Once Upon a Time in America
This week’s movie is Once Upon a Time in America, from 1984, and I suppose you could call it a Spaghetti Gangster Movie. It was conceived and directed by Sergio Leone, the man who invented the Spaghetti Western and contributed all the best examples of that form. In fact, except for the earliest part of his career when he was making Italian epics like The Colossus of Rhodes, Leone has never made any other kind of movie than a Western—with one exception, the movie we’re going to see in a few minutes.
In fact Once Upon a Time in America isn’t Italian or European in any way except for the presence of Leone. Even the gangsters themselves, whom you’d kind of expect to be Italian-Americans, are actually Jewish gangsters instead. The cast is all American, with performers like Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern and Tuesday Weld in the main roles. True, some of the shooting took place outside the U.S., but since it was in Montreal rather than Italy or Spain I think we can call the film American in that respect as well. No, the reason I call it a Spaghetti Gangster Movie is that Leone has attempted here to do for the gangster film what he had done for the Western in movies like A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and, of course, Once Upon a Time in the West. That last film is probably Leone’s masterpiece, the longest and most epic of all his long, epic Westerns. Even so, the full version of Once Upon a Time in America runs almost four hours and is the biggest, most hyperbolical Leone film of all. Leone’s Westerns are famous for their arid desert locations, their violence, and their grimy self-interested heroes—and in fact these qualities, especially in the hands of then-unknown American actors like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, transformed the American Western itself. But the really really distinctive feature of Leone’s Westerns is their operatic grandeur: their exaggeration and distention of stark qualities such as innocence and power, cunning and treachery, stoicism and psychotic violence. Leone’s action scenes are slower than anybody else’s —way slower. He spends what seems like hours setting them up with crosscuts of the participants, full of lovingly-held extreme closeups of intense faces. When the shooting finally starts, he’s as likely as not to go to slow-motion to extend things even further. He just exaggerates and simplifies everything, and if his style sometimes looks like a comic-book style, that’s turned out to be an extremely prophetic and influential move itself. Harsh irony and a cynical attitude towards any kind of moral posturing combine with a heightened visual lyricism and sometimes a sort of delirious sentimentality in a truly unique blend. There’s nobody like Sergio Leone—and that includes all his imitators.
It’s very interesting to watch what happens when Leone moves his European, stylized, operatic approach from one ultra-American genre (the Western) to another (the gangster movie). It turns out that Leone’s gangster movie is much more romantic and full-blooded than his Westerns. The Westerns represent a dog-eat-dog world where the only values are self-preservation and money, and perhaps the harsh codes of machismo aggression and pride. But in Once Upon a Time in America the emphasis is on feelings and on relationships, which are inflated and poeticized or sentimentalized. Here the dramatic elements are love and loyalty and betrayal, and because everything is seen through a flashback structure the perspective is that of a kind of bittersweet tenderness that comes with the passage of years.
The lyricism and the poignance of time remembered are echoed in the look of the film, whose period costumes and settings are warm and rich. The agoraphobic hostile emptiness of the Westerns is replaced here by a fullness and darkness and eventually an opulence that are far more evocative of the emotions of love and loss that Leone wants to explore. Perhaps this more friendly environment, and these tenderer feelings, reveal a soft core in Leone’s sensibility that was not visible before; and perhaps they bring Once Upon a Time in America simply too close to the kind of sentimental nostalgia that so often characterizes period movies. Not everybody liked this movie by any means, and not even all the Leone fans had good things to say about it.
I myself think the movie has serious weaknesses, but that it more than justifies itself in all of its extravagant length with a persistent sense of flair and with lots of really striking moments—and, maybe surprisingly, with the sincerity of its feelings.
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I was talking at the beginning about this movie’s romantic, and even sentimental, basis, and about what a change that represented for the film’s director Sergio Leone. It’s almost as if all the things which are deliberately kept out of his Westerns are finally able to make an entrance in his film world now. It seems that Leone’s conception of the Western is as a world of silence, emptiness, violence, and the repression of any softer feeling. Certainly in creating Westerns of this kind Leone astonished everybody on both sides of the Atlantic with a daring stylization that was simultaneously sophisticated and simplified. Clearly his Westerns offer a kind of distillation or essence of the form.
The question about Once Upon a Time in America then becomes: Does this movie do the same kind of thing to the gangster movie genre? Well, maybe up to a point. But rather than redefining the form through radical stylization and a new perspective, Once Upon a Time in America seems instead very aware of the recent Hollywood tradition in gangster movies which had begun in 1968 with Bonnie and Clyde and had of course been definitively expressed in Coppola’s Godfather movies in the mid-1970s. The quality of period nostalgia and even the almost philosophical meditation on time and change are both extremely important features especially of the Godfather films, and are very much in evidence in Once Upon a Time in America. So that it seems that in this case Leone is more an imitator than an innovator.
The characters in this film, while certainly deeper and more complex than anything in his other movies, are still flat and cartoon-like in comparison to (for example) Coppola’s, and one can see that Leone hasn’t lost his taste for vivid, two-dimensional figures. And he still loves to find striking moments of human idiosyncrasy and quirky and even grotesque perspectives of irony. Some of the scenes from the gang’s childhood, like Noodles’s peeping through a spyhole at the dancing Deborah, or Patsy’s eating the cream pastry he had intended as payment for sexual favours, are so intense and precise that they are strongly reminiscent of Fellini. The business with the watch, the time Noodles drives the car off the pier into the lake, Noodles’s hiring a whole restaurant to romance Deborah, and literally dozens of other scenes, have that feeling of exaggeration, deliberate heightening, that is characteristic of Leone’s sensibility. His ironic sense of humour, which often combines a corrosive personal satire with an almost ceremonial quality, gets maybe its best expression ever in the scene of switching babies’ identities around. Here you have the very pretty visual stylization of the maternity ward, a happy Rossini overture on the soundtrack, and a really Italian joke about patriarchal gender-bias that’s both funny and nasty.
Then there’s the film’s political subtext. Leone isn’t at all interested in exploring the central gangster-movie idea that crime is a form of free enterprise and gangsters are just successful neo-Darwinist businessmen. Instead, he wants to use left-liberal sentiment to validate his gang of thugs. So he has them strong-arming and murdering on the side of the striking workers and the idealist union organizers and against the cops who are in bed with the bosses. And he wants to distinguish good gangsters like Noodles from tragically flawed gangsters like Max by having Noodles reject the invitation to get in on the ground floor of labor racketeering, and having Max go on to become an actual politician over the dead bodies and betrayed lives of his former brothers. These political gestures have no substance, they’re just a kind of thin veneer of class-solidarity spread over an ultra-romantic, really apolitical movie.
The film’s real heart, and its real success to my way of thinking, is its almost Proustian sense of time, memory and loss. This sense is even stronger in the full-length version, where there is much more jumping back and forth from present to past — but even in the version we’ve just seen it is strong enough. The emotional forces powering the characters and the basic story are those of youth, love and loyalty. And the movie’s ultimate perspective is that all those forces will be inevitably lost, leaving only the sadness and failure of all the characters in their old age. The movie’s twin central romances — between Noodles and Deborah and above all between Noodles and Max — are both failures, big all-encompassing relationships that just went right off the rails. The choice at the end is then between the dried-up bitterness of the old Max and the sad resignation of the old Noodles. This final perspective as much as anything else sets Once Upon a Time in America apart from other gangster movies, and gives some sense of the creative presence of Leone, that very strange and very original filmmaker.