Review of Once Upon a Time in America (1984) by Xcv V — 03 May 2011

Epic, Violent, Greed, Love, Many themes that are present and explored in Sergio Leone's Mafia epic "Once Upon A Time In America.".

I Suppose I must explain the unjustice of what happened to Leone... Ten years in the making, the film was originally 4 and a half hours long, due to creative difference's and distributions the European cut was 3 hours and 40 mins.

The U.S cut however was 2 hours long, the narrative was everywhere, everything made no sense, Leone was reportedly heartbroken and vow'ed never to make another film and would sadly pass away a few years later...

Luckily for us IN 2012, Leone's children and the film's Original composer will collect all 4 and a half hours and have the definitive cut ready for the 2012 Cannes or Venice film festival.

Onto my Review...

In essence, I find the story one I think all of us know somewhere deep in the back of our brain , Kids growing up, best of friends, get involved in organised crime, now all we do is wait for the inevitable crash.

But that would be incredibly rude of me, to those people who have watched the film know that the performances and friendship between DeNiro and Woods's character is remarkable, the Visual look of the ghetto streets are grand, rustic and BIG on scale (The camera is shot so well you'd swear you were looking from the eyes of the kids).

As well as looking extremely authentic we are told a very well ploted narrative that spans into the friends's later years, and jumps throughout the character's 60 years of living...

We begin with an old David "Noodles" Aaronson (Played by lengendary actor Robert DeNiro) smoking in a Chinese opium den as he reflects on his lifetime as a child and a young adult, so far we have seen that he is on the run in the present time, then almost immediately we jump to Noodle's early years, making what he can of the depression and meeting a young yet lifelong friend Max.

As we meet the gang at a young age (That are probably the most fantastic performances from child actors ever put to film), goodtimes and tragedy are always frequent, years later Noodles and Max (Now played by James Woods whose performance is Carrer-Defining) meet again and how times have changed....

What i've just wrote in the last couple of Paragraphs doesn't even begin to go deep enough to explain what happends in the first act, and I really do not wish to tell you what happends because there is virtually no way to explain the grand scope of this film, it hardly feels like a movie, It's an Experience, One which would feel criminal if I told you.

But as I will constantly say, the casting and acting is fantastic, the Camera Work by Leone (a Man famous for his "Dollars" Spaghetti Western Trilogy) is flawless, and the Score for this movie is so big on scale I swear it could rival "The Godfather".

Final Verdict: In The Words of Roger Ebert: "An Epic Poem of Violence and Greed", Need we say more?