Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
Today we follow both James Woods and Burt Young over from yesterday’s piece of ‘70s grit and grime filmmaking THE GAMBLER to today’s ‘80s mob epic ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.
I’m a big, big Sergio Leone fan, so you can imagine how excited I was to finally get to this film, one of the last big films of his I haven’t yet seen.
You know, that more Leone I watch and rewatch the more I come to believe that he might be the one director who gets the medium of film more than anybody else. There can be genius directors… the Hitchcocks, Welles’, Curtizs, Spielbergs, Jacksons, Scorseses, Fellinis, etc, but I think Leone is without equal when it comes to visual storytelling.
Watch his Man With No Name Trilogy, watch ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST… and watch this movie and pay close attention to the flow of the editing, the length of shots, the character he puts into every frame, the faces he chooses to occupy each frame, the acting he gets from every single person in the film, from Clint Eastwood to featured extra #482. His films are a film school in and of themselves.
But you can’t imitate him. I’ve seen people try and it just doesn’t feel right. I really like ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, but Rodriguez didn’t pull it off. He made a hugely entertaining movie, no doubt, but there’s something missing.
Actually, the closest I’ve seen is the South Korean film THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD by Ji-woon Kim. That film feels effortlessly epic, the humor, drama and tragedy all balanced perfectly, dense and complex, but still iconic characters and the action incredible.
I don’t think ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is Leone’s most entertaining movie, but that’s no knock on it. I was riveted throughout and fully invested in each minute of the nearly 4 hour runtime, but the aim of the movie isn’t to give the audience a fun time, not like his spaghetti westerns. Here we are to witness one character’s life from childhood to old age, seeing him at his best and worst without flinching.
And we do see his worst… boy, do we.
Basically the flick opens with two hard-noses searching for Robert De Niro. They shoot a blonde in the titty, they beat the ever-lovin’ shit out of Larry Rapp, demanding to know where De Niro’s David “Noodles” Aaronson is, asking why Rapp is protecting him. He’s a rat. Rapp can’t take it and gives up Noodles, who is high out of his mind in a Chinese theater that doubles as an Opium Den.
Noodles escapes, running off to parts unknown to hide out.
The film plays with time rather liberally. We jump back and forth between multiple periods in Noodles’ life, sometimes for an hour at a time, sometimes for a few minutes.
We spend the most time with Young Noodles meeting his gang and how, as teenagers, they started rising through the crime ranks and Noodles at the prime of power, leading up to the betrayal we know is coming.
Those are our main big chunks, but we get a bit of Old Noodles returning to New York after 30 plus years and trying to piece a mystery together. He and his buddies had set aside a million bucks… it stayed in a bus station locker with only one key, held by an intermediary (“Fat” Moe) and could only be received if all the gang is there to pick it up. But when De Niro goes to flee, taking the key as the last surviving member of the gang he finds a suitcase stuffed with newspaper.
Thirty some years later he is sent a letter… he’s been found, but he wasn’t wacked. Someone knows where he is and wants him back in New York. Who is it? Who took the money?
In any other filmmaker’s hands, that mystery would be the point of the movie, but in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA that is really only a garnish on a giant steak.
What’s more important is the character of Noodles and how one’s life is dynamically shifted depending on what choices he makes. Not by coincidence most of these splits on the road of his destiny involve the character of Deborah Gelly.
As kids, young Noodles (played by Scott Tiler), spies on Young Deborah dancing. It could be considered him peeping, but there’s something very innocent about it. Even when she disrobes, she knows he’s there and is positioning herself in such a way that he doesn’t get to see much, but sees enough to make it worth the trouble of spying from the hole above the toilet. It’s still innocent.
Deborah is real. She is innocence incarnate, the chance Noodles has at a real life, free of crime and filth, but he bungles it every time.
There are at least 4 times I counted during the film where Deborah represented an out for Noodles. The first is as kids where Young Noodles and Deborah, played at this age by an incredibly young Jennifer Connelly. She drops the act of disinterest and kisses him. Her sister is incredibly sexualized, selling herself for sweets and money, but young Deborah is not that. Her purity and sweetness is what draws Noodles to her.
But he’s interrupted by his partner in crime, Max, who calls for him. And here’s his first choice. Does he stay and let the romance budding between him and Deborah florish or is it bros before hos? Max or Deborah? He can only have one. And like most stupid young people, he takes real love for granted… hell, he’s just a teenager, there’s going to be plenty of women, right?
