Top 250 Challenge: 230

Once Upon A Time In America (1984)
Number 111 on IMDb's Top 250

Epic, episodic, tale of the lives of a small group of New York City Jewish gangsters spanning over 40 years. Told mostly in flashbacks and flash-forwards, the movie centers on small-time hood David 'Noodles' Aaronson (Robert De Niro) and his lifelong partners in crime; Max (James Woods), Cockeye (William Forsythe) and Patsy (James Hayden) and their friends from growing up in the rough Jewish neighborhood of New York's Lower East Side in the 1920s, to the last years of Prohibition in the early 1930s, and then to the late 1960s where an elderly Noodles returns to New York after many years in hiding to look into the past. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: James Woods said Robert De Niro suggested that Woods wear a set of perfect, bright white teeth to demonstrate the aging character's wealth and vanity. The producers balked at the cost, so De Niro paid for them himself. Sergio Leone was contracted to deliver a film that would run for 2 hours and 45 minutes. His final cut was nearly 4 hours long. The American distributors reacted by excising an hour from the running time (though Leone's intended cut was seen in its entirety in Europe). A few days before the premier in 1984, Treat Williams found out the 2 hour version, not the 4 hour version would be shown in theaters. He was heard to have said that no one would understand the movie in the shortened version. Indeed, the film did not do well at theaters and the film was shut out of the Oscars and received zero nominations. When the video and DVD versions were released in the original 4 hour versions, the film ultimately found commercial and critical success.

Not only did they cut the film from four hours in it's original release, they changed the format of the film from a flashback/flashforward in time film to a straight sequential time film. I don't see how they could have done that, There is know way you would have known what was happening. De Niro returns to New York after a 30 year absence and starts remembering his past. He is invited back, but he doesn't know who invited him so some of the movie is about him trying to figure out who. You need to know this up front, not 3\4ths of the way through the movie. There was also a Hey! moment in this movie. I was sitting there watching it and a scene came up where a young Noodles is secretly watching a young girl dance in the backroom, we see a close up of her and see that she knows Noodles is watching her, and I say to myself, "Hey! That looks a lot like Jennifer Connelly, one of my favorite actors, but this movie was made in 1984! Wait, how old would she have been in 84? About 13 (she was born 3 months after me), so that could be Jennifer Connelly and sure enough, it was her first feature film role!" Cool Beans! (I had a Hey! moment in Heat too, "Hey! That is Natalie Portman!" I like her too). I also had a revelation with this movie. De Niro is pretty good in gangster/mobster/crime movies (See The Godfather: Part II, Goodfellas, Heat, Taxi Driver, The Untouchables, Mean Streets {I need to see that one}, etc...) If you are wondering why it took me so long to see this one (by far the highest ranked movie I haven't seen at 111 and the only top 200 film left). I had it at the top of my Netflix list for a long, long time, but it had a long, long wait for it, and when I finally got it, I only got the first DVD (the first 120 minutes of the 210 minute movie), so I had to wait for the second DVD. 230 down and 20 to go, wow, it's pretty amazing now thinking back to March when I decided to do this and I was sitting at 101 and had 149 filmes to watch. Man, I wrote all of this and didn't even mention Sergio Leone's cinematography at all, oh well...

Up Next: Come And See, A boy is unwillingly thrust into the atrocities of war in WWII Belorussia, fighting for a hopelessly...well, you have to come back to see if hilarity ensues.