Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

I'm familiar with most of the great gangster movies that have come out, but I've never heard of this title until recently. Well, I found why I've never heard of it -- the film is long, boring and disappointing. Somewhere in there is an interesting story, but "Once Upon a Time in America" does not tell that story.

Basically, with flashbacks occurring here and there, the movie follows a group of kids in their journey from young hoods to adult hoods. However, "Once Upon a Time in America" is too long, too disjointed, the story is not compelling, and the acting in the early parts of the film is atrocious (especially the child actors). A large part of the problem with the movie is Sergio Leone's directing style. Leone loves long stares and glances and wide panoramic shots, and unlike in his westerns, this style simply does not work here. In Leone's westerns these long sequences effectively built up tension while here they are just boring cinematic filler.

It seems that Leone lost objectivity in editing because a lot of scenes drag on unnecessarily, making the nearly 4 hour running time seem twice as long. In the first hour alone there's more than 5 minutes devoted to a scene of a 12-13 year old girl dancing ballet while a young Noodles (the main character) secretly watches. Did this really need to be 5 minutes? The point is made in the first minute -- she's a beautiful young girl and Noodles is in love with here. Why stretch it out for another 4 minutes? There's no point to it unless you like watching young girls ballet dance.

Soon afterward we're treated to a another 4-5 minute scene of a little kid eating pastry while melodramatic music gushes in like its some sort of pivotal scene. It boggles the mind why stuff like this was not edited down -- it doesn't move the story, its not cinematic and its not even acting, its 4-5 minutes of a kid eating cake.

Lastly, whereas a movie like "The Godfather" comes across as realistic and believable, "Once Upon a Time in America" while ostensibly gritty and realistic is anything but. Certain events in the story are completely unbelievable and hard to view as anything but fiction, which is not an asset when you are making a hard, gritty gangster movie.

If you like long 4 hour movies I guess this is for you, but to anyone else I would say that there's a good reason this movie has largely been forgotten, so proceed at your own risk.

Fmovies: Yes. It is that low quality. Loser city. Sleep inducing style story. No Hope, no interest and no movement. Just the usual pompous indulgement to keep the pretentious under the clutches to win an Oscar. Stay Away.

I have seen all the best gangster pictures like Godfather parts 1 and 2, Goodfellas and Scarface (the really old one and the Al Pacino one) and decided to watch this movie again for the first time in twenty years because I read the Leone turned down the chance to direct the Godfather and later on made this movie.

I just don't understand how this movie is ranked 115 on the all time list of movies on IMDb. This movie is unbelievably boring it is like watching a snail run the 100 yard dash. By the end of the four hours I couldn't care less about what happened to any of the characters. Noodle is dishonourable thug who should have pushed in the back of the truck at the end of the movie. This is a very over rated movie and does not even come close to standing up against Leone's westerns.

5 out of 10 and that is generous.

Once Upon a Time in America fmovies. This film was long, but not in the sense that it is a 3-hour long film and therefore any film that is three hours long is too long, but in the sense that it is an uninteresting story that is dragged out and out and out. It is also full of clichés that try to make Jews actually kind and also physically tough, Italians mafiosos and thugs and of course Chinese docile fu manchus that run opium lairs.

All these clichés might have been interesting or art 30 years ago, but today we have evolved.

Bottom-line: this movie serves a narrow band of an audience which is primarily people who were in Hollywood thirty years ago and had a background in Jewish New York City and want to promote it.

Boring, overlong and nonsense.

That is the best part. It is the only entertaining part. Otherwise, it is four hours of lame pastiche.

And they are already taken/sleeping around/disrobing for men. So we get to check them out. But one of them is a trailer trash with no standards who gives it up to the local copper. Other than that! OYVEY!