| Collector's Corner March 2008
C’era
una volta in America (Once Upon a Time in America)
- Starring: Robert De Niro, James Woods,
Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld, Treat Williams, James Hayden, Joe Pesci, Danny Aiello,
Burt Young, Jennifer Connelly
- Directed by: Sergio Leone
- Theatrical release: 1984
- DVD release: 2003
- Video: 1.85:1 (widescreen)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Released by: Warner Home Video
I’ve never smoked opium, let alone hung out in an
opium den, but I think I have a sense of what it must feel like from watching Once Upon
a Time in America, Sergio Leone’s operatic, mystical musing on love,
honor, loyalty, and organized crime.
Sergio Leone is credited with directing only seven films,
and all of them dealt with his take on America’s cultural mythology. Whether it was
in his westerns, where he celebrated tough, entrenched men fighting for their sense of
justice, or his young street thugs’ code of silence in Once Upon a Time in America,
Leone’s art is about morality and gritty independence. There are always at least two
warriors -- brave men on a collision course. Then there are the bosses: embodiments of
evil, and cowards to boot. Eventually, the warriors face each other for no reason other
than that it is inevitable that fighters will fight.
As much as Leone loved the classic westerns of John Ford
and Howard Hawks, he wanted his westerns to include the world-weary existentialism that
swept Europe in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He also loved the epic films of Akira
Kurosawa, with their skewed system of honor among superwarriors, in which an enemy
deserves respect in direct proportion to his bravery.
Leone also had an Italian’s eye for the grand gesture.
Gunfights in American westerns derived their suspense from showing the buildup to the
fight; then the guns started blazing. In a Leone western, the tension comes from the
pre-fight stare-down. And, of course, there was the building pulse of Ennio
Morricone’s music. Take the American western, beat in liberal heaps of grand opera, la
nouvelle vague, and Japanese samurai cinema, and you get an idea of the subversiveness
of Leone’s vision.
Leone considered westerns and gangster films to be in the
same category. Both covered good guys with a flexible concept of the law but an ironbound
sense of justice. And both showed bad guys who possessed courage and nobility. But Once
Upon a Time in America was Leone’s first and only film to take place in a city.
On its surface, America is about the genesis of an
organized group of criminals. It’s convenient to lump it in with The Godfather I and
II and Goodfellas, iconic American gangster flicks that eulogized, if
not celebrated, the life of the mob. But as Leone had subverted the myth of the western
gunslinger to his own purposes, so he did with the gangster genre.
 The film takes place in three different
periods -- 1921, 1932, and 1968 -- among which the narrative flows freely (some would say
confusingly). My mention of opium at the beginning is intentional. Leone uses David
"Noodles" Aaronson’s (Robert De Niro) descent into narcohypnosis in an
opium den as a poetic device for flashbacks. He then plants doubts in our minds about
Noodles’ grasp on reality, which makes our understanding of the plot into a house of
mirrors. This drove Leone’s critics crazy. I think they are crazy.
In 1984, what American critics saw was a butchered version
of Once Upon a Time in America. Leone had begun with a ten-hour film, which he
successfully cut back to six hours of film that he would release in two three-hour
episodes. But the studios remembered his friend Bernardo Bertolucci’s 315-minute long
Novecento (1900) (1976), also starring De Niro, which had doubly
failed: in Europe, as a two-parter; and in the US, as cut to 245 minutes.
Leone cut Once Upon a Time down to 4 3/4 hours, but
his contract called for a film two hours shorter. He then cut it to four hours, though he
thought the 45 minutes lost were essential to the narrative. He finally compromised with
his European bosses at 229 minutes, down more than two hours from his preferred cut. The
critics and judges at the Cannes festival still rated it a masterpiece.
That’s when the Ladd Company got hold of it. You might
remember them as the company that created the Blade Runner debacle. They
didn’t like Blade Runner’s dream sequences or its flow of logic, so they
cut it into pieces and added a stupid narration. Two years later, the Ladd bosses still
hadn’t learned their lesson. They took one look at Once Upon a Time in America,
and hired a hack to cut it down to 139 minutes. You can see why Leone always casts the
bosses as bad guys.
American critics held their noses while calling it one of
the worst films of that or any year. A Variety critic wrote, "Once Upon a
Time in America arrives as a disappointment of considerable proportions. Sprawling $32
million saga of Jewish gangsters over the decades is surprisingly deficient in clarity and
purpose, as well as excitement and narrative involvement." In the New York Times,
Vincent Canby wrote, "This version seems to have been edited with a roulette wheel.
Like most films that have been so clumsily abbreviated, this shorter version of Once
Upon a Time in America seems endless, possibly because whatever internal structure it
might have had no longer exists. It’s a collection of occasionally vivid but mostly
unfathomable incidents in which people are introduced and then disappear with the
unexplained suddenness of victims of mob murders."
The American critics who had seen the film at Cannes
lambasted the Ladd Company with harsh criticism. Roger Ebert described the showing at
Cannes: "The movie is compulsively and continuously watchable and . . . the audience
did not stir or grow restless as the epic unfolded." Then he said that the Ladd
Company had "murdered" the film. Pauline Kael said the Ladd Company’s cut
was "disastrously incoherent." Once Upon a Time in America made a paltry
$2.5 million and closed quickly.
Leone, heartbroken, never made another film and died five
years later, desolate over the irony that his masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in America,
would never be seen by Americans.
But his fans kept agitating until 1994, when Warner Home
Video released an almost complete version on VHS and laserdisc. They cut two minutes of
graphic misogyny to keep the "R" rating, but at least we could finally see
something that was very close to Leone’s vision.
Once Upon a Time in America has only grown in
stature. The august journal Sight and Sound picked it as one of the Ten Best Films
of the last 25 years. Ennio Morricone’s bittersweet film score, one of the best
examples of music creating its own action since Bernard Herrmann worked with Alfred
Hitchcock, is still in print as a soundtrack album.
But not until 2003 was a high-bit-rate, color-corrected,
completish cut released. Warner Home Video spent a good deal of money and a full year to
get it to look as good as possible. The DVD edition has the burnished look of the original
film, but I can’t wait for the Blu-ray. Unfortunately, Warner made two boneheaded
mistakes. There are no significant extras, though Richard Schickel does his usual
professional job of providing a commentary. Why couldn’t we have comments from
Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art, Chairman of the
Arts Council of England, and author of the definitive biography of Leone? The good news is
that Warner has spread the film over two discs to keep the bit rate up. But that led to
the other stupid misstep: Instead of ending the first disc at the intermission, they
arbitrarily break the film at its exact midpoint, thus destroying the flow.
But those of us who dream of someday seeing Leone’s
complete version of the film with all 70 minutes edited back in are out of luck -- those
film elements haven’t stood the test of time. Still another reason Leone’s
villains were bosses.
While it’s still winter and the nights are long, get a
copy of Once Upon a Time in America, a nice bottle of Italian wine, some popcorn,
and settle in for an amazing night.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
