The Ladd Co. fiddles with an epic while Sergio Leone burns
Manhattan, 1933. A pretty, blond woman walks alone into her darkened apartment. With a thrill of apprehension, Eve (Darlanne Fluegel) walks toward her big bed and slowly pulls down the top sheet. There, outlined in bullet holes, is the silhouette of her gangster lover, Noodles Aaronson. On the table beside her, Noodles’ framed photograph is abruptly smashed by a burly hand. “Where is he?” demands the intruder. Eve doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter: two bullets from a muted revolver send her reeling back, dead, to fill her lover’s silhouette. This is the first scene of Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America.
Manhattan, 1921. A lovely, dark-haired girl, just approaching her teens, dances alone to the torpid ecstasy of a phonograph record in the back room of a Lower East Side tavern. Through a crack in the wall, a boyabout the same age watches, transfixed. The dance over, Deborah (Jennifer Connelly) turns her back to the boy and slips out of her white chiffon dress, displaying herself in a vision that the young Noodles Aaronson will carry throughout his long, violent life. This is the first scene of the Ladd Co.’s Once upon a Time in America.
Now playing at movie theaters not very near you: the two versions of Director Leone’s $28 million gangster epic. If you wish to see the sprawling, lurid, hallucinatory film cut to Leone’s specifications at 3 hr. 47 min., you need only make a pilgrimage to Paris (where the film opened to good business two weeks ago) or, later this month, to a single theater in Chicago, where the Leone version will have its American premiere. If you want to see the Ladd Co.’s cut—brisk, less ambitious and audacious, dramatically more coherent at 2 hr. 24 min.—you can see it on 894 screens in North America. Both versions have their pleasures and problems; both look like the battered survivors of the movie industry’s protracted war between directors and distributors.
At the heart of both films is a cautionary fable that spans nearly five decades of American antisocial history: from 1921, when a teen-age gang of Jewish punks assembles in their Manhattan ghetto, to 1933, when the gang’s leaders, Noodles (Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods), tumble into betrayal, to 1968, when the old men meet to act out their perverse codes of honor. Leone filmed the story in the luscious, mythic style that he developed in his popular “spaghetti westerns” with Clint Eastwood and perfected in Once upon a Time in the West (1969), an outsider’s glorious, besotted tribute to classical Hollywood cinema. This time, though, the characters are not grand, strutting archetypes. Noodles and Max, their henchmen and adversaries, are spindly figures lost in venality; and Leone’s film, true to its subject, is cold, brooding and brutal.
This is a gangster film, so the screen pulses with gunfire and garroting. There are scenes as sweet as one of a boy’s bringing a charlotte russe as payment for his first sexual encounter, then greedily devouring his pastry when the girl takes too long to show up, and moments as gruesome as Noodles’ back-seat rape of Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), the only woman he ever loved. But America is, first and last, a European art film that rarely accelerates into the power drive of a slick Hollywood vehicle. Instead it tells its story in the form of a hashish pipedream conjured up by Noodles, slipping back to memories of 1921 and forward to a nightmare of 1968 as whim and reverie possess this gangster on the lam. Leone is less interested in arousing an audience’s easier emotions than in presenting, at a dispassionate distance, the horror of two men warily walking toward each other on a tightrope suspended above the snake pit of their , deepest compulsions.
The Ladd Co., beset in the past year by the commercial flops of The Right Stuff, Star 80 and Mike’s Murder, could not have been happy to find itself with one more auteurist fantasia. When Leone delivered his film at an hour over the contracted 2 hr. 45 min., a team headed by Editor Zach Staenberg went to work, putting the story into chronological order, jettisoning some of the most operatically violent scenes, dropping Deborah (and her child by Max) from the 1968 section and giving Max a new way out of his climactic misery. Says Jay Kanter, vice president of the Ladd Co.: “We thought Leone’s original was a wonderful picture. But the response to the first preview caused us to rethink the situation. Besides, at 3 hr. 45 min., theaters would be limited to just one show a night.” As it happens, Staenberg performed an adroit, sympathetic salvage job, but to little box-office effect. The shortened America opened the same day as Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and in the first week, as the starship Enterprise was beaming up $25.2 million, America Leone earned only $3.2 million.
“My film was a homage to the American films I love,” Leone told TIME Correspondent Denise Worrell at the Cannes Film Festival last month, “and to America itself. It is the film’s tragedy, and that of the Ladd Co., that it will be destroyed in the country it was above all intended for. But you know distributors, and Ladd is far from the worst. One distributor for a country in the Middle East said he wanted to buy the film, but only if we took out all the Jewish parts!” Even now, Leone is planning to release a “full” version—all 4 hr. 10 min.—to Italian television in three years. And after that, who knows where it might show up? Perhaps, in some future life, Leone’s flawed, fascinating epic will live happily ever after … in America.
—By Richard Corliss
