In the late 1960s, Sergio Leone was considered the European filmmaker who reinvented a specifically American genre, the western. He was a director recognized by the public and courted by producers. In 1969, Once Upon a Time in the West was a triumph in Europe. At that time, Sergio Leone happened to read a book called The Hoods . It was the memoirs of a small-time Jewish gangster from New York, Harry Grey, nicknamed Noodles. Sergio Leone was seduced by the autobiography of this somewhat ridiculous crook. He would never stop dreaming of adapting it for the cinema.
Ennio Morricone, the composer who would compose the music for his greatest films, wrote the score in advance. Asked for this project in 1970, the producers nevertheless imposed on Leone the production of a new western. It would be Once Upon a Time in America (1971), acclaimed by the public and critics. After ten years of silence (Sergio Leone did not direct any feature films between 1971 and 1982), the filmmaker’s stubbornness finally paid off. He found the financing to produce in 1982, under the title Once Upon a Time in America , the adaptation of the gangster’s memoirs, written in Sing Sing prison. The film was presented as the last part of the trilogy begun fourteen years earlier. It was shot in 8 months, in Rome, New York, Montreal, Miami, Paris, Venice, for around twenty million dollars. The first version, lasting 4h30, was designed in two parts, with a release staggered by a few days. American legislation on film distribution opposed it, so Leone reshot a 3h40 version. He had some run-ins with his producers who, considering his writing too complex, cut the film by an hour and wanted to restore the chronological order of the story. After threatening to remove his name from the credits, the filmmaker won his case. It was indeed the 3h40 version that was released in France on May 23, 1984 and was presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Memoirs of an Inglourious Gangster
As Le Point states , “in the beginning was reality. A narrow and rather derisory reality. The autobiography of a failed criminal, a collection of inglorious memories.” Although mediocre and unnoticed, these memoirs immediately fascinated Sergio Leone. Le Nouvel Observateur tells how the director met its author and was seduced by the story of “this likeable old gangster, this eternal child character who staggers through the great American Luna Park.” Le Point writes that Sergio Leone “was touched by the vanity of this attempt and by the grandeur of its failure. It was the story of a very small man who had to write the novel of his existence himself in order to try to go down in history. ” Les Nouvelles littéraires adds: “It is an inglorious gangster story . The hero is neither Al Capone nor Lucky Luciano. No one has heard of him. A little Jew from the ghetto who tried his luck with a machine gun.” Also, to remain in History, he was obliged to write his own story.” By general agreement, the filmmaker was also won over by the mixture of violence, passion, sex and friendship of this destiny haunted by betrayal. “All universal feelings,” underlines Les Nouvelles littéraires . Moreover, as Le Monde writes , Leone saw in the biographical story of this dull gangster “the pretext book to unfold nearly half a century of American history, or rather of American cinema.” Indeed, this story is at once that of a man, a country and an era. In addition to the director himself, five screenwriters will take turns to write the film adaptation.
A Fable About America
As critics note, Sergio Leone has retained very little from the original book, except for his childhood on the Lower East Side in New York, where a group of poor Jewish kids, determined not to stay that way, form an unbreakable bond. “The episodes in the alleys of the ghetto in the shadow of the great Brooklyn Bridge illuminate the whole story with a radical light,” writes Les Nouvelles littéraires . “As soon as childhood fades away, Sergio Leone lets his imagination run wild,” writes Le Point, because “the simple copy of a genre does not interest him any more than the strictly realistic reconstruction of a vanished world.” Once Upon a Time… : Like the Beginning of a Tale, this title appears for the third time in Sergio Leone’s filmography. For Le Point , “the film does not tell a realistic story, it is in the vein of the fable,” and, according to La Croix , “Leone finds in the New World the prodigious source of these fables.” Critics point out a fundamental difference between Sergio Leone and Francis Ford Coppola, often cited as a counterpoint. For Les Nouvelles littéraires , the approaches of the two directors are at odds with each other. Once Upon a Time in America is thus presented as the “anti- Godfather “, Coppola’s mafia saga (first episode made in 1971). For Le Matin , “Leone did not want to make a show like The Godfather , but a fable, a film about memory, friendship, nostalgia and death”. Lutte ouvrière shares this point of view: “It is a tale in which Sergio Leone takes us from one era to another, from the promises of childhood to the melancholy of old age, from reality to fantasy, in search of lost time”.
