Warner Bros. | 1984 | 229 mins. | R
Director Sergio Leone, best known for spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars, turned down the chance to direct The Godfather to work on his own mobster epic, Once Upon a Time in America. Ultimately, it took ten years and six script writers from Italy and the U.S.to get the film made. When Once Upon a Time in America made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, the audience stood and cheered. Unfortunately when the film arrived stateside it had been cut from its original 229 minute runtime, down to just 152, leaving audiences confused and Sergio Leone heartbroken.
Thankfully, as they did with the latest DVD release, Warner’s Blu-ray is the director’s cut. The opening is memorable for its harshness—a a helpless woman gets two bullets pumped into her, followed by a bloody, brutal beating as gangsters look for the David Noodles Aaronson (Robert DeNiro).
On the run from some very angry gangsters, Noodles goes to Buffalo, N.Y., where he ides out for the next 35 years. He returns to his old neighborhood as an elderly man, believing he’s finally been found out. He reminisces about his childhood in the Lower Eastside in the early part of the century with some other Jewish kids. They’re mostly fellow thugs, who beat up drunks and engage in petty crime. One day, Young Noodles (Scott Tiler), meets Maximilian ‘Max’ Bercovicz (played by Rusty Jacobs as a kid and James Woods as the adult). They form what they believe will be a lifelong friendship. Along the way, he remembers old friends “Patsy” Goldberg (James Hayen), “Cockeye” Stein (William Forsythe) with whom he ran a speakeasy and committed various crimes, including extortion and murder. Also never far from his thoughts is Deborah Gelly (Elizabeth McGovern), the girl he loved since he was a kid, though by his own hand he destroyed anything he could have had with her.
As Max waits to learn his fate, he reminisces about the crimes and the good times. There were a few women, as well as a couple of rather brutal rapes (which some viewers may find troublesome), gunplay and frivolity. DeNiro is so quiet and understated here, if you’re looking for another GoodFellas type performance, this isn’t it. Even so, DeNiro’s work is powerful, because Once Upon a Time in America is a really a story about his characters inner most emotions, and DeNiro has also been skilled at exposing those for any character he’s played.
Presented in 1080p with the AVC codec, the transfer approximates the film’s original 1.85:1 aspect ratio by filling the entire 16:9 frame. The image exhibits some haziness in wide shots and mild haloing along high contrast edges. Contrast is somewhat inconsistent, struggling more in the darker scenes. Black level and color depth are solid and contrast shows the full range of values with no signs of compression. Fine object detail is pretty good, but the overall sharpness is somewhat disappointing. Softness in close ups seems to be more a result of source-originated focusing errors; otherwise skin and clothing show a respectable amount of detail. Finally, grain structure is visible – as is a light amount of noise in shadow areas – with no indications of overused noise reduction tools.
Dialogue in the 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix is consistently clear. Surround activity is minimal, with only some very light support for the film score and some mild localized effects. LFE is non-existent, but the track has sufficient depth and fullness, along with some very good detail in the upper frequencies.
Buried in a complex menu that requires you to know what the special feature is attached to, there are two terrific parts of added content included in this Blu-ray release. The first is a commentary track from Time critic Richard Schickel. Ported over from the previous two disc DVD version of the film, we insight into the film. Schickel loves that the movie makes little sense in its conclusion, and his dialogue is detailed and intriguing. Also interesting, is a 19 minute segment from a longer Leone documentary. This segment discusses Once Upon a Time in America and sees collaborators and cast members Woods and Tiler along to discuss the filmmaker. Perhaps most intriguing is producer Arnon Milchan, who discusses the hatchet job done by the studio to make the movie more “mainstream”. Also available, is a trailer.
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