Review | Once Upon A Time in America

Sergio Leone's final film is also one of his finest, a kaleidoscopic epic that creatively interweaves several different eras. While Leone remains best known as a Spaghetti Westerns specialist, this landmark gangster picture - every bit as ambitious and colossal as its title suggests - shows how his talents transcended genre boundaries.

It's as if the director took the classic crime films of Mervyn LeRoy and Raoul Walsh (both of whom he worked with in his early days as an assistant) and decided to boost the formula and expand the format. Eschewing the economy and knockabout pace of such pictures, he stretches this meditation on male relationships and the price of violence over almost four long, long hours. The end result is an intricate and carefully paced chronicle of a group of Jewish hoodlums and of a nation itself.



The film centres on the criminal career of Noodles, a "two-bit punk" on New York's Lower East Side who forms an alliance with Max, another of the neighbourhood's young hell-raisers. The pair aim to get rich quick but soon fall foul of local kingpin Bugsy, resulting in the death of a friend and a long stint inside for Noodles. On his release, Noodles wants out of the game for good but Max, who has grown evermore arrogant and ambitious, urges him to pursue new business with Joe Pesci's fearsome mobster Frankie Minaldi.



Leone's picture veers between scenes of elegiac old-world nostalgia - such as the young boy arguing the toss between a cream dessert and the opportunity to lose his virginity - and moments of savage, often misogynistic violence. There's not one but two rape sequences here, as well as a few gruesome tortures. Stick with it and you'll be rewarded with a clutch of plum performances (Woods, in particular, has never been better), some handsome cinematography and a memorable score from (who else?) Ennio Morricone.

Chris Wiegand