Once Upon a Time in America — Characters & Cast

To belong somewhere — to the gang, to the street, to Deborah — and, later, to find a version of his own history he can live inside. As he puts it, he likes the stink of the streets; he never wanted the empire, only the world he already knew.

From a watchful slum boy to a bootlegger, a convict, a fugitive and finally an old man summoned back to a city that has forgotten him. His arc is not ascent or fall but return: he ends the film exactly where his conscience left him, and the last thing we see him do is retreat inward.

Power and permanence: to stop being a street kid, to matter beyond the neighborhood, and to refuse the limits Noodles accepts. He taunts Noodles that he will carry the stink of the streets for the rest of his life.

The most ambitious of the boys, Max drives the gang out of petty theft and into serious money, and keeps pushing long after Noodles wants to stop. His trajectory is one of escalating hunger, and of a willingness to sacrifice anything — including the friendship that defines him — to the next step upward.

Escape and self-creation — to leave the Lower East Side behind entirely, including the boy who loves her and everything he represents.

The neighborhood girl who dances alone in a back room and intends to become someone else. She grows into an actress and a woman of another class, and her rise is measured precisely against Noodles' inability to follow her out of the past.

Attachment and self-preservation. She is blunt about the arrangement: she and Noodles never liked each other — they put up with each other for Max.

Introduced through violence, she becomes entangled with the gang and outlives its collapse, carrying knowledge of what happened between the two men. Her later scenes make her one of the film's few honest voices about what the group actually was.