Once upon a Time in America (84, Sergio Leone)

As Sergio Leone's last film, Once upon a Time in America carries forward the advancements Leone had made with his last two films, Once upon a Time in the West and Duck, You Sucker! Like Once upon a Time in the West, Leone seeks and strives to reference, riff, and comment on nearly every (mainstream) gangster picture ever made. While doing so, he also addresses the big steps he took in Duck, You Sucker! and crafts characters with big psychological strains. Somehow, he manages to tie these two concerns into one big package that finishes the thematic concerns of the two pictures (the death of the West, flourish of revolution) and take his material up to the present day through his commentary on industry and the trajectory of American business practices.

Sound like a lot? Leone certainly takes on a multitude of subjects with the film, but with the release at just under four hours, he has time to look at a lot of things. Ever the entertainer though, Leone makes sure to keep the running time managable through his incredible sense of staging and pacing. The use of alternating time periods here is something astounding and allows Leone to frame his narrative while simultaneously building his characters, relationships, and the bigger questions therein. So the beginning of the film sets up De Niro as a destroyed man and then charts back to explain how he rose and fell and the larger implications of his story upon the changes in America itself.

Where Leone really improves upon his prior efforts is in the "before" stages. While backstory and motivation in his previous films had been largely handled through the use of revelatory flashbacks (Bronson in West, Lee Van Cleef in For a Few Dollars More, Mallory in Duck), he creates the character's pasts into a whole section of the film and utilizes his increased running time and the chance to fully explore these pasts as a way to develop his larger concern.

Through such an expansive narrative, the film can take a lot of thematic threads and follow them over time. Take, for instance, the concurrent developments of sexuality and business, the film's two major tools. As the boys start hooding around and robbing for small time, they also develop sexually. The two threads continually converge, most notably early on when the boys intimidate a police captain by photographing him with a prostitute and proceed to lay down their terms with him as they lose their virginity. Such a moment ties the big moment of puberty, the first sexual experience, with burgeoning business.

Leone never loses this connection but sees it through the rest of the film. The group's first big job, a knock down gig, comes concurrently with the film's first rape scene, a very bizarre moment that touches on some of Leone's shortcomings with female characters. As the group steals diamonds, Noodles, seemingly in the energy and motion of the moment, rapes the jeweler's lover. Even though he later states some regret in working for the big organization, the damage is done. Leone constantly portrays Noodles in this way, able to be violent (sexually or otherwise) but simultaneously pining for a chance to keep things small and presumably start a relationship with his childhood crush, the embodiment of purity (played by Elizabeth McGovern).

The relationship between De Niro and McGovern ultimately ends in the film's most disturbing sequence. After a date in which Noodles essentially plays Gatsby, he finds out that he can't have her and rapes her in the backseat of his car. The moment comes as a revelation to Noodles who seems to realize that the expansive business practices isn't the answer. Of course, things go south for the gang from there, and the film comes full circle.

The eventual ruthlessness of sexualized violence becomes a tool for Leone to show the depths of Noodles' flawed psychology but also as a wake-up call for the character himself. In the end though, even this symbol of purity ends up with the corrupt politician, implying, essentially, that all women are subject to money and really become whores when given the chance. Leone's treatment of women here and throughout the flick is quite atrocious and really plays into the virgin-whore dichotomy. They're used mostly as ciphers for the men and an echo for their business practices. Of course, Leone shows how such an existence is inherently unsatisfying for a woman, but the treatment of the characters is shallow in the first place. McGovern spends most of the film gazing off into space because she really has no character to play at all. The others try, but their simple promiscuous femininity is too cut and dried for any attempts of development. As stated above though, they are ultimately used as ciphers for the larger thread of business expansion and dead ideals.

This lazy character work runs concurrently with some of the others in the film. Despite a great James Woods performance, the Max character essentially operates under the radar with character development left out in favor of sporadic changes. The rest of the gang and other secondary characters (police, union leaders), while not given much work, function as a whole due to some great casting, including Treat Williams, Joe Pesci, William Forsythe, and Danny Aiello. Although none of the actresses get to play real characters, the men get some great, pulpy moments to push aside concerns over underwriting. De Niro is predictably great as Noodles, and the film's intense of that characterization and his psychology is unheard of in Leone's canon that normally concentrates on grabbing a character's essence and rocking it out for the film's running time (see: Henry Fonda in West and Clint Eastwood in the Dollars films). This emphasis on psychology and the effort put toward tracing it throughout the narrative is a big jump for Leone, and the film owes its success to how that character is handled.

Like the characters though, individual scenes occasionally flounder. The romance scenes between De Niro and McGovern are almost all an outright failure, which is a shame because the first scenes with the two as children are fantastic. As the pair age though, that naive flirting tries to become a romance without any meaningful moments between the pair. The relationship between Woods and De Niro has a lot more substance even if Woods' character doesn't get developed except in short sporadic bursts that cause the development of their friendship to get muddled and inconsistent at times.

Likewise, Ennio Morricone's soundtrack runs the gamut from gorgeous to sentimental to just plain weird with that pan flute. However, for the most part, his themes carry the emotional moments, and when it works, it works better than Howard Shore or John Williams could dream of.

Perhaps the conflict that sometimes arises between hard boiled and sentimental comes from Leone's obsessive genre take. At times, scenes will play out with stark brutality that recalls some of the meaner noirs and 70's crimers. Other times, there's a flowery sentimentality that also recalls an older era of filmmaking, something that Leone can never escape. Morricone's soundtrack reflects this with the pan flute accompanying the weirder and progressive moments mostly and the weepy themes accompanying some of the weaker moments.

In the end though, Leone's successful with his genre work, getting the eras and styles of yesteryear right while bringing in the uncompromising characterizations, violence, and sexual behavior more akin to the films of the 60's and 70's that he helped influence in the first place. In short, he makes it fun but keeps it sophisticated.

Although not as entertaining as the Dollars films, comprehensive in genre as Once upon a Time in the West, or as explicitly political as Duck, You Sucker!, Once upon a Time in America may be Leone's greatest achievement, a case in which character, construction, commentary, and cojones all come together. It's a swansong for one of the most celebrated and consistent directors ever, and it's a miracle of home video that the appropriate version is now the only version.