Notes on Once Upon a Time in America

I have a lot going on right now off-line – you know, that little thing called “life” – but I still have all of these things percolating in my head that I want to write about. I haven’t forgotten about Man in Mirror – I actually have been still researching that one – it’s coming!!

But onto another thing I’ve wanted to write about: Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.

The story behind the story of this movie is almost more famous than the movie itself. This was like Sergio Leone’s “dream of passion” – we all have one – and most good directors worth their salt (grammar police, sorry) have one film that drives them a little bit insane. That’s what that “dream of passion” will do to you. He tried for years to get the rights to the book that the movie would eventually be based on. It spoke to him. The immigrant experience, crime, the wild west of prohibition … and the glories and underbelly of America. The casting for this film was almost like a gladiator combat zone in the damn Coliseum. Everyone wanted to be in this picture. People campaigned to be in this picture. It was like The Godfather. I remember when DeNiro came to my school to speak – and somebody asked him if he had auditioned for the first Godfather – and he said, “Yeah, I read for Michael. I think every actor in town read for Michael.” Just to give you the scope of the casting call. And the coup that was Al Pacino’s landing of the most coveted role of that decade. Once Upon a Time in America offered the same thing to actors of a certain type (who happened to be very hot at that point – and still are – the tough-guy, the Italian gangster guy, the Scorsese street-thug guy). Richard Dreyfuss campaigned to be in it. Joe Pesci wanted to be in it. (He did end up being in it – but not in the part he originally wanted). As it stands, I would say the casting is perfect – on multiple levels.

We have the whole section when the boys are young – and how on earth they found these young actors who so seemed to be a young Robert DeNiro type – a young James Woods type – when we encounter them later as adults (and of course it’s not a linear movie, I’m just saying – in looking back on it) – it is so obvious who is who. The “cock-eye” character is so obviously William Forsythe – the second you see him as a grown man (although, uhm, is that guy really an adult? With his pipes o’ Pan and his amoral gap-toothed grin? Doesn’t seem so) – but anyway, the second you see him as an adult, you know: Oh. Of course. That’s Cock-eye. Amazing casting.

And the kids are all terrific. They have to do some very tough scenes – violent scenes, and sexy scenes, too – they’re precocious teenagers after all, growing up in a hurry. And they really seem like kids. They look 14. It’s not the Hollywood of today where for the most part the “tweens” are played by 19 year old starlets. These kids seem adolescent.

And that one little tiny boy has to do a slow-mo death scene, being shot in the back by a bullet on the cobblestone streets (I wish I had a screenshot of it – I found a screenshot of his death scene – but not his toppling over) – and I have to admit, I teared up watching it. Not just because I had fallen in love with that little guy, and he was so young to be gunned down in the street … but also because I was just proud of that little-boy actor for doing his job so well. Look at him, goin’ down, in slow-mo – and then lying there, with his legs crooked beneath him – all in one shot. That’s the most pure type of acting – the “make believe, bang bang you’re dead” type of acting, and I love it when a kid can pull it off – because a kid is still so close to the land of Make Believe. They know how to pretend. It is in their blood. Adult actors have to REMEMBER how to pretend. So to see him go down like that … It was devastating. But I was also proud of the little boy’s courage and acting skills. Welcome to how I watch movies.

Also, Jennifer Connelly plays Elizabeth McGovern as a young girl (say, 12 years old) – and the resemblance is uncanny. Seriously. Elizabeth McGovern has quite a specific face – the thick eyebrows, the sort of plumpness around the mouth, the eyes – it’s not generic.

It is completely believable that Connelly, the serious-faced, serious-eyed young girl would grow up to be Elizabeth McGovern.

