Cast of once upon a time in america7/23/2023 These close ups have become quintessential touchstones in the dictionaries of cinema, with filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino expressing publicly the deep importance of the Leone close up. In typical Leone fashion, the film studies the faces of its cast intimately and defiantly, preferring long, extreme close-ups over action or set pieces to convey emotional depth. Like the characters of all the truly great mob classics, Noodles and Max are empowered as a by product of their environment: early 20th century America. Somehow, in spite of all their deplorable actions, it’s just impossible to take your eyes off the criminals of Leone’s “Kosher Nostra” film. While I’d never advocate for films that indulge in this sort of tired rape narrative, it feels only natural that a movie immersed in American history and culture would have such a fascination with violence against women. In this way, the film becomes surprisingly prescient again today, because Once Upon a Time in America is as much a crime epic as it is an intricate exploration of entitled young men who might today call themselves incels: aggressively masculine, dismissive of women, yet violently obsessed with achieving sexual dominance.įitting in to the ever-burdensome history of American cinema’s fascination with sexual violence against women, Once Upon a Time in America features a vicious rape sequence that illustrates terrifyingly the wicked dangers of this form of male behavior. Whereas The Godfather construes benevolent figures like Clemenza or Marlon Brando’s puppy dog-like Don Corleone, Leone envisions mobsters for who they truly are: chauvinistic, sociopathic, emotionally splintered plagues to society. Unlike the sympathetic, ever-glorifying quality of mob films like Goodfellas or The Godfather (the latter of which Leone actually rejected the offer to direct in favor of this film), the gangsters in Once Upon a Time in America are just downright appalling. What distinguishes Leone’s epic from the other great American films is its startling dedication to the portraying reality of this country. It wasn’t until 2012 that American audiences got to see an approximation of Leone’s grand, nearly four-hour vision, when Martin Marin Scorsese managed to restore most of the film for a Cannes screening and DVD/Blu-Ray re-release. In fact, the film itself, after getting such exceptional praise in France, didn’t receive a single nomination here in the States at all. It was an act so contentious and poorly executed that the unbelievable soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, without argument one of the best in all of cinema, was disqualified for Academy Award consideration because the producers failed to properly credit him in their new cut of the film. After Leone had delivered his 229-minute cut, the American distributors at the Ladd Company shortened the film to a measly 139 minutes against the director’s will, which, according to the lore, was done by an assistant editor from Police Academy. premiere later that year, it was discarded by critics and audiences alike, with some calling it the worst film of the year. When the movie premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, it received a 15-minute standing ovation. Contextually, the film as a cultural moment speaks to the agony and ecstasy of Americana, a great movie that was infamously botched upon release in one of the most shameful studio mishaps of our time, shortly preceding the heartbreaking death of Leone-which raised many to believe that the intensity and tragedy of America itself is what brought the Italian auteur to heart failure. Narratively, it is steeped in the rich, aggressively violent history of the early days of our immigrant-hating nation, depicting quite brutally the underpinnings of male-oriented corruption that render many of today’s power structures. But sometimes it takes an outsider to expose the truth of a place, and no film has encapsulated the glorious, menacing tragedy of our country quite as ravishingly as Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in America.Ī stratosphere-scraping citadel of cinema, nearly everything about Leone’s last film-and greatest masterwork-speaks to the grand illusion of the American Dream. Classics like On the Waterfront or The Last Picture Show are iconic for their honest, nuanced portrayal of a country that is as broken as it is proud. American-born filmmakers have long devoted themselves to capturing the essence of our nation on film.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |