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List Price: $26.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 1153
Released: June 10, 2003 |
| Our Price: $10.99 |
| Used Price: $8.21 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 04/05/2005 Rating: Nr
Description of Once Upon a Time in America (Two-Disc Special Edition):
This movie has a checkered history, having been chopped from its original 227-minute director's cut to 139 minutes for its U.S. release. This longer edition benefits from having the complete story (the short version has huge gaps) about turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants in America finding their way into lives of crime, as told in flashback by an aging Jewish gangster named Noodles (Robert De Niro). On the other hand, it's almost four hours long, and this sometimes-indulgent Sergio Leone film is no Godfather. Still, it is notable for the contrast between Leone's elegiac take on the gangster film and his occasional explosive action, as well as for the mix of the stoic, inexpressive De Niro and the hyperactive James Woods as his lifelong friend and rival. --Marshall Fine
Once Upon a Time in America (Two-Disc Special Edition) Reviews:
GANGSTER EPIC 
2008-11-18 - Once Upon a Time in America (Two-Disc Special Edition)
THE LEADING ACTOR IN SERGIO LEONE'S DREAMING EPIC IS NOT JAMES WOODS NOR IS IT ELIZABETH McGovern; NOR FOR ALL THE EXCELLENCE IN HIS PERFORMANCE, IS IT ROBERT de NIRO. THE MAIN CHARACTER IN THE FILM IS 'TIME'! THE THEME IS ONE THAT HAS ALWAYS FASCINATED MR.LEONE. ONE COULD POINT TO SOME OF THE MORE OBVIOUS SYMBOLS IN HIS EARLIER FILMS LIKE THE HANDLESS CLOCKS THAT LITTER THE LANDSCAPE OF 'ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST' OR THE MUSICAL FOB-WATCH IN 'FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE' THAT WAS A CONTINUOUS REMINDER OF RAPE AND REVENGE AND WAS USED TO TIME THE FINAL SHOOT-OUT!
IN 'ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA', THE ITEM WHICH FIRST BRINGS THE YOUNG NOODLES(de NIRO) AND MAX(JAMES WOODS) TOGETHER IF THEIR LIFE TIME OF CRIME IS A STOLEN POCKET WATCH, AND IT PASSES BETWEEN THEM THROUGHOUT THE FILM AS A KIND OF TALISMAN. MOREOVER, THE ALL-IMPORTANT KEYS THAT CAN OPEN
THE LEFT-LUGGAGE LOCKER, WHERE THE GANG STORE THEIR LOOT ARE HIDDEN IN A GRANDFATHER CLOCK. QUITE LITERALLY, SERGIO LEONE IS SAYING, THE KEY TO THE MYSTERY IS IN THE CLOCK. IN STRICT CHRONOLOGICAL TERMS, THE FILM, IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PHASES. (1)1923: THE ADOLESCENT GANG OF NOODLES, MAX, COCKEYE, DOMINIC AND PATSY IS FORMED ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN.
(2)1933: WHEN AFTER SEVERAL SUCCESSFUL YEARS OF TRADING IN HOOCH, THE END OF PROHIBITION SPELLS AN END TO THE GANG'S ACTIVITIES, AS A RESULT OF WHICH MAX PLANS TO PULL AN AMBITIOUS BANK RAID , AND NOODLES, ANXIOUS TO AVOID THEIR DESTRUCTION IN THIS MAD SCHEME, BETRAYS THEM TO THE POLICE AND THEY ARE ALL SLAUGHTERED IN THE RAIN; AND (3)1968: WHEN NOODLES AFTER ANONYMOUSLY LIVING IN BUFFALO IN A SELF-IMPOSED EXILE FOR THIRTY FIVE YEARS, RETURNS TO NEW YORK, SUMMONED BY A STRANGE LETTER WHICH SEEMS TO HOLD A SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERIES HE HAS BEEN PONDERING WHILE IN EXILE.
THE FILM RECREATES THE STARING POINT OF 1968. IT THEN, SHIFTS TEASINGLY BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS IN TIME, IN MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT HUMAN MEMORY DOES. IT MAY NOT BE MUCH, BUT IT IS EVERYTHING THAT IS CINEMA.
A hallmark production
2008-10-27 - I had no idea that a movie could be so interesting. It truly is an absorbing and well made movie. All of the characters are unforgettable. Thank you, Sergio Leone.
Once Upon a Time in America
2008-10-01 - Great movie. It's quite long and takes a little time to get into it, but it's worth the time.
A Great Gangster Movie
2008-09-28 - Shadow Watcher
Nobody Drowns in Mineral Lake
I've always felt that, with the exception of THE GODFATHER TRILOGY, Sergio Leone's epic is, by far, the best of the modern gangster films. Butchered by the distributors upon its initial release, the movie was later restored to its nearly 4-hour length and form. It is this extraordinary version that is available on DVD.
"I brought back the key to your clock," says aging hood Robert DeNiro to childhood friend, "Fat Moe" (Larry Rapp), and thus begins a journey into memory. Set to the haunting music of Ennio Morricone, the picture moves back-and-forth in time as the guilt-ridden DeNiro unravels a mystery that has plagued him for more than 35 years.
"You can always tell the winners at the starting gate," he tells Moe, as he contemplates his wasted life. "You can always tell the winners...and the losers."
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA views the experiences of a group of Jewish mobsters, headed by DeNiro and James Woods, who prosper in New York during Prohibition. We first meet them as teenage hoodlums; follow their colorful, violence-filled exploits into adulthood, until one fateful night that changes all of their lives forever.
Elizabeth McGovern is DeNiro's childhood sweetheart, an aspiring actress who, though she loves him, realizes that this is a bittersweet romance that can never be. Tuesday Weld, Treat Williams, Joe Pesci and Danny Aiello round out the well chosen cast. Leone, incidentally, has also done a remarkable job in recreating and photographing New York of the 20s, 30s and 60s.
The tragedy of this engrossing film is that, because of its misconstrued first release, it was passed over in 1984 for Oscar consideration. In its original version, it certainly would have been a prime candidate for Best Picture.
© Michael B. Druxman, author of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (available December 2008)
Finest Film of the Past 25 Years
2008-09-26 - This is a great film -- in my view it is clearly the best film of the past 25 years. Leone's final cut, the one that played to international audiences, not the butchered format foisted on Americans, has been restored. Incidentally, I do recall going to an artsy neighborhood movie house in 1985 (they still existed back then) and seeing this precise cut. Too bad it was not the one that played on the first-run screens. It should have won best director, best film, and best score -- and DeNiro should have won best actor.
I will have to give spoilers here to explain my reaction to the film. The film is difficult enough as it is, and you can't really discuss it intelligently without getting down to specifics.
The ultimate question raised by Schickel, the commentator on the disk, is whether the movie is simply an opium dream. To support this thesis we have the film ending in the opium den, with DeNiro's smile as the opium rush overcomes him. And this scene is immediately preceded by a very dreamy segment from the future where someone who looks like James Woods' charactor (Max) walks out and disappears behind a garbage truck. Does he jump in? Is it really Max? Well he didn't jump in because the compressor is chewing up lettuce, not body parts, and apparently Leone wanted ambiguity by using a double instead of Woods for the scene and by never showing him clearly. And then these flappers in a car appear out of nowhere with Kate Smith singing "America" in the background What's that supposed to mean? And what about Elizabeth McGovern's character's failure to age much in 35 years -- is that part of the dream?
It is dreamlike, to be sure. Also, what's fascinating about all the future shots is the limited futuristic detail -- consistent with a 1933 opium smoker imagining the future by superimposing 1933 America on it. Noodles (DeNiro) arrives back in New York in 1968 on a bus/train, not an airplane. There's no sweeping view of 1968 Manhattan. No talk of the space race, or the cold war, or Vietnam.
On one level, Leone does want to tell the tale in an opium dream fashion -- hence the flashbacks and hopping all over time. But I don't buy the idea that this is just Noodles' dream of the future after he's betrayed (and thinks he's killed) all three of his friends. If Leone wanted the movie to be literally all a dream, he would have had no 1968 details -- he could have used radio instead of TV, a checker cab instead of a 1960s car for Noodles, music different from the Beatles, no frisbee appearing out of nowhere.