I loved the scenes when Noodles is peeking through the hole in the bathroom wall – watching her practice ballet – in that airy dusty storage space. A poetic movie space – probably not like any storage space in the back of any bar on the lower East Side that ever existed – but this is the movies. Especially this movie – which is shot out of chronological order. You see the older Robert DeNiro (say, the 50 year old man) looking back on his child-self and then the child-self becomes the slicked-hair 25 year old DeNiro … so these childhood scenes, to me, were not mean to be completely realistic. But more … nostalgic. The way we remember things from afar. Deborah (the Jennifer Connelly/Elizabeth McGovern character) is an image of … goodness, and hope – that carries him through some of his darkest hours. And of course, he ends up sullying that goodness in one of the nastiest scenes in the film that I could barely watch. So when we see her – as a young girl – dancing around the storage area – with barrels of apples, and pickles, and bins of parsley – and we see her as almost an angel, in a lofty airy space filled with streaming light … we see her through the gauze of memory. We see her across the abyss of years. It’s sad. The shots are lovely – poetic – and yet we feel sad. Because we know they represent days long gone.

The opening scenes – the apartment, the opium den, the Chinese theatre, the black and white tiles of Moe’s bar (which is, actually, McSorley’s on East 7th – a landmark bar if ever there was one), the chairs flipped over up on the tables, the burnished mahogany of the clock – and the phone ringing … and ringing … and ringing … and ringing …

Seriously. The sound of that phone ringing is a leitmotif.

American distributors had a helluva time with the four hour movie that Sergio Leone eventually handed in. His cut had actually been over 10 hours long. And this movie is so good that I would love to see 8 more hours of it. But four hours? And no chronological set up? How do we know that we’re looking at the four young boys – only now they’re grown-up? [Uhm, because we’re not morons, and we can figure it out??] So the distributors basically booted Leone off of his own “dream of passion” – and hired someone to cut the film to an acceptable length. Two hours. This was the version that was released in the United States to a definitively lukewarm response. By ironing out the chronology – by taking out all of the symbolic poetic images – not meant to be literal truth, but a deeper kind of truth – they ruined the movie. The phone rings for no reason … Leone had put the film together very carefully. We see various phones – and we aren’t sure as we see them – if they’re in the 1910s, or the 1920s, or the 1960s … it could be any of them. We don’t know sometimes who is calling who. We are not told whose phone we are seeing. And the phone just keeps ringing.

All of this, naturally, does make sense. If this kind of non-literal film-making drives you crazy – and you would rather have a clear-cut storyline told in a traditional way – then obviously this movie would make you nuts. But the 4 hour version – which eventually was put back together and released on video and DVD – is closer to Leone’s actual intent. It’s Proustian almost: how certain senses can ignite memories. Not just intellectual memories, as in: Oh man, member when we did such and such? No – there are certain moments – where maybe you get a whiff of a pastry you haven’t had since you were 8, or you suddenly hear a Christmas song over the radio that was your great-grandmother’s favorite … and you don’t sit there and think: “Wow. Member all of that?” It’s more like you actually go back in time. You shudder with closeness to your old self, those old dead selves, your ghosts. This is what Leone is getting at in this movie. Robert DeNiro, Noodles, has returned to his old hood – and wherever he looks – he doesnt’ just see the present-day streets and sidewalks. It’s like he can also see, as an afterimage, the cast-iron streetlamps of his childhood, the rattling wheels of the junk wagon clattering along, the smells and sounds of his childhood – when the “old world” was much closer. So phones ring. Is it the phone in the speakeasy? Or the opium den? Or in Moe’s back room? Who knows? Memories come, unfold, unfurl … and not always in the “right” order.

I love that about this film.

