LGM Film Club, Part 525: Once Upon a Time in America
By 
Like every other Sergio Leone film, there’s a lot in his magisterial masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America that makes no sense–how does Robert DeNiro know how to drive on his first job after 12 years in prison that took him from being a boy to a man? But of course it does no one any good to ask for this kind of detail in a Leone film. Instead what you get is not only a legendary gangster epic that I would say is as good a film as The Godfather (which is no slag against that film, I think Once is really that good) but it does what nearly no other film can do–be 4 hours long and I wish it was at least an hour or two longer. I could spend forever with those characters, especially when the gang are young punks. Leone always had a weird but pretty accurate idea of America, which is was a nation where greedy men ruled through violence. Hard to argue that it doesn’t make even more sense in 2025 than it did in 1984. The other thing about this film is that since Leone spent the 70s not being able to get a film project made, this must have felt like it came out of nowhere, at least to those who saw the original version. That was not available in the US for a long time thanks to studio hacks who thought the film was too long and so did a hatchet job on it. Leone never would get another film made. Also, DeNiro totally should have killed James Woods at the end of the movie, just because James Woods is an asshole.
In any case, somewhat to my surprise, we’ve never discussed this film in the series. In fact, we’ve only talked about For a Few Dollars More and that was over 5 years ago. So let’s chat about Once Upon a Time in America. Among other things, that iconic shot I used for this post, which is right there with Manhattan for the best use of the Brooklyn Bridge in a film.