The Ultimate DVD Geek: Once Upon A Time In America

It had not happened before, but with the Warner Home Video Two-Disc Special Edition release of Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America (20026, $27) on DVD, the film enters the pantheon of the greatest motion pictures ever made. The reason for this is rather simple. The DVD’s supplementary section is a collective testimonial to the film’s greatness, crystallizing opinions that have been accumulating since the film was first screened in 1984. The initial American theatrical version, however, was a butchered mess, so a critical mass of viewers were unable to appreciate the film’s true value until home video presentations of the unabridged version started circulating a couple years later.

Running 229 minutes, the narrative, about a group of gangsters in New York City, has two major parts that are linked by a third part. The third story is set in the late Sixties as the hero, played by Robert De Niro, having lived a modest life since he went into hiding, is drawn back to the city. The first part depicts his character as a child, when he first met his companion in crime—played as an adult by James Woods. The second part, the bulk of the film, is about their activities as adults, accumulating power and pulling off some major crimes until differences in the strategic direction of their gang split them apart. The end of the second part, however, both opens and closes the movie, with De Niro’s character smoking opium in a Chinatown den as hitmen try to determine his whereabouts. Now, opium turns a user into lead—floating lead, but lead. His ability, then, to nimbly sneak out the back and escape when the hitmen arrive, as he does at the film’s beginning, has a compelling ambiguity that weaves its way, like the smoke from his pipe, through the entire movie. Are all the subsequent flashbacks and flash-forwards just his besotted imagination as he lays on the cot waiting to rot or to die (after all, consider the film’s title…)? Or is that a metaphor for what happens to everyone, in a non-Matrix sort of way?

As one would expect from Leone, the film is a brilliant stylistic accomplishment. Its images, its designs, its music, its sounds (there is, famously, a telephone at the beginning of the film that seems to ring forever), its faces are all richly and fluidly applied, and they have been beautifully delivered on the DVD. The four primary Leone films preceding Once Upon a Time in America had almost no sexual content and only one significant female character, but America has several big female parts and extensive, innovative sexuality. In fact, it may be the film’s sexual content, rather than its gangster milieu, that sets it apart from Leone’s earlier works. Along with the enhanced eroticism these sequences convey to a viewer, they also unveil a substantial part of each character’s psyche. How each character relates to sex has a direct bearing on that character’s fate, and it fills out the depths of the characters in a manner that was unapproachable with Leone’s inscrutable cowboys.

But the treasures of the film come from its individual sequences. There are so many wonderful, memorable moments in the movie that it conveys a lifetime of experience as it unfolds. Not all of these scenes are charming—it takes a couple viewings to overcome repulsion toward the scene where De Niro rapes Elizabeth McGovern and to recognize that, as characters, what happens to them is depicted and performed with a stunning intelligence. From a plot standpoint, you probably could eliminate a lot of the childhood scenes and still have enough to establish the relationships between the characters, but you would lose so much texture in the depiction of the New York neighborhoods teeming with immigrants and the many perfectly crafted scenes showing youngsters straining to act like adults and failing (perhaps the most memorable of all—a young boy spends all of his savings on a cream puff that is the price of a young girl’s sexual favors, but as he is waiting for her with his gift, he can’t resist its own temptation). It is the brilliance of these moments that accumulate on multiple viewings, so that you are eventually overwhelmed by the movie’s rich artistic vastness.

Probably to enhance the digital transfer rate—at least one hopes that’s the reason—the platter break does not occur at the Intermission point, but at a breathing point during a major dramatic scene. If they had to do it that way, then so be it, but using the real Intermission, which occurs about 40 minutes into the second platter, would have been greatly preferable. The film is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The sound has been remastered in 5.1-channel Dolby Digital, bringing a slightly enhanced fullness to Ennio Morricone’s incredibly lyrical musical score—probably one of the most intoxicating musical scores ever (What are pan flutes doing in the music for a gangster movie? Oh, that’s right, the opium pipes…). While the sound is dimensional, actual separation effects are unnoticable, so other than the music and a few atmospheric noises, the audio remains centered. Neverthless, tones are reasonably strong and clear. There is an alternate French audio track in 5.1 Dolby and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles.

The supplement, also appearing on the second platter, is not really elaborate. There is a trailer, a 13-minute montage of production photos that contain a lot of shots of Leone at work and a 20-minute retrospective documentary, in which a persuasive number of individuals, some of whom worked on the film and some of whom did not, unabashedly sing its praises as the circumstances of its initiation and production are discussed. Woods, for example, says it is the one film title he would like to have listed on his gravestone, and you believe him.

Beware of the commentary by the film critic, Richard Schickel. He explains and analyzes everything, and while he admits that some of his interpretations are nothing more than his own opinions, his breakdown of the movie is so thorough that it robs a bit of its magic. He does to the movie’s ambiguities what Clint Eastwood used to do to a bad guy’s henchmen. Nevertheless, he talks through the entire movie without too many gaps, describing what is happening in the film and the motivations behind the action, explaining Leone’s techniques, talking a little bit about the production background, and discussing other matters inspired by the film’s artistry. And he is not beyond suggesting that the film has a few minor flaws. “Elizabeth McGovern said that this movie has to work as a love story between these two guys, granted a fractious love story, and she offered the possibility that, you know, that there wasn’t enough personal chemistry between Woods and De Niro to make it really, truly work as a passionate love story. I think there’s a little bit to that. I think it’s possible that these two actors, you know, were collegial but not the kind of great buddies that these two characters in the movie, for all their fractiousness, were.”

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