There are not a lot of futuristic details because Noodles really does not live in 1968. He's never gotten away from 1933, and that's what the movie is really about. There are no second acts in America, as I believe Fitzgerald said. Noodles goes to Buffalo and "goes to bed early" each night for the next 35 years.
As for the garbage truck ending, it's just a point in the movie that is more symbolic than real. It bothered me when I first saw the movie -- did Max jump in? Was he grabbed and thrown into the cab? Did someone jump out and nail him in the bushes? It doesn't matter. His life is over and the details of his death don't matter once Noodles refused the deal to do the deed himself. He's a dead man, and his memory and physicality are all going to be hauled away with the garbage. Fame and fortune are ultimately fleeting in America. I don't think the flapper scene works very well -- you should have had modern teenangers reveling and showing their oblviousness to the past.
So what does this movie mean? Schickel says it's a movie about loss and living with bad choices -- and he is right. Making it all "a dream", though, doesn't fit this meaning, which is why I don't buy that particular theory. But it's also a movie, fundamentally, about America -- or a European's view of America. I think it's about the violence and unceasing ambition that defines so much of our character. But Leone fundamentally loves America. And so the movie is also about the greatness of spirit and the survivor instinct that defines Noodles and his love interest Deborah.
Noodles is not a material success. He probably does not even have a family. But he is someone who puts friendship above ambition and who, ultimately, decides that there are some jobs you just have to turn down. Deborah pursues her craft, refuses to compromise, and rises out of the ghetto on her own merits. But how is it that she ends up with Max, who makes all the wrong choices, valuing ambition above all else? I'm not sure this works all that well, though it is significant, perhaps, that she never marries him. Is he simply a connection with her past to maintain? Does Max somehow put the fix in on her career?
Of course, despite his greatness of spirit, Noodles is poignantly tragic. His violence and emotion get the better of him, which explains the most disturbing scene in the film, the date rape he does on Deborah when she says she won't stay with him. The scene is the one of the most disturbing in all of film, and when I first watched the movie I wondered if it was simply gratuitous? On review, I don't think so. This horrible violence is too much a part of Noodles' character, and the American character, to be ignored. It has to be depicted.
Schickel completely misses the point in his commentary in describing Noodles as a schlemiel who can never quite get it right. I think he's larger than life and heroic in his own odd way. He's a Gatsby, but one who never tried to redefine himself (like Max did). As Fat Moe says, I would have bet everything on you, Noodles. That's how all his friends see him.
But why doesn't this guy, after Prohibition, just cash in his chips and go to college, Schickel asks? To a certain extent(and with the very large exception of the rape), Noodles acts under trying circumstances with courage and in the way we'd like to see ourselves acting. But, then, all of us, I suppose, would have seized the opportunity to get out of the lifestyle and go to college and be respectable. Noodles can't do that because of his loyalty to friends. It's an endearing, if tragic characteristic.
I found the ending, DeNiro's opium smile, very poignant as well. No, I don't think this is Leone laughing at us, telling us the whole thing is an opium dream. I think it's the way Americans deal with their pain and hopeless contradictions: via escape. This escape can be substance abuse or some other obsession. It's an incredibly sad ending.
Leone's technical mastery is the stuff of legend. His attention to detail, transitions, everything is so right. The pace of the movie is very, very slow. But he's just so damned good.
And the acting -- DeNiro is simply the best there is. The child actors were very well cast and particularly the young Deborah was marvelous. I like James Woods as Max. One criticism of Schickel was whether there was enough chemistry between Woods and DeNiro to sell the movie's theme that it was a love story about, ultimately, the love between Max and Noodles. I thought they played well together, that the bond and respect and tension between them is utterly convincing, and that Woods like DeNiro was marvelous.
I liked Elizabeth McGovern as well, and the other leading ladies (Tuesday Weld and the actress who plays Noodles last girl friend) were great.
It's an amazing movie, from which you learn more with every viewing.
