing this precise cut. Too bad it was not the one that played on the first-run screens. It should have won best director, best film, and best score -- and DeNiro should have won best actor.
I will have to give spoilers here to explain my reaction to the film. The film is difficult enough as it is, and you can't really discuss it intelligently without getting down to specifics.
The ultimate question raised by Schickel, the commentator on the disk, is whether the movie is simply an opium dream. To support this thesis we have the film ending in the opium den, with DeNiro's smile as the opium rush overcomes him. And this scene is immediately preceded by a very dreamy segment from the future where someone who looks like James Woods' charactor (Max) walks out and disappears behind a garbage truck. Does he jump in? Is it really Max? Well he didn't jump in because the compressor is chewing up lettuce, not body parts, and apparently Leone wanted ambiguity by using a double instead of Woods for the scene and by never showing him clearly. And then these flappers in a car appear out of nowhere with Kate Smith singing "America" in the background What's that supposed to mean? And what about Elizabeth McGovern's character's failure to age much in 35 years -- is that part of the dream?
It is dreamlike, to be sure. Also, what's fascinating about all the future shots is the limited futuristic detail -- consistent with a 1933 opium smoker imagining the future by superimposing 1933 America on it. Noodles (DeNiro) arrives back in New York in 1968 on a bus/train, not an airplane. There's no sweeping view of 1968 Manhattan. No talk of the space race, or the cold war, or Vietnam.
On one level, Leone does want to tell the tale in an opium dream fashion -- hence the flashbacks and hopping all over time. But I don't buy the idea that this is just Noodles' dream of the future after he's betrayed (and thinks he's killed) all three of his friends. If Leone wanted the movie to be literally all a dream, he would have had no 1968 details -- he could have used radio instead of TV, a checker cab instead of a 1960s car for Noodles, music different from the Beatles, no frisbee appearing out of nowhere.
There are not a lot of futuristic details because Noodles really does not live in 1968. He's never gotten away from 1933, and that's what the movie is really about. There are no second acts in America, as I believe Fitzgerald said. Noodles goes to Buffalo and "goes to bed early" each night for the next 35 years.
As for the garbage truck ending, it's just a point in the movie that is more symbolic than real. It bothered me when I first saw the movie -- did Max jump in? Was he grabbed and thrown into the cab? Did someone jump out and nail him in the bushes? It doesn't matter. His life is over and the details of his death don't matter once Noodles refused the deal to do the deed himself. He's a dead man, and his memory and physicality are all going to be hauled away with the garbage. Fame and fortune are ultimately fleeting in America. I don't think the flapper scene works very well -- you should have had modern teenangers reveling and showing their oblviousness to the past.
So what does this movie mean? Schickel says it's a movie about loss and living with bad choices -- and he is right. Making it all "a dream", though, doesn't fit this meaning, which is why I don't buy that particular theory. But it's also a movie, fundamentally, about America -- or a European's view of America. I think it's about the violence and unceasing ambition that defines so much of our character. But Leone fundamentally loves America. And so the movie is also about the greatness of spirit and the survivor instinct that defines Noodles and his love interest Deborah.
Noodles is not a material success. He probably does not even have a family. But he is someone who puts friendship above ambition and who, ultimately, decides that there are some jobs you just have to turn down. Deborah pursues her craft, refuses to compromise, and rises out of the ghetto on her own merits. But how is it that she ends up with Max, who makes all the wrong choices, valuing ambition above all else? I'm not sure this works all that well, though it is significant, perhaps, that she never marries him. Is he simply a connection with her past to maintain? Does Max somehow put the fix in on her career?
Of course, despite his greatness of spirit, Noodles is poignantly tragic. His violence and emotion get the better of him, which explains the most disturbing scene in the film, the date rape he does on Deborah when she says she won't stay with him. The scene is the one of the most disturbing in all of film, and when I first watched the movie I wondered if it was simply gratuitous? On review, I don't think so. This horrible violence is too much a part of Noodles' character, and the American character, to be ignored. It has to be depicted.
Schickel completely misses the point in his commentary in describing Noodles as a schlemiel who can never quite get it right. I think he's larger than life and heroic in his own odd way. He's a Gatsby, but one who never tried to redefine himself (like Max did). As Fat Moe says, I would have bet everything on you, Noodles. That's how all his friends see him.
But why doesn't this guy, after Prohibition, just cash in his chips and go to college, Schickel asks? To a certain extent(and with the very large exception of the rape), Noodles acts under trying circumstances with courage and in the way we'd like to see ourselves acting. But, then, all of us, I suppose, would have seized the opportunity to get out of the lifestyle and go to college and be respectable. Noodles can't do that because of his loyalty to friends. It's an endearing, if tragic characteristic.
I found the ending, DeNiro's opium smile, very poignant as well. No, I don't think this is Leone laughing at us, telling us the whole thing is an opium dream. I think it's the way Americans deal with their pain and hopeless contradictions: via escape. This escape can be substance abuse or some other obsession. It's an incredibly sad ending.
Leone's technical mastery is the stuff of legend. His attention to detail, transitions, everything is so right. The pace of the movie is very, very slow. But he's just so damned good.
And the acting -- DeNiro is simply the best there is. The child actors were very well cast and particularly the young Deborah was marvelous. I like James Woods as Max. One criticism of Schickel was whether there was enough chemistry between Woods and DeNiro to sell the movie's theme that it was a love story about, ultimately, the love between Max and Noodles. I thought they played well together, that the bond and respect and tension between them is utterly convincing, and that Woods like DeNiro was marvelous.
I liked Elizabeth McGovern as well, and the other leading ladies (Tuesday Weld and the actress who plays Noodles last girl friend) were great.
It's an amazing movie, from which you learn more with every viewing.
Summary of Once Upon a Time in America (Two-Disc Special Edition)
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