Once Upon a Time in America

(C’era una volta in America)

Extended Director’s Cut

featuring

Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams,

When Sergio Leone’s pulp masterpiece was originally released, the studio gunned it down, leaving a wound some eighty minutes wide. They also restitched the action, making chronological what had been a gauzy experiment in atemporal storytelling, and missed Leone’s intention entirely: “The principal character in the film is Time,” he explained. Covering almost five decades, this bloodied American fairytale follows two Jewish pals, Noodles Aaronson (Robert De Niro) and Max Bercovicz (James Woods), as they rise through the ranks of Roaring Twenties racketeering in New York's Lower East Side. Shot in elegiac tones by Tonino Delli Colli, the film gives us craven double-dealings and street-side ambushes, brute betrayals and manhandled mistresses, all with the poetry of the gutter, and all seen through the unfaltering eyes of Noodles, now an aged gangster whose great melancholy will not release him from the prison of time. Leone's panoramic glimpse of New York's underworld is a violent meditation, not about gangsterism, but about the price one pays when following the darkest path. It should have been called “Remembrance of Crimes Past.” 

Steve Seid
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Sergio Leone
  • Leonardo Benvenuti
  • Piero De Bernardi
  • Enrico Medioli
  • Franco Arcalli
  • Franco Ferrini
Based On
  • the novel The Hoods by Harry Grey

Cinematographer
  • Tonino Delli Colli
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 251 mins
Source
  • Criterion Pictures

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