As with all of Leone's films, America displays a fastidious concern with detail in its sets, costumes, and props. Leone's concern, however, is not with strict historical realism, but rather with creating a sort of heightened reality. Though his movie is a gangster story that takes place in small-scale or squalid places like opium dens, tenement buildings, and crowded delicatessens, production designer Carlo Simi gives everything a touch of opulence, a larger than life quality. And I mean "larger than life" quite literally- as has often been said about Leone's work, America's sets, while often evocative and convincing in their individual details, as a whole are grandiosely overscaled, so that the interior of a kosher delicatessen on the Lower East Side appears as large as a train station, and an opium den supposedly hidden in the back room of a Chinese puppet theater (with, according to Leone biographer Christopher Frayling, Indonesian puppets performing an Indian epic) has people on cots stretching up the ceiling. The epic quality of Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West lay more in their style and physical scale than in the movies' actual stories, which are rather slight. Leone placed his characters against the background of vast historical movements and events, but he didn't focus on the powerful people causing or at least marshaling these events. On the contrary, much of the larger than life quality of his heroes and villains came from how they seemed to exist outside of society and normal human concerns, like, as writer Danny Peary pointed out, a more-than-human race of warriors doomed by the advent of civilization. Gangsters, of course, don't stand outside of society so much as they infiltrate it and corrupt it, and Leone adopts to this difference with a comparatively restrained style, particularly for his actors. Still, little remnants of his spaghetti westerns remain in his interpretation of mobsters. One important difference from The Godfather is that Leone's gangsters are not bosses- they do their own dirty work, whether it be smuggling, union racketeering, or murder. They're still outlaws more than figures of authority, and the main source of contention between Noodles and Max is the latter's decision to hire the gang out to "the Syndicate," as represented by Joe Pesci's mob powerbroker. In interviews on the film Leone spoke of the Prohibition era as the second great era of frontier lawlessness in America, which makes no sense from a historical point of view but works beautifully from a pop culture perspective, which of course is the point. Leone puts an almost touching faith here in the viability of genre as a means through which to filter his epic vision of twentieth century America. The childhood scenes are like a wicked, R-rated version of Our Gang, with the pint-sized crooks exhibiting a strange innocence, displayed most memorably in the famous cream pie scene. But already this innocence has begun to curdle into amorality, into an unthinking amorality and disregard for others. Leone sympathetically and amusedly dwells on their battles with the buffoonish, corrupt neighborhood cop, known as "Fart-face." These scenes have a particularly Our Gang-like quality to them, depicting clever and precocious outwitting stupid and cruel adults. The first of the gang's exploits that we see, however, consists of them burning down them the news-stand of a man who has refused to pay protection money to the local boss. The kids watch excitedly through a grille as flames devour a man's livelihood before his eyes as if they were watching a show put on for their own amusement. All throughout the film, we see people watching other people at a remove, particularly men watching women. Noodle is the ultimate spectator, often silent, constantly watching others, desiring women he can't have, observing events he can't control, seemingly vanishing for extended periods of time (first for eight years, then for thirty-five,) to reappear in an America that has gone on without him, among people who have gone on without him. At least 2/3 of the film, and possibly the whole film, occur in his head, in flashbacks to his past, so Noodles can watch his own life unfolding like strips of film in a projector. Early on, we see patrons watching an Indonesian shadow-play in the theater that fronts for the opium den where Noodles hides from the world. The silent audience outside and the stoned customers within taken together are like a Janus-faced portrait of a movie watcher, subsuming their daily lives in the play of shadow and light on a screen in a state close to dreaming, or drug-induced hallucination, or even death.
Review of Once Upon a Time in America
