The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sergio Leone · a film · 1984 · 229 minutes · in English · after The Hoods by Harry Grey
Mode
Gangster epic turned into a work of memory and guilt; chronicle, elegy and possible dream in one
Mythos
The return after long absence that finds one’s place taken; the pact sworn in childhood and broken by one of the sworn; the underworld entered by a drug
Phase
Forty-five years of American life in three periods, the early 1920s, 1932 to 1933 and 1968, told from an opium den in 1933 and returning to it
Presentation
Feature film in colour, in English, 229 minutes in the version Leone completed; photographed by Tonino Delli Colli, edited by Nino Baragli, with music by Ennio Morricone
Register
From a boy eating a charlotte russe on a stair to a rape in a car; long held looks, slow tracking, a score used sparingly
Scale
One man’s mind, a neighbourhood, a gang and the passage from the street to the state
Governing Proposition
A gangster comes back to New York after thirty-five years and learns that the guilt he has lived in, for the deaths of his friends, was written for him by the friend he mourned. The wager of the film is that memory can be the only place a man lives, that only an order of telling governed by memory can show it, and that a film which ends in 1933 with a young man smiling may have dreamed the old man as well as remembered the boy.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens in 1933 with the worst already done. The gang is dead, and the film is not yet ready to say how. A telephone rings and goes on ringing across a long run of cuts, carried over images in different places and at different times, so that one sound holds together what the picture keeps apart. The ringing is the first figure of the film’s method: a thing heard in one time and laid over another.
Noodles, played by Robert De Niro, is in an opium den. Its front is a Chinese shadow theatre. The film passes through the den into 1968, and it will come back to the den at its close. What lies between is told out of order, in three periods: the Lower East Side of the early 1920s, when Noodles and his friends are boys; 1932 and 1933, the gang at the end of Prohibition; and 1968, when Noodles, old, comes back to New York after thirty-five years away.
The telephone belongs to the guilt. Noodles made a call to the police, and he has carried the deaths that followed it for thirty-five years. The film lets that guilt stand for most of its length as the fixed fact of his life, the thing from which the past is mourned. It will turn out to have been arranged. The version judged here is the one Leone completed, 229 minutes, shown out of competition at Cannes in May 1984 and released in Europe that year; the shorter American release is evidence in the case, not the work.
Movement II
From 1968 the film reaches the 1920s by way of a peephole in Fat Moe’s storeroom. As a boy Noodles watched through a hole in the privy wall while Deborah, played as a girl by Jennifer Connelly, danced alone among the sacks. As an old man he looks through the same hole. The film’s whole relation to the past is in that look: the past seen through a gap, by a man who did not enter it then and cannot now.
The childhood is long, and it has to be. It holds the boys’ pact and the stoops, rooftops and families of the Jewish Lower East Side. It holds Noodles’s first love. And it holds their comedy. Patsy, sent to buy his way with Peggy, sits on the stair with a charlotte russe and, waiting, eats it himself, bite by bite, until there is nothing left to pay with.
Delli Colli’s light gives these streets a weight of place that the rest of the film leans on, and Morricone’s score, with Deborah’s theme and the pan flute, lifts the scenes without sweetening them. Among the boys is Max, played by James Woods, the one who wants more, and the friendship between him and Noodles is the film’s axis. The film is tender toward the boys before the street takes them, and it does not pretend the street is far away.
Movement III
The boys walk down the street toward the camera with the Manhattan Bridge closing the view behind them. It is the image of the childhood most often remembered, and in the film it comes just before the end of it. In the street beneath the bridge Dominic, one of the boys, is shot. He falls into Noodles’s arms and says “I slipped.” The first killing of the film is of a child, and it ends the childhood.
The film has by now set the pattern of its looking. The boy watches through a hole; the man watches through the same hole; the one who looks is never quite inside what he sees. The two Deborahs, the girl in the storeroom and the woman she grows into, will be seen the same way.
The passage between periods is made at a station. A young man leaves and an old man arrives, and the cut joins them across thirty-five years in one place. Baragli’s editing works this way throughout, on a sound, a look or an object, an old face matched to a young one. The transitions are not ornaments of the story. They are how the film says that Noodles lives in memory, and that memory may have composed his future as well as his past.
Movement IV
In 1932 and 1933 the gang is grown and doing well. The film follows its rise and its comedy: a jewel robbery in Detroit, a baby swap in a maternity ward played as a prank, and a long involvement in a labour dispute, with Treat Williams as the union leader and the industrialists on the other side. These passages carry the gang’s business, and the union plot prepares Max’s later politics. Some of them could be shortened without the film ceasing to know what it knows.
The film shows two rapes, and it does not excuse Noodles. Carol, played by Tuesday Weld, is assaulted, and later returns as a willing companion and as a joke in a comic line-up, and here the film plays in a register its own account of the gang does not support. The second is of Deborah, played as a woman by Elizabeth McGovern, in a car. It ends his hope of her, and it is the act that makes him what Max will later be able to buy.
