Once Upon a Time in America

Colour, 35 mm
USA, 1984, 229 min
Section: Sergio Leone

About the film

A story of Jewish gangsters whose strongest weapon is their unshakeable faith in friendship. Noodles (Robert De Niro) is the gloomy protagonist of Sergio Leone’s lifetime project, a work which plays out in three timeframes. From Chinese opium dens and celebrations for the end of Prohibition, the film goes back eleven years to the early 1920s to witness the birth of the friendship between Noodles and the ambitious Max (James Woods). They and three other cohorts embark on an exciting, though short-lived life of crime. Bootleg liquor, extortion and diamond heists are some of the livelihoods chosen by this branch of the Jewish mafia in New York’s Lower East Side. Thirty-five years later we meet up with Noodles again as he returns from voluntary exile to places he was once happy. Leone’s magnum opus is at the same time his most personal film. His perfect reconstruction of bygone eras is set, once again, to Ennio Morricone’s music, whose melancholy tones sensitively exemplify this bittersweet look back at an epoch that will never return. In this film essay on the strength of memories, the director included many motifs drawn from his childhood on the streets of Rome and in the darkened auditoriums of the movie theatre.

About the director

See Tribute to Sergio Leone