Once Upon a Time in America

Once upon a time there was an Italian named Sergio Leone who was so fascinated by the mythology of the United States that he directed two meditations on that mythology.

The first, Once Upon a Time in the West, explored the birth of industry and the destruction of the way of life of the old West.

The second, Once Upon a Time in America, looked at early twentieth century poor Jewish immigrants and what amounted to the betrayal of the promise of America, the American dream.

In Leone's words, it's about "time, memory, and the cinema." 

Both are among the greatest films I've ever seen.

Once Upon a Time in America had a tortured history.  Leone originally envisioned splitting the movie into two three-hour parts, but the studio insisted it be a single film.

By the time it debuted at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, it was 3 hours and 49 minutes.  That's the version that ran in Europe.

Against Leone's wishes, the movie was cut to 2 hours 19 minutes for its US run, and by all accounts that version is an incoherent mess.

Leone died of a heart attack in 1989, and many of those closest to him attribute heartbreak over the mutilation of his masterpiece as the cause.  Once Upon a Time in America indeed proved be his last film.

The movie begins and ends with renditions of "God Bless America."  In between, there's a complex flashback narrative covering three time periods: 1921, 1933, and 1968. 

(Not so coincidentally, Once Upon a Time in the West was released in 1968.)

The movie begins in 1933.  A woman is murdered by thugs in the opening scene, and the next scene sees low-rent Jewish gangster Noodles (Robert De Niro) taking comfort in an opium den.

There's a good argument that everything that happens after Noodles smokes opium is a dream -- Noodles dreaming the American dream.  Leone himself endorsed this view.

A mist is a constant through all eras, which adds to the dreamlike quality of the film.  It's all a foggy memory.

The movie plays on memory triggers.  A phone rings twenty-two straight times, leading Noodles to ponder the night he phoned the police to rat on his friends.

One thing to note is that even if the 1968 part of the movie is literal and not Noodles's fantasy, the 1933 and 1921 portions of the movie are still merely memories.

Memory is a tricky thing, and Noodles might not recall the events from earlier eras exactly as they occurred.

Noodles remembers the last night of prohibition, the night he ratted.

Noodles's best friend Max (James Woods) has conceived a plan to rob the New York Federal Reserve, and in order to prevent Max from following through with the crazy scheme, Noodles informs the police about a liquor run he and his buddies are planning.

Noodles believes two years on a prohibition charge is better than decades for armed robbery.  Things go very wrong and all his friends are killed.

As it turns out, Max orchestrated the disaster and faked his own death, but Noodles blames himself.

Everything that happens in the movie is a product of the guilt Noodles feels over responsibility for the deaths of his friends.

Come 1968, thirty-five years later, Noodles is summoned by the mysterious Secretary of Commerce for the United States.

It turns out that the secretary is Max, who faked his own death and stole $1,000,000 from a communal pot of money.

If this is an opium dream, it's a way for Noodles to clear his conscience.  Max is the one to blame.

Max has gotten himself in trouble with bad people, and asks Noodles to kill him.  Noodles refuses the job and finds redemption, at least in his fantasy version of reality.

For me the movie is at its best when it's 1921 and we see the future gangsters as kids.

These are poor kids living in the ghetto.  Crime is a way out of poverty.

Leone's attention to period detail is mind-boggling, and every shot seems to be a painting.  It's breathtaking.

As a kid, Noodles has a crush on a girl named Deborah, played by a young and beautiful Jennifer Connelly. 

Deborah likes to dance, and to let Noodles spy on her as she does it.  In 1968, she has become a successful actress.

What Noodles's friends have done with their lives come 1968 is strongly informed by what we see of them as children, again lending credence to the fantasy interpretation.

They have become what Noodles expected them to become, they are a product of his psyche.

Max fakes his own death, which is something he does in 1921 as well, tricking Noodles into believing for a moment that Max has drowned.

Max and Noodles's relationship is complicated and there's more than a hint of homoeroticism to it.

Max gets visibly annoyed when Noodles wants to spend time with women, and sleeps with every female that Noodles beds (and has trouble getting it up for the first girl in 1921). 

It seems like the person Max really wants to screw is Noodles, though, again, these are Noodles's memories, and perhaps he's projecting his own feelings on to Max.

Time is a recurring theme.  Watches and clocks abound. 

Noodles even has a key to a clock that he's held for thirty-five years.  He returns it to its owner in 1968, who re-starts the clock.  Time has literally frozen in the interim.

The time and memory motifs are accentuated by Ennio Morricone's elegiac and nostalgic soundtrack, with "Deborah's Theme" providing the most direct link to the earlier Once Upon a Time in the West.

I've only seen the 3 hour 49 minute version of Once Upon a Time in America.  Martin Scorsese is working on securing the rights to footage that would allow restoration of Leone's 4 hour 29 minute cut.

Scorsese himself paid homage to Leone in the Boardwalk Empire pilot, which includes a funeral procession for a bottle of alcohol on the eve of prohibition.  In Once Upon a Time in America, it's a funeral procession for prohibition, the night before its demise.

