Once Upon A Time In America
A few years ago, I saw The Godfather at the New Beverly Theater, and something incredible happened: I didn't like it. The revenge plots bored me and the performances seemed clownish, like SNL-level Italian stereotypes. (A few years later, Minky saw it screened alongside Part II and is now a fierce Godfather apologist.)More recently, I had the opportunity to see Once Upon A Time In America at the Egyptian. It was my first Leone. James Woods spoke afterwards, as did some other people involved in the production. I was blown away. It's formally and intellectually ambitious at every level. The use of music and sound is very deliberate (a whistled theme recurs to link important passages, the phone rings some forty times across three locations and two time periods before it's picked up in Noodles' opening reverie). At the same time, it's not at all high-minded: the scenes set in the Jewish gangsters' youth are Rabelasian with scat and sex. The gangsters' portraits, while not as Method-cool as those in the Godfather, are there in service of Leone's exploration of American power and progress.
I've still only seen two other Leone films, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. A very good essay about the latter, and Leone, is up at The New Republic.
posted by Josh K-sky at
1:33 PM
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