And in the two rape scenes those elements are queasily mixed reminiscent of the way Leone treated Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West. In their youth, Peggy would trade sex with Noodles and his pals for pastry treats. They share a brief reunion kiss, and as Noodles moves on she lets out a long sigh. Or at least it forces Noodles to make a decision on that count. Movies Are Prayers, Josh's book Get it here. The plan fails, however, and Max and Noodles fight, with Noodles knocking Max out cold before the police arrive.
When he comes to, he learns that his friends have all died in a shootout with the cops. He escapes, numbs his pain in the opium den the audience first saw in the film's opening scene, and flees to Buffalo, where he lives out his life in hiding.
Or he does, until someone from his past finds him in He learns that Max faked his own death with the help of the cops and spent the last 30 years rising in the Teamsters Union under the identity of Christopher Bailey, going so high he became the U.
Secretary of Commerce. But now, Max has made enemies of the wrong people, and so he's contacted Noodles to kill him before the Teamsters can.
Which is where the first of the film's double mysteries comes into play. Noodles refuses the assignment; to him, Max died with the rest of the gang, and this is some other person to whom he owes nothing. He leaves Bailey's house, but Max, or somebody, follows him in the dark.
As Max walks toward him, a garbage truck passes between the two men, and when it drives on, Max is nowhere to be seen. The camera instead follows the truck, showing the back where a spinning blade chops and compacts the refuse. The image of the truck doing its work definitely seems a little bit leading. Someone who's already hired his friend to kill him and been rebuffed might take the next opportunity available to do the job himself.
Perhaps this is meant as a farewell; or it may be a sign that she has reconsidered. We never learn the truth, because Noodles responds by brutally raping her. After an excruciating amount of time has passed, the driver halts the car. Noodles disembarks and the vehicle speeds away with the distraught young woman.
This revelation raises the possibility that the concluding scene is of Noodles entering the den even earlier, on the heels of his rape of Deborah, and that it is her departure that instigates his flight from the real. All the terrible events in his life—his imprisonment, his break with Deborah, and the deaths of his friends and lover—are consequences of choices made by Noodles and it is this truth from which he tries to run.
It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. Finally, both men find redemption only in fantasy, whether such fantasy be reality or a dream. Al Pacino plays Michael in all three Godfather films, as he moves from a being a young decorated veteran in the days immediately following the Second World War to someone who is by the late s a wealthy and immensely powerful head of a global corporation.
An aged Vito is memorably brought to life in the first film by Marlon Brando. In the second film, however, Brando never appears on screen and instead a young Vito is equally memorably played by. De Niro. Despite its elements of fantasy, Once Upon a Time in America formally offers a realist portrayal of the lives of Noodles and his compatriots. And as tragic figures whose destiny is determined by fate, Vito and Michael cannot be judged according to the criteria of good and evil.
In the spirit of classical tragedy, the pair are portrayed as noble men, who, while they may do bad things are not bad in and of themselves. Take the case of Michael. He is drawn in only after an assassination attempt on his father, who has been targeted by other gangsters because of his principled refusal, whatever the lost profits, to support the trafficking in heroin.
Michael realizes that the only way to truly protect his father is to murder those who want to do him harm. He is similarly forced to become the head of the family after his older impulsive and violent brother Sonny James Caan is brutally murdered.
However, again he is forced into violence by the combination of the racism of a corrupt Nevada senator, the desire for vengeance on the part of his business partner, and, worst of all, betrayal by his remaining brother Fredo. Fredo is played by the extraordinarily talented John Cazale.
Cazale appeared in only five films between and his untimely death in , but all five—the first two Godfathers , The Conversation , Dog Day Afternoon , and The Deer Hunter —were nominated for the best picture Oscar, two of them in the same year and three of them winning. It is this reimaging of the criminal as tragic—again, someone who is not really free and hence beyond judgment as good or evil—that Leone thoroughly demolishes in Once Upon a Time in America.
Imagine the response in the U. And here we arrive at the continued timeliness of Once Upon a Time in America. Such a tragic mythos extends beyond the figure of the immigrant gangster and is applied to many aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first century American life.
First, it is no coincidence that Leone sets the action of the final sequence in , for among other reasons, this is the year of the election of Richard Nixon as the President of the United States and the beginning of the long historical wave that has led to the present.
These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment.
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