Deborah becomes the regret of his life. She pops up again when we transition into adult Noodles, now played by De Niro with Deborah played by Elizabeth McGovern. Once again he has a choice. He went down the wrong path before and it cost him years in jail. What does he do now? Once again, he chooses his friend, Max (James Woods), and a career in crime as prohibition flourishes in the ‘30s.
And I see why. His group is incredibly likable. As kids and adults, I found I very much liked these guys and their friendship… that kind of true, deep friendship that only exists between people who grew up together.
But as these guys get more and more powerful, the adage “absolute power corrupts absolutely” comes true. There are divisions among the guys, arguments, but it doesn’t go crazy soap opera dramatic. Most of the tension is aleved by a smile and friendship showing through. However, even though big missteps are routinely avoided, they baby-step their way into becoming monsters.
The full extent of how monstrous they become isn’t revealed until the final 20 minutes, but it’s pretty shady.
There’s a whole lot of movie to cover here and I’m not even going to try to detail the story beat by beat. I will highlight some specific favorite moments, character and performances before I wrap this up, though.
First of all… Ennio Morricone’s score is unbelievable. Soft, emotional, but also pounding and fast when needed. The score to a film can be its soul and Morricone gives this film every bit as fascinating and complex as the characters within it.
De Niro is fantastic throughout. I especially like his more subdued work later on as an old man. He returns to New York in the late ‘60s under heavy make-up which isn’t too far off from what he ended up looking like. When he returns he’s essentially had 30 years to toss and turn in the bed he’s made for himself starting as a kid, blaming himself for the death of his friends, reflecting on what could have been.
James Woods really shines here, though. He’s incredible, both charming and sometimes psychotic. He’s De Niro’s right hand man… or maybe De Niro is his right hand man… either way, they are like brothers and Woods has a few moments that are absolutely amazing. One scene where he chastises De Niro for being so caught up on Deborah and shows that he doesn’t have the same trouble by telling Tuesday Weld, a clinging prostitute, to fuck off and throws her out of the room and another scene… his final confrontation with De Niro, which is much subtler, but even more raw than anything else in the movie.
You get great turns by Jennifer Connelly, the great Burt Young (Paulie!), Tuesday Weld looking crazy hot even in middle age (but if you really want to go ga-ga for Weld, check out PRETTY POISON with Anthony Perkins), Treat Williams (remember when he used be in big movies and was really damn good in them?), Joe Pesci, Danny Aiello (who has one of my favorite scenes in the movie, as a police captain whose wife finally gave birth to a son only to have Noodles and his gang switch the tags up at the hospital so his boy is now a girl), William Forsythe as the adult Cockeye and Elizabeth McGovern as the adult Deborah carries all the innocence and purity that began with Connelly as the younger version of the character.
The violence is operatic and graphic. There’s a particular kill, a bullet to the eye, that had me cringing on the couch. There’s no violence like Leone violence, even if I’d say that both Verhoeven and Peckinpah have outdone him in other movies. But there’s an elegance to the way Leone handles violence… that is at once very real, but very theatrical. That’s the thing. The man knows and uses iconography to brilliant effect.
Which brings us back to Leone. Throughout the writing of this entire review I’ve been trying to think of another filmmaker as visually amazing as Leone. And I don’t mean flashy, but how ever camera move means something, adds to the movie, the characters and the atmosphere. I don’t think he has an equal, or at the very least not an equal in my eyes. His style of visual filmmaking is what I think is best about the art of filmmaking. In my opinion nobody does it better.
Final Thoughts: This is an incredible movie, just be warned that it’s a big time commitment. The film clocks in at nearly 4 hours, but there is a 6 hour assembly that Leone put together originally and I’m fasincated at what that would be like. Apparently at least 45 minutes of this long cut was deemed “crucial to the story” by Robert De Niro. I wonder if that cut will ever get a release… maybe at the same time as Malick’s 6 hour long cut of THE THIN RED LINE… But if you haven’t seen this film or Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, you owe it to yourself to give them both a spin to see what cinema can truly be when handled by a master.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Monday, November 17th: SALVADOR (1986)
Tuesday, November 18th: BEST SELLER (1987)
Wednesday, November 19th: THE HOLCROT COVENANT (1985)
Thursday, November 20th: BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (1962)
Friday, November 21st: WHITE HEAT (1949)
Saturday, November 22nd: MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES (1957)
Sunday, November 23rd: EACH DAWN I DIE (1938)
Tons of Cagney coming up! Hell yeah! But even before that, we continue on our James Woods-A-Thon! See you tomorrow for Woods in Oliver Stone's SALVADOR!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
