The Making Of Once Upon A Time In America
Stupid over-spending, graphic rape scenes, Robert De Niro's Method madness - it can only be the making of Once Upon A Time In America and the breaking of the legendary Sergio Leone...
For a lot of people, The Godfather is the daddy of modern gangster films. Informed by the classics of the genre, it’s Francis Ford Coppola’s epic that all subsequent Mob movies have been weighed against. Not surprisingly, many of the Mafia movies that followed seem very small beer next to such an awesome achievement - all that is except one.
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America is the one gangster film that rivals The Godfather for scope and scale. For many, it is every bit the equal of Coppola’s epics. And for some, it’s even better.
Regarded at the time of its release as The Godfather’s poor cousin, Leone’s film really has little in common with Coppola’s saga. Centring around the relationship between David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson and Max Berowicz - boyhood friends who grow up to become big-time gangsters - it’s the story not of stereotypical Italian hoods, but of Jewish gangsters, the protagonists being loosely based on the infamous Meyer Lansky and George ‘Bugsy’ Siegel.
And while it bears the trappings of the genre, Once Upon A Time In America is less concerned with the gangster lifestyle than with universal forces such as betrayal, memory and the passage of time. The complexity of the film’s flashback structure is only matched by the depth of the characterisation. In The Godfather, Marlon Brando played Don Corleone a a charismatic heavy. In Once Upon A Time In America, Robert De Niro’s Noodles is a man with so many contradictions and insecurities, Travis Bickle is like Forrest Gump in comparison.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to As Luck Would Have It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.