DeNiro is terrific – in a kind of silent worried way … I thought that James Woods was phenomenal. To me, it is his character (and his performance) that is the real key to the movie. We never know what makes Max tick. We think we do, but then he always surprises us. There are depths in that guy, and you better look out. He’s volatile. He’s frightening. He’s ruthless. He’s scared. He’s smart. Smarter than Noodles. We see Max through Noodles’ eyes – and even by the end of the movie, as close as those two were … we still don’t feel that we can get inside Max. And isn’t that the way with some people we meet in life? Isn’t that sometimes the way it goes? James Woods is absolutely terrific. He can look almost boyish sometimes – there’s a vulnerability in his eyes, a need there -that can be so seductive. And then he can turn around and be quite cold. Ruthless. And cruel. He’s volatile. But not in the what I see as predictable (or at least it’s predictable now) Al Pacino way. Al Pacino is so predictably “explosive” now that it is basically schtick. Some people have funny schtick. Pacino’s is: i talk very low and calm in an ominous quiet voice AND THEN I … SUDDENLY … EXPLODE … MAKING EVERYBODY AROUND ME …. JUMP! Again: it can be quite effective, I’m not dissing it. I’m just saying it’s schtick. Woods seems, at times, truly unstable. Like when Noodles says, casually, as a joke, “You’re crazy” – and Woods literally goes nuts. As though some switch has been flipped … it’s a trigger. Woods goes insane. You think he’s kidding at first – you hope he’s kidding – because … he seems so out of control, so damaged. He’s fantastic.

I loved the atmosphere of this film. I want to LIVE in the apartment in the first scene. If I ever have any money, I will pay one of my gay decorator friends to make my apartment look like that. The scenes at the Chinese theatre were amazing. You didn’t feel like you were watching a movie that was filmed on a set. I truly felt like I was looking at a place that existed at the turn of the century. It seemed … haunting. Like – it so doesn’t exist now. We are looking at a world gone by. Things were not dwelled over … i didn’t sit there and think about the art direction (which I often do with other films) – because it didn’t seem to have any art direction – and by that I mean: these all seemed to be real places. Of course they weren’t … there was art direction … but the way it was filmed, and the way the characters inhabited these spaces … seemed completely real.

Amazingly, too, Leone shot these scenes all over the world. He makes you totally think that you are looking at the lower East side in 1915, 1916 … and he might have filmed those scenes in Jersey, or in Rome, or in Canada. He shot the movie all over the world. The location scouts must have had a helluva time. Unbelievable.

I have to think more about the movie – but now I can see why Michael said to me that it is one of the greatest gangster movies ever made. It’s kind of the gangster movie. And it’s also an homage to the chaotic birth of America – the immigrants, the crime, the new-ness of the country compared to the worlds that all of these characters have emigrated from … the sense of possibility … but because they choose at a very young age that crime is the way to go, there’s a dark side to all of it.

Connecting links abound … the clock, the phone, the locker, the briefcase, the key … and then, before I sign off here – I have to just mention the last shot – which is a closeup of Robert DeNiro’s face, and he’s smiling. The shot goes on forever … It’s frozen on him, and it’s disturbing – because … why is he smiling? It’s not clear. And if he’s smiling for the reason why we think he’s smiling – then it’s actually tragic. It’s a death mask grin. But that shot was so arresting, so … I’m trying to think of the word. Naked? I kept expecting the shot to end. I kept almost hoping for the scene to end. It was one of those things, where I felt strangely confronted by it. It was too naked. I kept expecting the screen to fade to black. But as the shot went on … and as my wish that it would all stop was not granted, I relaxed into it … and once I relaxed, all kinds of fascinating things started spiralling through my brain. I was looking at him, and thinking about Noodles, and contemplating him, and contemplating his smile. Wondering about him. I had that much time. And also just the fact that he’s smiling. I don’t think he smiles a real smile throughout the movie. Noodles is kind of a dour guy. And his teeth are stained brown, and he has the crinkly smile lines around his eyes, and the camera is right in his face so his mole looks enormous … and the shot never ends. It’s like getting into a staring contest, and you so want to break your gaze away, because it’s too … revealing. Naked. You have to tolerate the shot, is what I am trying to say – and the meaning is not immediately clear. I’m still not quite sure about it – but I do know – that I have been thinking about it and pondering it ever since.