Tags

, , , ,

Last week, I watched Once Upon a Time in America, catching it in the final days before it was to be removed from Netflix streaming. It was a long watch and it was a long time coming.

I should remember when it came out in the theaters, although I can’t say that I particularly do. Over the years I’ve seen it on Blockbuster shelves and Walmart bargain racks but never was moved to watch it. It did have something of a bad rap, and possibly a well-deserved one at that. That said, I was unaware of the details and, you might even say, I didn’t even know the basics.

As I’ve explained, I don’t like to read the synopsis of a movie when I am intending to watch it. Absent a ranking or review system, we are left to what we all endured in those old Blockbuster days – judging a VHS box, literally, by its cover. Back then, I would look at the title and look at the box art and try to make a guess about the subject and tone – and whether or not it was for me. With Once Upon a Time in America, I had it pegged as some sort of turn-of-the-century immigrant-family tale. I could tell by the big names on the box plus the gravitas with which it was presented that this was meant to be a serious work, so it always remained on the edge of my watch list. It never made it to the top, though, until Netflix forced my hand.

That one of those “big names” was Sergio Leone somehow eluded me. Don’t ask me how that happened. Had I noticed I might have put two and two together, as I’m sure all my readers must have. I, like you, knew Sergio Leone for his westerns that made Clint Eastwood famous. I would have remembered (or at least should have) that Leone made Once Upon a Time in the West. From there, the title should have been the tip off. That’s assuming I didn’t really know my Sergio Leone oeuvre. Otherwise, I would have recognized it as a third title in the “Once Upon a Time” trilogy, a trilogy based (as far as I can tell) entirely upon the titles. The third of the trio, the 1978 Duck, You Sucker!, is also variously known as A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon a Time… Revolution, depending (I suppose) on how sophisticated you expect your potential audience to be.

So a week ago I finally realized that Once Upon a Time in America is nothing like what I thought it was. What it is is Sergio Leone’s run at an American mobster epic. It is Goodfellas, a half-a-dozen years before Goodfellas. Like Scorsese’s masterpiece, it is based on a book. In this case, the book is the 1952 story The Hoods by Harry Grey. The Hoods was Grey’s first book, written using a pseudonym, and the story is a combination of fiction, fact, and autobiography from a man born as Herschel Goldberg. Goldberg was a participant in the organized crime of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s.

The first thing I noticed about the film is that its style, in and of itself, is something from another era. Although made in the 80s, it has a distinctly 70s or even 60s feel. Why say something in 60 seconds when you can take 20 minutes to really SHOW it? It’s a film filled with long pensive shots, conversations where the dialog is (deliberately) unintelligible above the background noise, and lots of T&A. My second thought was, wait, wasn’t this made in 1984? Surely they didn’t make films like that in 1984?

And, broadly speaking, no they did not.

Whereas a director could freely mix art-house chic and popular appeal in the early 70s (see Scorcese’s earlier Mean Streets), this did not fly with marketing types of the 80s. Leone’s original vision was to tell the story in a pair of films, each three hours long. He managed to trim this down to a single piece running four hours but was convinced that this too was too long. He trimmed it down to 3 hours and 49 minutes and called it good. His American distributors, figuring they had an overlong dog on their hands, chopped out another hour and a half (!!) before releasing it to theaters. The result was commercial and critical failure. Leone’s original, albeit trimmed version, was released full length in Europe and became known as the “European version.” Critics who saw both attributed the American disaster to the ridiculous edit.

While the distributor’s hatchet job pretty clearly hurt the film financially it is hard to say that leaving it intact would have served them better. Like other 60s epic pieces, the film was not even intended to be watched in a single sitting. There is an intermission card – oddly located about 2/3rds of the way through the film. I wound up breaking it up into even smaller bites so I could get to bed before the sun came up on me. I did make it through and I’m glad I finally did. I wouldn’t put it quite on par* with Goodfellas, much less The Godfather (which Leone was offered the opportunity to direct but turned it down in favor of creating his own story), but it is a decent film.

I now have to wonder if I would not have appreciated the “Director’s Cut” even more. It isn’t, one should add, an actual “director’s cut.” Leone’s 3h, 49m version was cut by him but it was done under pressure to shorten the movie. He died in 1989 of heart failure and some think that the pressure surrounding Once Upon a Time… was a contributing factor. The so-called Director’s Cut was assembled in 2012 using work prints and prior script drafts. I’ve seen a couple of clips from it and some of the added scenes go a long way to explaining confusing points in the film, especially with the ending. I’m not sure I have it in me, though, to put in another four-hours-plus to revisit something I just watched. Maybe a few years from now.

One thing I couldn’t help noticing was the portrayal of the main characters as they grew from young teens to late middle age. Obviously the 14-year-old characters were played by different, younger actors but the greying of the years was done with makeup. Robert DeNiro is particularly of note because the convincing job of creating the elder Bobby D in this film can be contrasted to what was done on The Irishman. Despite the use of CGI (or maybe because of it), the altered DeNiro of 1984 is far more believable than anything done on the newer film. They didn’t quite do so well with Elizabeth McGovern. Part of the problem is that she has aged far more gracefully than anything the makeup department could do with her.

And speaking of actors’ ages, I was almost afraid to look up how old Jennifer Connelly actually was and whether that was really her butt. Just asking the question might be a felony these days. However, being a fan of watching the full credits at the end (which, unusually, was shown on Netflix with this one), I saw that she actually had a body double for that scene – performed by a lesser-known Italian actress named Margherita Pace. I can’t find Margherita’s age but I’m going to assume she was plenty old enough to go nude on camera.

For all our sakes.

Photo by Mario Cuadros on Pexels.com

*I have to couch this statement with some disclaimers. For the cinephile, there is probably no comparing the two. Goodfellas is rowdy entertainment set to an MTV-inspired soundtrack. Just contrast, for a small glimpse, the wonderful and classic (in the movie business sense) score from Once Upon a Time in America. It’s hard to rank the two strictly on quality measures without heavily including what I, the viewer, wants from the film. In preferring Goodfellas, my emphasis is heavily on which of the two I enjoyed watching the most.