Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

  It took me three days to get through this movie.  Seriously.  This is not for the faint of heart.

I have to say, this is probably the weakest Leone film in his entire canon.  First, there is the bloated 3+ hour running time to tell a non-linear story that basically boils down to a bromance gone bad.  This movie is epic in the way glaciers are, and moves at approximately the same speed.  Secondly, it hates women.  There is not one, but two fairly brutal rapes.  One I would let slide because it actually seems like part of the story, but the other is just completely gratuitous.  Thirdly, it's a total downer with a lame quasi-ending that feels completely half-assed.


David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert DeNiro) and his three friends:  Max (James Woods), Cockeye (William Forsythe), and Patsy (Richard Bright) grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn as petty street kids.  They make a pact to each put half their money in a suitcase and never touch it unless all four of them are together.  Noodles goes to prison for stabbing a guy and when he gets out as an adult, his buddy Max is waiting.  Max, Patsy, and Cockeye have opened a speakeasy and have been running booze during Prohibition.  Times are high until the repeal.  Faced with unemployment, Max comes up with the idea of robbing the Federal Reserve Bank.  His girlfriend (Tuesday Weld) begs Noodles to come up with a plan to stop Max, since it's essentially suicide.  Noodles tips off the cops so that everyone will be arrested but something goes wrong and Max, Cockeye, and Patsy die in a car explosion.  Noodles, now on the run, tries to get the money they had all saved but finds the suitcase full of nothing but newspapers.  He manages to get to Buffalo, where he lives in obscurity for thirty years.  In 1968, Noodles receives an anonymous letter calling him back to Brooklyn, where he relives all of the painful memories of his early life.

When I was reading about it and saw that it wasn't nominated for a single Oscar, I thought that was ridiculous.  It's a Sergio Leone film with an Ennio Morricone score.  That's got to be good for something, right?  Cinematography, at least?  Now that I've seen it, I totally understand.  Unless you really really love gangster films, skip this one.