Then comes the call. Noodles telephones the police, and the call seems to cause the gang’s deaths; it is the telephone of the opening. Noodles is gone from New York for thirty-five years. The middle period is where the film is least sure of its law, as comedy and brutality sit side by side without the mind that holds them saying what it thinks; but the frame holds them, since this too is Noodles remembering.
Movement V
In 1968 the old man finds that his place has been taken. Max did not die. He lives as Secretary Bailey, a public man with a commission investigating him, and he has Noodles’s money, his woman and, for a son, his name. Deborah is an actress, and she plays Cleopatra. The gangster’s career has run without a break into legitimacy, and the street boy who wanted more is a cabinet secretary. The guilt Noodles carried for thirty-five years was written for him by the friend he mourned.
Noodles visits Bailey at his house. He will not kill him. He calls him by his public name and tells him a story about a friend, refusing to know him. Then Noodles leaves, and outside, in the drive, there is a garbage truck. The film does not say what happens to Max there. Its two great facts, the betrayal and the refusal, are given; what follows is withheld.
The last shot is in 1933, in the opium den. The young Noodles, before the years that followed, turns his face to the camera and smiles. Placed after the revelation of 1968, the smile makes it possible that the old man and his discovery were dreamed by the young one, and the film supports more than one meaning for it: relief, oblivion, triumph, or a mind that has found a story it can live with. The American release of 1984 cut the film to 139 minutes and put it in chronological order, and it was received as a confused gangster picture. What it lost was this order, in which the film knows that memory is where Noodles lives.
Act III · The Twelve
The length is mostly compelled. The subject is the weight of thirty-five lost years on one man’s memory, so the childhood has to be long enough for the boys’ pact, Dominic’s death and Deborah dancing in the storeroom to bear the whole later life, and the 1968 scenes have to be slow, because Noodles is now a man with nothing to do but look. The two rapes cannot be removed: the film’s account of Noodles stands on them. What holds the axis lowest is the 1932 to 1933 material that is assembled rather than required: the union plot, the baby swap in the maternity ward, parts of the Detroit jewel robbery. Each could be shortened without loss of knowledge.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The film brings into the open the life of a man who has made his memory the only place he lives, and who learns at the end that its central fact, his guilt for his friends’ deaths, was a fiction written by the friend he mourned. That can be stated and holds: remorse as a form of self-regard, nostalgia as a refusal of what one did. Beside it stands an American passage from the street to the state, Max’s career shown as continuous with legitimacy, not opposed to it. The rapes disclose what Noodles is beneath the longing. But the handling of Carol, who returns as a willing companion and a joke in a line-up, leaves part of that disclosure unexamined.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of more than one kind, and it is reached in all three periods. Morricone’s score, with Deborah’s theme and the pan flute, lifts scene after scene without sweetening it. Deborah as a girl dances alone among the sacks while Noodles watches through a hole in the privy wall. Patsy sits on the stair with the charlotte russe he bought to pay Peggy and eats it himself, bite by bite, a comic sublime of appetite and childhood. Dominic falls in the street beneath the bridge. The boys walk toward the camera with the Manhattan Bridge closing the view. A telephone rings across the opening; an old man stands in an empty station; a young man smiles.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The archetype is built, not evoked. The structure is a return after long absence to find one’s place taken: an Odyssey turned inside out, in which the usurper is not a suitor but the returning man’s dearest friend, risen from the dead, holding his money, his woman and his name for a son. Under it lie the betrayer brother, the pact sworn in childhood and broken by one of the sworn, and lost time that can be entered only by a drug or by memory, the opium den as underworld. The Jewish Lower East Side stays particular and carries the American myth of the street boy who climbs. Some myth is atmosphere: the shadow theatre, the 1968 Cleopatra.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Leone left the Western, the form he had remade and where his name was certain, for the gangster film, a genre whose recent summit, The Godfather and its sequel, stood in the way. He swerved from that inheritance on two fronts: against the dynastic saga he set one man’s consciousness, and against linear chronicle a structure of memory, possibly dream, ordered by association, a peephole, a station, a song. The stake was real and was paid. The American distributor judged the film unreleasable at its length, cut it and reordered it, and it failed; Leone directed no other film before his death in 1989. Running nearly four hours, its ending may undo the reality of its last third.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The question this axis asks was answered in public. In 1984 the American release put much of the same footage into chronological order in 139 minutes, and was received as a confused gangster picture, because what the film knows lives in the order of its parts. Told from the opium den outward, the childhood is not backstory but the place Noodles goes back to; 1968 is not an epilogue but the present from which the whole is remembered; and the final smile, set in 1933 after the revelation of 1968, makes it possible that the old man was dreamed by the young one. The transitions, the peephole and the station, are instruments of that knowledge.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Four decades of return have not closed the film’s central questions. Is 1968 dreamed in the opium den? What happens to Max at the garbage truck? What is the smile: relief, oblivion, triumph, a mind that has found a story it can live with? Each answer changes the scenes before it, and the film supports more than one without collapsing. The formal yield holds as well: the patterning of looks through holes and windows, the doubling of the two rapes and of the two Deborahs, girl and woman, the way the score attaches to a period and leaves it. The evidence is shown, not promised, since the film’s standing was rebuilt across the 1990s and 2000s on exactly this return.