The subject of my latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar is Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, and these are the warmup paragraphs:
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Nearly four hours long, Once Upon a Time in America was drastically cut when released in 1984. Viewers were puzzled, and reviewers panned the butchered 144-minute version that they saw. The movie makes a lot more sense at its proper length. When the 85 minutes of deleted footage were restored, some of the same folks who derided Once Upon a Time in America hailed it as Sergio Leone’s melancholy masterpiece, a gangster epic that doubles as an exploration of friendship, betrayal, male competition masked as sexual desire, greed, violence, and the American dream.
The gangsters here are first-generation Jews, the locale is New York City’s Lower East Side, and there are three distinct time periods. Though the story begins in the early 1920s, the movie opens in 1933, in the aftermath of a disastrous caper that only one of the gang members survives. That survivor is David Aaronson (Robert De Niro), known to all as “Noodles.”
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For more click here.
https://theamericanscholar.org/gangsters-in-love/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_jIL0UJe1Q
https://youtu.be/-LCAIUamxZ0
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