Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Directed by Sergio Leone. Starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Tuesday Weld, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, James Hayden, William Forsythe, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Danny Aiello, Darlanne Fluegel, Jennifer Connelly, Larry Rapp, Amy Ryder, Richard Bright, Julie Cohen, Robert Harper, James Russo. [R]

Leone’s final film is a complex and haunting crime epic tracing the rise and fall of four Jewish gangsters, friends since their days as hooligan youths in New York’s Lower East Side during the early part of the twentieth century. Long, moody and elegiac, but compelling from start to finish, full of promises and betrayals, the destructive influence of greed and the deterioration of honor, the triumphs of the viciously amoral and the lamentations of the ruefully introspective. Adapted from a Harry Grey novel (“The Hoods”), Leone tells the sprawling story as a melancholy reflection—some even argue for the interpretation that the lion’s share of the film is nothing more than an opium dream of a mobster imagining the childhood that was and the middle-age to be—laid out in a chronological disarray that’s likely to make the early passages hard to follow for the uninitiated; but it’s a unique spell that he casts, setting it apart from the lengthy catalogs of operatic gangster stories and examinations of the seamier side of America’s legacy. Beautifully detailed production spanning five decades, strikingly photographed by Tonino Delli Colli on both real New York locations and back-lot recreations in Rome, filled with Ennio Morricone’s majestically morose music. Hacked to pieces and rearranged for its initial US wide release; only on home video did Leone’s original nearly-four-hour cut see the light of day outside of Europe and the early sneak previews (an extended director’s cut restoring an additional twenty-plus minutes makes for perhaps an even richer and more rewarding experience). Connelly’s film debut.

94/100