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By PAUL BRENNER
Aged gangster Noodles (Robert De Niro) ambles around his old mob stomping ground
and tells his old friend, "You can always tell the winners at the starting gate
-- and the losers. Who would ever put a penny on you?" Sergio Leone's operatic
cathedral of a gangster film, "Once Upon a Time in America," now available in
its uncut form on Warner Home Video, in its crazed ambition and all encompassing
scale, is a film (much like von Stroheim's "Greed"), in the iced standards of
Hollywood legers, that -- despite the adulation heaped upon it on its unveiling
at the Cannes Film Festival -- was doomed to be a loser at the starting gate.
And in 1984 it was. The U.S. release of the film was cut by a good ninety
minutes and the story, chronicling the life and times of the Jewish mob in New
York City in a complex series of elegantly designed flashbacks and
flash-forwards, hammered into chronological order, was rendered senseless. In an
all too typical instance, Leone's dream project/love affair with Hollywood
gangster films was taken by Hollywood, butchered beyond recognition, and spit
back into the lover's face.
But is Leone's reverent, poetic depiction of Hollywood clichés a great film?
There is no denying Leone's brilliance and fervor and passion, it is all there
to see in every frame. Perfection, on the other hand, has its price. In its ten
year period of gestation, Leone had wrangled over his dream film (and ultimately
his film epitaph) in his mind and knew exactly where the camera would go, how
the camera moves would be shot, how he actors would act. This lack of
spontaneity, Leone's mannerism, serves to encase the film in an airless
Cinecetta glass jar. And it doesn't help that De Niro and James Woods --
exciting, itchy performers on their own -- seem to be acting in different
hemispheres. The use of comical Woody Allen parody names -- Noodles, Fats, and
Bugsy -- also doesn't help. It is almost too easy to see in the famous final
shot of a drugged-out Noodles smiling into the camera the film as Leone's opium
dream of Hollywood. But that is what "Once Upon a Time in America" is -- Leone's
rigor mortis masterpiece.
The two-disc set features a horrendous disc break, occurring in mid-scene, that
sets the head twirling about on the neck. There is a Wagnerian audio commentary
but film critic Richard Schickel along with a documentary on the film, a stills
gallery, the theatrical trailer, and a cast and crew listing. The film is in
English and French and subtitled in English, French, and Spanish. But don't
believe the promotional line on the DVD box that the film is "offered for the
first time in the full version 1984 Cannes Film Festival audiences cheered."
Save for three minutes, the uncut version, ultimately, was released theatrically
in the United States and made available by Warner Home Video on laser disc in
1994. |