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Intrinsic force is high. The film turned the gangster film from social chronicle into a work of memory and guilt in the manner of the modern novel, with a structure the genre had not tried. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the mutilated American release meant the film entered its field late and slant; its mark on the later memory-framed, long and mournful gangster film is visible but diffuse, hard to separate from the Godfather films, and the cinema of the 1980s around it was not redirected. Its pressure has come chiefly through the complete version’s reputation, through Morricone’s score, and through the case it made against studio recutting. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Forty-two years have elapsed. The film Leone completed survives whole: the 229-minute version has been shown and issued, and the restoration of 2012 is repair and addition, not loss. But for years, in its largest market, the work was replaced by an altered version that unmade its form, and that charge falls on the form first: for a decade or more many viewers knew a different film under the title. Presence since has been steady but not of the widest kind; the film is studied and revived rather than continuously before the public. The surface is not fixed to its moment, since its settings were already period in 1984. The bar is met exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making is load-bearing. Delli Colli’s photography holds three periods in three palettes without announcing them, and the rebuilt streets of the Lower East Side and the framing of the bridge give the childhood a weight of place the later sequences lean on. Baragli’s cutting carries the film’s thought: transitions on a sound, a look or an object, the telephone carried across scenes, an old face matched to a young one. Morricone’s score is used sparingly and structurally. Leone’s patience with duration, the long looks and slow tracking, is technique, not indulgence, in most scenes. The costs: uneven ageing make-up in 1968, broad playing in some 1933 scenes, middle passages that run on their own momentum.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the charlotte russe on the stair and the rape in the car. They mostly obey one law, memory’s, in which childhood comedy and adult brutality are held by the same mind and lit by the same longing; the film never steps outside Noodles’s remembering to judge it. The opium frame governs the whole and makes the tonal range cohere. The range is very wide, from childhood and love to crime, politics, old age and possible dream, and the coherence that holds is credited for it. The strain is in the middle period: the maternity-ward prank and the line-up with Carol are played in a register the film’s own disclosure of the gang does not support.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders are held through Noodles, not listed: consciousness, since the whole is a mind’s; childhood and first love; friendship and its betrayal; the immigrant neighbourhood with its religion and families; crime as labour and business; the union and the industrialists; the state, in Max’s rise to a cabinet secretary and the investigation that ends him; and history across forty-five years of American life, from Prohibition to 1968. What keeps the figure from rising is thinness at two points. The family is slight: Noodles’s own parents barely appear, and women are seen almost wholly through male want. The sacred is present chiefly as its absence and as the cemetery.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Made at 8.9, then The Sublime at 8.8. A form told from an opium den outward, whose knowledge lives in the order of its parts, as a reordered release proved by losing it; a making in which photography, cutting and score carry the film’s thought across three periods; and elevation reached often and in every period, from a girl dancing among sacks to a young man’s smile.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0: the length is mostly compelled by the weight of thirty-five lost years, but the union plot, the maternity-ward prank and parts of the jewel robbery are assembled rather than required. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, a high force with a reach delayed and narrowed by the mutilated American release, and The Encompassed at 8.4, where the family is thin and women are seen almost wholly through male want.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Imperishable meet it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.0, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.5 from a sum of 102.5, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Once Upon a Time in America in the version Sergio Leone completed, 229 minutes, shown out of competition at Cannes in May 1984 and released in Europe that year, from the opium den to the opium den: directed by Leone from a screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini and Leone, after Harry Grey’s memoir-novel The Hoods (1952); produced by Arnon Milchan; photographed by Tonino Delli Colli; edited by Nino Baragli; with music by Ennio Morricone; with Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Jennifer Connelly, Tuesday Weld, Treat Williams, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Danny Aiello, William Forsythe and Larry Rapp. It was Leone’s last film. The 139-minute version the Ladd Company released in the United States in June 1984, reordered into chronological sequence and shorn of most of the 1968 frame, is not the object; it enters as evidence for the form and as a charge on survival. The extended restoration shown at Cannes in 2012 is not the object, and no scene is judged that may belong to it alone. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain. Figures and details that could not be verified are not given, among them the running time of the restoration of 2012, the shot and scene counts, the share of the running time held by each period, the number of rings of the telephone and the music heard at Grand Central in 1968.