Once Upon a Time with Sergio Leone

With Ennio Morricone receiving an honorary Oscar last week, it occurred to me that a couple of his scores were for some well-known films that I hadn't seen, so zoom they went up to the top of my Netflix queue. Both of them were directed by Sergio Leone and begin with the same five words, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Once Upon a Time in America.

Once Upon a Time in the West came after the Dollars trilogy, which established the Spaghetti Western genre and made Clint Eastwood a star. This later film, from 1968, seems to be a synthesis of his earlier films, and more heartfelt, with an emotional core the trilogy doesn't have. At the same time, though, it was a bit aloof in its almost fetishistic display of Western visuals.

For example, the opening scene is quite famous. Three hombres show up at dilapidated station, waiting for a train. For about ten minutes they wait, one of them bothered by a fly, another by water dripping on his hat. A windmill creaks as it spins around. It certainly has some virtuoso editing, and does a nice job of building suspense, but it seemed to me to be ultimately an empty exercise. Off the train steps Charles Bronson, who dispatches the three men quickly.

Bronson is the part Eastwood would have played, the man with no name (he is called Harmonica by others due to his proclivity for that particular musical instrument). He is on some sort of a vendetta that isn't explained until the end. In particular he is after a bad guy named Frank, played by Henry Fonda. A third person ends up in this triangle (as with the dollar trilogy, there are always three sides to a Leone western), in the person of Jason Robards as an outlaw called Cheyenne. The lynchpin to the plot is a homesteader who is murdered, along with his family (Fonda shoots a young boy in a particularly chilling scene), leaving a widow behind, an ex-whore from New Orleans played by Claudia Cardinale. Turns out the homesteader was sitting on land that the railroad wanted dearly, and Fonda is the enforcer for the head of that railroad.

There are all sorts of wonderful set pieces, including a shootout in a railroad car and the final showdown between Bronson and Fonda, which are full of the extreme close-ups Leone is famous for. Robards character is effective, as he is a villainous man who is softened to Cardinale's plight. He says she reminds him of his mother, a sentiment that isn't heard in many Westerns, but seems especially poignant in this one.

In 1983 Leone made Once Upon a Time in America, a gangster epic starring Robert DeNiro. The running time was close to four hours, and it was butchered for its U.S. release, leading to confused and negative reviews. I saw the full-length version on DVD. It's hailed by many as a masterpiece, but frankly I don't get it. The problem--the 800-pound gorilla known as The Godfather.

For ever more, when any filmmaker wants to make a film about organized crime and the American dream, they have to be compared to Coppola's films, and Once Upon a Time in America, while a decent film with some interesting visuals, comes up vastly short. DeNiro plays Noodles (that's the first mistake, that name) a Jewish kid from the Lower East Side in about 1920, who teams up with Max (who will grow up to look like James Woods) to create an empire of crime. The film has a complicated structure, beginning with the gang's demise at the end of prohibition, flashing forward to DeNiro in the 1960s, and then back to the beginning. I liked this structure quite a bit, and apparently the re-cut put everything in chronological order, which probably removed what power the film has.

Where this film falls short of The Godfather is mostly in the production values. It seems to have been made on a shoestring. Some parts seemed like actors playing dress-up, and the sets and costumes just didn't look quite right, nor did the cinematography. Also, though DeNiro and Woods are in age makeup to indicate that they would be about sixty years old, actress Elizabeth McGovern is not, which makes for a strange scene at the end of the film. There is also an ambiguous ending, involving a mysterious garbage truck and the final image, DeNiro as a young man in an opium den, which didn't have any emotional impact for me.

Leone was an interesting filmmaker, but I don't think he was on the top tier of directors. His westerns are fun and entertaining, but not as sweeping as say, John Ford, and his gangster film will forever be in the shadow of Coppola.