Once Upon a Time in America

I saw Sergio Leone’s epic drama—or a version thereof—the weekend it opened, in 1984, at a suburban movie theatre. It tells the story of a band of Jewish gangsters in New York who got their start as kids in the early days of Prohibition and whose machinations carried them through the nineteen-sixties. The gangsters as adults were played by Robert De Niro and James Woods, but, because of a cinematic peculiarity, they didn’t make much of an impression on me. The version of the film that was released then ran a mere hundred and thirty-nine minutes, and its events unspooled in chronological order, from the twenties through the sixties. In that cut, the movie started with scenes of the protagonists, Noodles and Max (played by the teen actors Scott Tiler and Rusty Jacobs) in a Brooklyn Jewish ghetto, and those scenes, which I discuss in this clip, overwhelmed me as the most vivid and evocative cinematic depictions of that milieu, the one of my immigrant grandparents’ own youth, that I had ever seen. (Moreover, the subsequent aging of the gangsters, which occurred as a leap ahead in time, struck me as a cinematic coup de théâtre of a rare power.)

That cut, it turns out, wasn’t the one Leone intended; his runs two hundred and twenty-nine minutes, and it’s the one now available on DVD. I subsequently saw it, years later, at MOMA, and was grateful to see more of a movie I love, and to see it as it was meant to be. But Leone’s structure, featuring a pleated time scheme in which the early twenties appear as flashbacks and the aging of the gangsters is set up early, was nonetheless something of a disappointment. In any case, the power of his depiction of the Brooklyn shtetl still stands. On an odd historical note, Leone was offered “The Godfather” but turned it down to make this movie—which was then held up for a decade over rights to the book on which it’s based.