Once Upon a Time in America — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

The film shares its opening formula with Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) — the very project Leone made instead of this one after first reading The Hoods. The echo frames the gangster saga as the urban twin of his Western myth-making, and signals that both are told as fairy tales about America rather than histories of it.

Harry Grey's The Hoods was published in 1952 as semi-autobiography by a former criminal writing under an assumed name — a book that is itself a man rewriting his own past. That the film about unreliable memory grew from such a source is a neat, and probably not accidental, mirror.