Once Upon a Time in America Review

The American distributor cut this to 139 minutes and put it in chronological order, and Gene Siskel named that version the worst film of 1984 and the uncut one the best. The long version is the film. It opens and closes in a 1933 opium den, and everything between drifts across three eras the way memory does, with Robert De Niro's Noodles half remembering and half inventing; Leone himself allowed that the 1968 scenes might be an opium dream.

Tonino Delli Colli gives the childhood streets a dusty, golden grandeur, and Ennio Morricone's score, with Gheorghe Zamfir's pan flute, carries the rest. The score was ruled out of the Oscars because the studio dropped Morricone's name from the trimmed credits.

James Woods is superb as Max, all charm and contempt, and the child actors, Jennifer Connelly among them, give the first hour its ache. The flaw is not the length but the two rapes, filmed at length and barely reckoned with, which reduce Deborah and Carol to instruments of Noodles's story. Elizabeth McGovern has said her scene was meant to be extremely uncomfortable to watch, and it is; the film around it shows far less interest in her. A grand, mournful and deeply compromised epic.