Spoilers for Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Sergio Leone’s final film Once Upon a Time in America suffered on release. Looking beyond the meddling of The Ladd Company – the film’s US distributors, who cut the film by an hour and a half – it never quite matches up to either Leone’s previous works or the American gangster epics that had come before.
Still, it remains an interesting experience. Ennio Morricone’s soaring score harks back to the genre-defining spaghetti westerns that Leone made famous, while the lead performances by Robert De Niro and James Woods are incredible, perfectly capturing the jealously and possessiveness that comes from a lifelong friendship going awry.
It’s also a film that has been the subject of several theories, mostly revolving around the transitional scene of David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson (De Niro) in an opium den. Chronologically representing the middle of the story, Noodles has just betrayed his crew Max (Woods), Patsy (James Hayden) and Cockeye (William Forsythe), leading to their deaths at the hands of the police.
At this point, the film strays from its grittier, more realistic style and becomes dreamlike. We cut forward 35 years to an aged Noodles, called back to New York by an anonymous letter. During the last half, he reencounters old faces from his past; each of these conversations is a little too pointed, too perfectly scripted to guide Noodles towards the truth.
It's this that convinces many that the 1968 sequences are all part of an elaborate, opium-addled dream. After all, when we leave Noodles in that den in 1933, he has associates hunting him down for tipping off the police. The most likely end for him is death, instead of a rather quick come down from his high and enough time to escape the city.
The bizarreness of his interactions is perhaps most obvious when he meets Carol (Tuesday Weld), Max’s girlfriend at a retirement complex. She was the one who convinced Noodles to tip off the police back in ’33, and here she tells him that Max had manipulated the pair into betraying him. That he would rather be shot and killed than risk ending up in an insane asylum like his father had.
Even if we take the film at face value, without the possibility that these final moments are a hallucination, the conversation feels like two people desperately trying to justify their actions. With the added wrinkle of Noodle’s opium intake, it becomes his own subconscious grabbling with the guilt. The opium den scene also puts what we have seen before into doubt. How can we trust the film at all, when it’s potentially all a drug-induced dream?
As we reach the central point, when Noodles betrays Max, there are frequent references to how Max does not like being called crazy. Could these be part of the narrative that Noodles has created to justify his actions?
The greatest evidence for this comes in the final moments, however. Noodles’ investigation leads him to the party of Secretary of Commerce Christopher Bailey, who turns out to be Max. He explains that he faked his own death, worked with the police force, and stole the stashed away money to create a new life for himself. It was he who lured Noodles back to New York, and he wanted Noodles to kill him.
While there are justifications for this convoluted ploy – Max has fallen on the wrong side of the Teamsters and will be assassinated later that night – this again feels too on the nose. Racked with guilt in that opium den, wouldn’t Noodles create a scenario where his best friend survived his betrayal? Not only that but a future where that same friend not only forgives the betrayal but also coordinates the entire thing and wants to be killed by the end?
Leone would support the opium den reading of the film and, to be honest, it makes Once Upon a Time in America a better film. Taken at face value, the final part of the film undoes much of the allegories about greed that take up much of the running time. Instead, it becomes something convoluted and untidy, instead of the relatively simple story of gangland New York.
By placing an unknown amount of the action inside Noodle’s subconscious, it becomes a strange character piece, exploring how a damaged youth expands on his childhood criminality, and how he imagines it will come to an end. That Noodles refuses to believe his own delusion, just before we cut back to him laughing in the opium den, creates a haunting end to an imperfect epic.
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Sergio Leone, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini. Based on the novel The Hoods by Harry Grey
Starring: Robert De Niro, James Woods, James Hayden, William Forsythe