“This country’s still growing up. Certain diseases it’s better to have when you’re young.”
Sergio Leone’s final film is about what used to be. It is no coincidence that the soundtrack’s most memorable moment is not one of Ennio Morricone’s motifs but rather an anachronistic use of The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’. It is a mob drama with added nostalgia, as the old Noodles (Robert De Niro) returns to the Jewish neighbourhood where he grew up and relives memories of his troubled youth as a gangster in Prohibition Brooklyn with the mind-altering benefits of both hindsight and opium. Noodles (and Leone) look back prudently at the obscene violence and crime that made them, whilst the film gets to revel in the grisly delights of it all over again.
Although it was mercilessly edited for its American theatrical release, Leone’s original cut of Once Upon a Time in America deserves a second chance. It is complex and punishingly long, but it gives itself plenty of time to show the friendships of Noodles and his partners in crime blossom before they are inevitably torn apart. It also allows for thorough showcases of the stunning sets, which really have held the test of time. Unfortunately, other parts of the film feel more like relics from a bygone era. The crash zooms into characters’ faces and stagey blocking and camera pans feel self-consciously old-fashioned, and the makeup of the aged characters is sometimes unconvincing. Most troublingly, the film treats its female characters with appalling contempt; which, while probably true to the setting and the male characters’ amorality, is nonetheless likely to leave a bitter taste in modern audiences’ mouths. However, if Leone does have a final lesson to impart, it is that it might be worthwhile to have one look back into that mysterious, mutable, messy thing called the past.
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