Tribute to American Cinema
“One of the first loves of Europeans is America as given to us by Hollywood: the epic of the West, the heroic battles, the musicals, the jazz,” writes Le Point . For La Croix , “Sergio Leone’s entire film is nourished to the point of osmosis by the images of American cinema.” “This fable carries within it all the magic of Hollywood mythology” according to L’Humanité dimanche but, as with the director’s two previous works ( Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in the Revolution ), “these are indeed counter-images, or at least images diverted from the film mythology made in the USA .” Because the film is made from a European point of view. It is the opposite of an action film, fast and efficient. “Sergio Leone is European, which gives him perspective, a kind of second degree,” writes Le Monde , adding: “he immerses us in the reality of his unreal America, or rather reinvented on his memories of cinema, sagas of the West and Chicago, and claims his journey in the history of American cinema.” For L’Express , “it is a sum of images of America as cinema has always dreamed it.” Le Figaro magazine adds: “Sergio Leone has put in the 3 hours and 40 minutes of his film the New York of 1930 and that of 1968, Prohibition, a tribute to Chaplin, Valentino’s haircut, the shadow cast by James Cagney and Jane Wyman, love in its cruelest and sweetest form, blood, voluptuousness, death, joy.” La Croix insists: “Fascinated by America, Hollywood and cinema, Leone takes back his story from Noodles. And he transforms it into an immense quest for lost splendors. Curious about the power and fragility of his art, he goes back to the source: the detective film, the black series, the monumental films and the glorious gangsters.” Le Nouvel Observateur points out the purely cinematographic references within the film itself: “references to Sternberg (a chase in an opium den), to Chaplin (the relationships between teenagers and cops ) , to Welles (an extraordinary sequence shot and the polite despair in the face of old age). Not to mention a rather salacious homage to Mae West, winks to American comedy and a chameleon-like assimilation of film noir.”
A lyrical breath
Critics agree that the story of the gangsters’ childhood and their apprenticeship is particularly successful. “Once upon a time in America there was a band of Jewish teenagers bound by a pact of friendship for life and death. The scenes of the streets, docks and warehouses, in particular, are magnificently composed and totally mythical,” notes Les Nouvelles littéraires , adding: “the Brooklyn Bridge, an emblematic monument glimpsed at the end of the sordid streets and spanning the distance between myth and reality is at once familiar, disturbing, beautiful and monstrous.” “From the first seconds, the magic works, in the unleashing of violence, the tragic slowness of the panoramic shots, the rise of the camera over the city and the faces. It is the splendor of an opera that imposes itself, with its majesty, its excess and its madness” ( VSD ). Le Quotidien de Paris , for its part, underlines the mastery demonstrated by Sergio Leone in directing the large crowd scenes, and admires the epic and lyrical breath that runs through the film. In Les Échos , Annie Coppermann notes that “Ennio Morricone’s music, discreet enough not to blur the characters’ depth, is also ample enough to convey his anxieties and respites.” For Alain Lemoine in Lutte ouvrière , the most endearing aspect of the film is also the evocation of the poor Jewish milieu of the Bronx at the beginning of the century: “The filmmaker has managed to render the amazed vision of memory to evoke the birth of childhood friendships and first loves.” The critic continues: “the episodes devoted to the 1930s are rather inspired by the traditional mythology of American cinema. Gangsters are presented as a kind of hero, with just the right amount of fights and great feelings.” As for the 1960s, they appear more like a foreseen future where the plot unfolds in a fantastic atmosphere.
A journey to the truth
When Once Upon a Time in America begins , Noodles is back in the place of his childhood, after a very long absence. “Like Travis in Wim Wenders’ film ( Paris, Texas ), he is a man from nowhere in search of his roots,” says Les Nouvelles littéraires . “Noodles (Robert De Niro), the anarchist for whom nothing has really changed since adolescence, and the ambitious Max (James Woods), ready to do anything to rise in the hierarchy of crime and power, have a common destiny,” writes Le Point . “Until the moment when Noodles no longer wants to follow. Betrayal, then flight. And 35 years of rehashed guilt and nothingness. It is around this 35-year “hole” that the film, in fact, revolves,” adds the newspaper. Noodles’ journey is a real journey, from Iowa to New York, critics observe. But it is also, guided step by step by Max, a journey towards knowledge, towards the truth that he has kept buried deep inside him for so long, for fear of looking at it or acknowledging it. Le Point engages in an analysis: “as if born of the same embryo, after a youth full of confidence and carefree, the two heroes are reunited by the force that had made them enemies and separated them: Time. These two outlaws represent two contradictory aspirations that are often found united in the same person, anarchism and conformism. In reality, to speak of one is to explain the other”, concludes the weekly. The itineraries of the two men, one idealistic, lucid and libertarian, the other paranoid and power-hungry, “cut by a broken structure, will allow us to see the essential differences that give each of them the desire to live and die. “Masks are transformed into one-way mirrors and traps are defused against a backdrop of violence, dreams and disappointed hope,” writes Noël Simsolo in Révolution . A simple theme, notes Le Point , to which Leone has been faithful since his first film: Good and Evil are inextricably intertwined.
