Day 66: I Like The Stink Of The Streets

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984)
Directed by Sergio Leone
Starring: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, James Hayden, William Forsythe, Larry Rapp, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Danny Aiello, Tuesday Weld

Back in the early 70's, Sergio Leone, director of the famed "Dollars Trilogy" (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly), was on the short list of directors Paramount wanted to direct The Godfather.  For his own reasons, Leone turned them down.  So Paramount got B-movie director and Roger Corman protege Francis Ford Coppola, and the rest is history.

Turning down The Godfather had always been one of Leone's biggest regrets.  As such, as far back as he could remember, he always wanted to make a gangster film.  So when he came across the novel The Hoods by Harry Gray, he jumped at the chance to make it into a film.

Seeing as how this is a Sergio Leone film, I'm changing up my format just a bit for this review.  You can listen to this music while you read it.

THE GOOD
As expected, this is a movie by a master filmmaker.  Never mind the fact that it's four hours long; this is basically a clinic on how to make movies right.  Just by watching this one film (more than once, and taking extensive notes), you can learn everything there is to know about the art of filmmaking.  Everything here works.

THE BAD
"WHAT?  You thought there was something BAD about a Sergio Leone film!?  Blasphemy!"

Hold your horses, guys.  I already went on and on about how great Leone was.  But there was a lot about this film that just didn't sit right with me.

I said that watching this movie will teach you all you need to know about artful filmmaking, and it's true.  But to do that, you will have to sit through nearly four hours of horrible people doing despicable things.  The main character, Noodles (De Niro), is one of the most unlikeable protagonists I have ever seen in a movie.  He and his partner Max (Woods) have absolutely no redeeming qualities.  They are greedy, violent, sex-obsessed hoods, and even though their friendship and ultimate falling out are intriguing, it is nearly impossible to like them.

THE UGLY
Noodles is the worst of the two characters, and the movie focuses on him.  While he starts off as a tough little punk in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, he quickly turns into a monster.  Though he does a lot of horrible stuff, the worst is when he rapes his childhood sweetheart Deborah (McGovern), and seems to have no qualms about it.  And the problem is that Leone seems to linger on this scene (and others like it) for just a bit too long, making the animosity grow toward the character we're supposed to be the most interested in.

However, there may be a reason for all this focus on the depravity of these characters.  It's often been said that The Godfather was an extremely romantic take on Mafia families.  Yes, they were criminals, but they were also bound together by a strong family tie.  There's none of that here in Once Upon a Time in America.  These guys are the worst of the worst.  And Leone does do quite a good job at deconstructing the Mafia mythos, just as he had done with the Cowboy mythos many years earlier.

But at least the Man With No Name had a few redeeming qualities.  I just wanted someone to stab Noodles in the eye.

So yes, this is a masterful film by a masterful filmmaker.  But it's one of the toughest movies I've ever sat through.  And it's got an ending that may frustrate (even infuriate) many viewers, and it's the subject of the question that James Woods says he gets asked the most often: Did Max die at the end?  If you think you're up to it, watch it and try to figure it out for yourself.