Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #92: Once upon a Time in America

The lives of gangsters are often filled with drama, loss, betrayal, and the occasional shootout, which explains why Hollywood has made so many movies about their chosen professions. Once Upon a Time in America (1984) is a very interesting entry in the genre since it was directed by an Italian director, is based on a book by a Russian-American and takes place over three different eras in New York City. Also noteworthy is the fact the gangsters here are all Jewish, something rarely seen in a genre generally populated by Italian American characters. At 229 minutes, it is a massive epic that is worth the time but might leave some viewers shocked by one character’s particular crime.

Given the movie’s length it is best viewed on an afternoon when one has nothing to do and nowhere to go, which over the past year has been the case for me and billions of others. This was yet another discovery on Amazon, which brought me one step closer to checking off every movie directed by the Italian maestro, Sergio Leone. Despite not being American he redefined that most American of movie genre, the Western, with a trilogy of movies staring Clint Eastwood. It seems only natural that he would then gravitate towards a gangster movie since many gangsters became the modern outlaws. There is even a scene in Once Upon a Time in America where the gangsters perform a robbery while wearing bandanas over their faces, just like outlaws on horses would in the old west.

These particular gangsters are childhood friends who grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood of 1918 Manhattan. This neighbourhood feels meticulously recreated, from the rooftops of tenement buildings to streets filled with hundreds of extras dressed in period, and in many cases religious, clothing. The fact that these gangsters are Jewish is not integral to the plot, but it is a clear part of their identity and seems to have been handled with care.

What is integral to the story are the themes of friendship and betrayal. The first character we meet is Noodles (Robert De Niro) who in the 1930s is on the run after having seemingly betrayed his associates. What has happened forces him to leave New York and not come back until the 1960s. When he does come back, he visits his last remaining friend in the neighbourhood, triggering many memories. The film then alternates between the 1910s when the gang members were just children with the ambition of becoming rich criminals, the 1930s when they have reached success as bootleggers, and the 1960s as Noodles tries to reconcile with his past actions.

It takes a while to finally piece together what happened to force Noodles out of town, but the journey is thoroughly engrossing. As children the gang members behave as ordinary children would, thinking of girls and sweets, sometimes at the same time. Yet they have enough criminal ambition and wit to blackmail a cop, make a business proposition to a gangster, and stash their ill-gotten gains in a train station locker. As adults (played by James Woods, William Forsythe, and James Hayden) they own a club that is open all day and have connections with the Italian mafia. You could say it’s an American success story, but every success comes with a price.

That price weighs a lot on Noodles who is greying in the 1960s and full of regrets. As he visits places from his past, the film shows how one small thing can trigger emotions from decades ago. It’s a great performance by De Niro, which made me feel sympathetic for Noodles until I discovered one of his regrets included raping his childhood crush. After that I felt uncomfortable watching any scene with his character and was hoping he would suffer for his actions.

In fact, the biggest flaw this movie has is how every female character is portrayed. They are either prostitutes, girlfriends who are told to shut up, or victims. Depending on what gangsters do in movies I can be morally agreeable to their actions up to a point. I can keep rooting for them if they steal from the rich, manage a casino, rig a horse race, or import alcohol, but violence against women is an obvious red flag. The criminals on Peaky Blinders have a lot of blood on their hands, but at least women help run their business and every one of them would sooner shoot a rapist than have one on their crew.

Looking back at Leone’s filmography, as far as I can tell none of his movies have any female characters who are not either victims or prostitutes. Once Upon a Time in America was his last film, negating any chance of him ever rectifying that, assuming he would have ever been interested in doing so. It’s a shame because he went out on a high note, directing one of the most expansive and beautiful crime dramas ever made, but for me that beauty is tainted by the treatment of every women on screen.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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