Once Upon a Time in America

Sergio Leone's final film follows David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro), a Jewish immigrant kid from New York's Lower East Side who grows up stealing, hustling and eventually killing alongside his charismatic partner Maximilian "Max" Bercovicz (James Woods). Adapted from Harry Grey's 1952 semi-autobiographical novel The Hoods, the story tracks a gang of street boys as Prohibition turns their petty rackets into an empire, and as ambition begins to open a fault line between the two friends who built it.

The narrative is not told in a straight line. It moves restlessly between the boyhood of the 1920s, the bootlegging years of the early 1930s, and 1968, when an aged Noodles returns to a city that has erased almost every trace of the life he lived. A mysterious summons pulls him back — someone knows who he was, and someone wants him to come home.

Around this spine Leone builds a portrait of appetite: for money, for status, for a woman named Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) whom Noodles has loved since childhood and can never quite reach. The result is less a crime thriller than a four-hour meditation on how a life gets spent, and on what a man tells himself about it afterwards.

Leone uses the gangster film the way he had used the Western — as a national myth to be taken apart. The title's fairy-tale opening ("Once upon a time...") is an announcement that what follows is a legend, not a chronicle, and the America inside it is a promise that eats the people who believe in it. The immigrant boys chase the dream in its purest, most literal form — money, respect, ownership — and what they get is a lifetime of moral debt.

Underneath the crime story is something more private and more devastating: a film about memory as a form of self-defense. Noodles is a man who has done unforgivable things, and the film's fractured, drifting structure reproduces the way a guilty mind circles its own worst moments without ever quite landing on them. Leone's message is that the past is not survivable by honesty alone; men build stories about themselves in order to keep living, and the film's ambiguity about what is real, remembered or dreamed is the point rather than a puzzle to be solved.

The opium dream reading. The film's final image returns to Noodles in the den in the early 1930s, smiling, which retroactively casts everything after it into doubt. Leone himself advocated the interpretation that Noodles never left that room and dreamed his future in opium — the drug that, in Leone's phrase, gives completely new visions. On this reading the 1968 sections are not events but a fantasy in which Noodles' subconscious rewrites him as the betrayed innocent rather than the guilty party, granting him a monstrous, chemical absolution.

The film arrived at the end of an era: it was Sergio Leone's last work, released fifteen-odd years after he first optioned the material, and it closed a career that had already redefined the Western. Its reception was violently split by geography. In the United States the studio's 139-minute chronological re-edit baffled audiences and drew harsh reviews, while the longer cut shown out of competition at Cannes in 1984 was greeted with a record ovation of nearly twenty minutes. Few films have such a stark gap between the version audiences saw and the version the director made — a case study still cited in arguments about final cut and about the very idea of a "director's cut."

Over the following decades the restored longer versions turned the film's reputation around completely; it now carries an 86% Rotten Tomatoes rating (average 8.62/10 from 50 reviews) and a consensus praising it as visually stunning, stylistically bold and emotionally haunting. Its influence runs through the sprawling, decades-spanning crime epic as a form — the mode of gangster film that treats organized crime as a way of talking about America itself — and Ennio Morricone's score, written for a picture the Academy did not even nominate in that category, has long outlived the film's troubled release. It is also a permanent exhibit in cinephile culture for the question it refuses to answer: what, exactly, are we watching in that last shot?

Praise. Viewers consistently single out the film's scale and beauty — Tonino Delli Colli's photography, the reconstruction of the Lower East Side, and above all Ennio Morricone's score, which many describe as the emotional spine of the picture. The performances of Robert De Niro and James Woods are widely regarded as career-level work, and the childhood passages featuring the young gang are frequently named as the film's most affecting stretch. Rotten Tomatoes registers an 86% approval rating with an 8.62/10 average across 50 reviews, its consensus praising a film that is "visually stunning, stylistically bold, and emotionally haunting."

Criticism and controversy. The most persistent complaint is length and pacing — the extended cuts run close to four hours and demand real patience. Far more divisive are the film's two rape scenes, which many viewers find gratuitous and which have become the central objection in modern reassessments; defenders argue they exist precisely to demolish Noodles' romantic self-image. The narrative's elliptical time-jumping frustrates some first-time viewers, and the version problem remains a live issue: the 139-minute American release is near-universally condemned as incoherent butchery, and audiences are routinely warned that the film only works in its longer forms.

Verdict. Watched complete, it is regarded as one of the great crime epics — flawed, morally uncomfortable, and unusually haunting. Watched in the studio cut, it is regarded as a different and much lesser film.