The failure of a life
Once Upon a Time in America is a film about lost time. A film of “pathetic beauty, colored with a twilight light” ( La Croix ). “Max is a frenzied incarnation of the American dream of success, which allows Sergio Leone to encompass an entire social and mythical history of America, in that of the typical individualist: the gangster,” we read in Positif . But, as Le Quotidien de Paris notes , “Sergio Leone does not tell the story of the rise of a gangster, but speaks of the passing of time, nostalgia, solitude and death.” “A very bitter film that ends with the total failure of a life” ( Positif ). “The truth of Noodles is the pure and simple disaster of his life. He loses himself in oblivion, which is perhaps a more intense and deeper death,” adds Positif . Les Nouvelles littéraires insists on the fact that “the geometric place from which everything starts (for us, the spectators), and where everything will end, is an opium den, in the attic of a Chinese shadow theater. The dream journey, produced by opium, opens and ends the film, like a haven and a refuge. A place of oblivion and reverie where the past, the present and the future merge and over-impress each other.” Critics note the very marked hallucinatory character of the film. “Dreamlike, visionary, Once Upon a Time in America is more like an invitation to travel, a journey back in time, which will lead the hero to face the truth. The film is enveloped in the iridescent fog of opium and dreams” ( La Quinzaine littéraire ).
The labyrinth of memory
Once Upon a Time in America is also a film about memory. “Sergio Leone, based on the opposition of the two characters, Max and Noodles, recreates their lives in the mode of memory and the hindsight that time has given,” notes Les Nouvelles littéraires . The press of course notes the filmmaker’s nod to Marcel Proust, when, when asked by Fat Moe (Larry Rapp): “What have you been doing all these years?”, Noodles (Robert De Niro) replies: “I went to bed early.” Le Nouvel Observateur , after noting that “this film is a bit like the filmmaker’s In Search of Lost Time ,” writes: “Beyond the Proustian gag, the film has the stuffiness of great novelistic enterprises. It is not just about portraying multiple characters over an extended period. The challenge is different. To restore to the screen the complexity of perception, the reflexive suggestion that remain the prerogative of literature. To achieve real narrative depth.” Sergio Leone has built a labyrinth where eras, from 1920 to 1968, mix, respond to each other, and shed light on each other, between reality and imagination. The film, built outside of any chronology, on a series of flashbacks and flashforwards , “mixes three eras, passing from one to the other through an editing that only responds to the mechanisms of the hero’s memory” ( Les Nouvelles littéraires ). Critics admire this “superb precision mechanism from which Sergio Leone can orchestrate broad lyrical variations on an America that has haunted him since childhood” ( Le Point ). “The editing introduces several levels of reading. It is about making the viewer lose the precise reference points that would allow him to recognize the era in which he finds himself. This was done very carefully,” specifies Jean Gili in Positif . “There is not a single sequence in this film that does not follow on from the previous one without taking up a detail, visual or sound, which it transforms and transports to another space and another time. It could be the nagging telephone ringing that crosses sequences of violence, a spoon in a cup of coffee, or a lamp flame that becomes car headlights, according to the logic of a memory that is searching for itself,” adds Jean-Philippe Domecq in the same review.
However, some critics criticize Sergio Leone’s film for being too complex. Le Parisien writes: “So many useless parentheses, so many confused flashbacks, so many dead-ends, so many outbursts of violence spread out too complacently…”. For L’Express too, once the story of the New York kids’ apprenticeship has been told, “nothing goes right. The flashbacks are lumpy, characters appear, disappear, whole sections of the plot remain obscure.” For this newspaper , Once Upon a Time in America is “a disappointing, romantic, bloated, contradictory film, and probably impossible to finish.” This is also the opinion of Nouvelles littéraires : “Sergio Leone did not know how to conclude. Slow and hieratic, the staging does not keep all its promises, sometimes veering towards academicism and pomposity. We are not gripped by any real emotion. What should have swept us away in a maelstrom of sensations and vertigo simply leaves you feeling a little haggard and drained.” Once Upon a Time in America ultimately turns out to be a disconcerting work. “Baroque and exciting” ( France-Soir ), “gigantic, overwhelming, astonishing” ( Le Figaro ), “of pathetic beauty” ( Le Quotidien de Paris ), “this beautiful piece of cinema has something extremely brilliant, and at the same time, a little empty and a little vain,” summarizes Les Nouvelles littéraires . As if this third part of Sergio Leone’s triptych remained an elusive film.
Prodigious Robert De Niro
The press unanimously pays tribute to the performance of actor Robert De Niro. “A larger-than-life actor who imposes his truth, a truth that goes so much further than physical transformation,” enthuses Le Monde . “Who can change appearance, weight, generation, and gaze like him?” asks François Chalais in Le Figaro magazine . Critics are dazzled by the actor’s involvement in the role of Noodles, particularly in the makeup sessions that required him to get up at dawn. “Once again, De Niro spared no effort or spared his body,” emphasizes Libération . Le Monde even calls him “a metaphysical actor for whom the body is only an accessory costume.” All the critics praise this actor trained at the Actor’s Studio, who, “with his slow gestures, his muffled voice, his disillusioned silences, knows how to measure the slowness of time, and despair” ( Le Parisien libéré ). Faced with this sacred monster, they also recognize the extraordinary performance of James Wood in the role of Maximilian Bercovicz, known as Max, whose astonishing emaciated face is both disturbing and pathetic.