Cinema: The Long and the Short of It

The Ladd Co. fiddles with an epic while Sergio Leone burns

Manhattan, 1933. A pretty, blond woman walks alone into her darkened apartment. With a thrill of apprehension, Eve (Darlanne Fluegel) walks toward her big bed and slowly pulls down the top sheet. There, outlined in bullet holes, is the silhouette of her gangster lover, Noodles Aaronson. On the table beside her, Noodles' framed photograph is abruptly smashed by a burly hand. "Where is he?" demands the intruder. Eve doesn't know, but it doesn't matter: two bullets from a muted revolver send her reeling back, dead, to fill her lover's silhouette. This is the first scene of Sergio Leone's Once upon a Time in America.

Manhattan, 1921. A lovely, dark-haired girl, just approaching her teens, dances alone to the torpid ecstasy of a phonograph record in the back room of a Lower East Side tavern. Through a crack in the wall, a boy about the same age watches, transfixed. The dance over, Deborah (Jennifer Connelly) turns her back to the boy and slips out of her white chiffon dress, displaying herself in a vision that the young Noodles Aaronson will carry throughout his long, violent life. This is the first scene of the Ladd Co.'s Once upon a Time in America.

Now playing at movie theaters not very near you: the two versions of Director Leone's $28 million gangster epic. If you wish to see the sprawling, lurid, hallucinatory film cut to Leone's specifications at 3 hr. 47 min., you need only make a pilgrimage to Paris (where the film opened to good business two weeks ago) or, later this month, to a single theater in Chicago, where the Leone version will have its American premiere. If you want to see the Ladd Co.'s cut—brisk, less ambitious and audacious, dramatically more coherent at 2 hr. 24 min.—you can see it on 894 screens in North America. Both versions have their pleasures and problems; both look like the battered survivors of the movie industry's protracted war between directors and distributors.

At the heart of both films is a cautionary fable that spans nearly five decades of American antisocial history: from 1921, when a teen-age gang of Jewish punks assembles in their Manhattan ghetto, to 1933, when the gang's leaders, Noodles (Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods), tumble into betrayal, to 1968, when the old men meet to act out their perverse codes of honor. Leone filmed the story in the luscious, mythic style that he developed in his popular "spaghetti westerns" with Clint Eastwood and perfected in Once upon a Time in the West (1969), an outsider's glorious, besotted tribute to classical Hollywood cinema. This time, though, the characters are not grand, strutting archetypes. Noodles and Max, their henchmen and adversaries, are spindly figures lost in venality; and Leone's film, true to its subject, is cold, brooding and brutal.