Scorsese's Dark Masterpiece

Sylvester Stallone and Rocky might have taken the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1976, but it's Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver that's remembered not only as the best movie of that year, but of the entire decade.   Taxi Driver is also Scorsese's towering achievement, his greatest film, his dark, expressionist masterpiece.

Scorsese's follow-up to Mean Streets is the portrait of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a lonely man driven by his failures to make human connections (in his words, to become a person like other persons) and sexual frustrations to a violent, orgastic rampage that ironically leaves him a hero to the public.

De Niro as Travis is so disturbing, so real, he hardly seems to be acting at all, and this is the performance (after Mean Streets and Godfather II) that put De Niro on the map as one of his generation's greatest actors.  De Niro so embodies Travis that if you were to see him on the street after watching the movie, you might run the other way.  He's that good, that intense.

Travis is a New York City cabdriver who, due to insomnia, has begun working both day and night.  In the opening shot, Travis's checker cab (among other things, Taxi Driver provides a glimpse of a pre-Giuliani Manhattan) emerges from a cloud of steam, and we're immediately aware that this is the taxi from hell.

Bernard Herrmann's jazzy soundtrack (which he completed the night he died) adds to the sense of isolation and pessimism that surround the film.

The opening sequence also sees the first of several close ups of Travis's eyes in the rearview mirror, and at many points in the movie we are seeing things not as they necessarily are, but through Travis's subjective point-of-view.

Travis claims to have been a Marine, but aside from what could be symptoms of post-traumatic stress, there's no corroborating evidence of his service; he certainly has no interest in firearms until the thought is implanted in his head as he's already begun breaking down mentally.

We see Travis walking the city streets, alone.  He seems to have no friends.

While driving a cab, Travis is willing to travel anywhere and pick up anyone, including "spooks." 

That's as explicit as Travis's racism gets, although his body language during other scenes implies that Travis does not like black people.

There's almost a sense of Travis as God's (or Satan's) avenging angel, and Travis foresees a "real rain" -- something of Biblical proportions -- coming to wash the "scum" off the streets.  By the end of the movie Travis will be seen by himself and others as that metaphorical rain.

Travis spends his off hours going to porn movies.  He tries to flirt with the concession stand attendant, who blows him off strongly, wanting nothing to do with this porn theater patron.

Travis watches the movie, but achieves no sexual release.  This is an important detail as Scorsese has discussed what he calls "Deadly Sperm Build-up" ("DSB") in relation to Taxi Driver. 

The DSB theory assumes that a male unable to find sexual release will explode violently.  The massacre at the end is therefore Travis's orgasm (there's what amounts to a pre-ejaculation earlier in the movie, when Travis shoots and kills a would be robber).

Travis meets with other cabbies on break getting coffee at a diner, Travis sitting at a bit of a distance from the others.  One of the cabbies suggests to Travis that he arm himself with a gun.  While the cabbie makes the suggestion, we see Travis's drink bubbling, as he begins to lose his mind. 

Travis has been watching (not in a healthy way) a woman named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) who works on the Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris) presidential campaign

We never learn Betsy's last name, which keeps an air of unreality about her, and we usually see her through Travis's idealized point-of-view.  Shepherd offers a sly performance, with subtle hints that Betsy is a snob.  For Travis, she's the Madonna portion of the Madonna-whore complex.

Travis works up the courage to walk into Palantine campaign headquarters and ask Betsy out.  Travis tells Betsy she's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, and although there's a sweetness in how Travis goes about this, there's also something obviously off about him.

Betsy is flattered, and either intrigued by Travis or slumming, she agrees to go out with him.

Travis jokes that he's there to protect Betsy.  Betsy laughs.  The joke won't seem so lighthearted come the end of the movie, when Travis "saves" Iris (Jodie Foster) a 12-year-old child prostitute.

Travis and Betsy meet for coffee, and Travis makes odd conversation, expressing hostility towards a male colleague of Betsy's from the Palantine campaign (Albert Brooks).  Betsy agrees to go to a movie with Travis on his day off.

Travis picks up Palantine for a cab ride, and something is again obviously off about Travis, which Palantine picks up on. 

Iris then briefly enters the cab, we get a close up of Travis's eyes, and her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), pulls her out of the taxi.  Palantine and Sport are now linked in Travis's mind.

Travis takes Betsy to a porno, and when she walks out of the theater, into a cab, and out of Travis's life, he doesn't understand what he did wrong. 

Travis has no social intelligence, and as ridiculous as it is to take a date to a dirty movie, this was the era when Deep Throat was a mainstream success.  When Travis tells Betsy he sees couples at these movies, it's probably the truth.

Travis uses a payphone to call Betsy to apologize, but she's through with him.  As Betsy rejects Travis, the camera turns from him to a long hallway, much like a shot we'll see at the end during Travis's massacre.  Viewers watching this scene can't help but feel sympathy for Travis.

With Travis's failure to make a lasting connection with Betsy, he becomes completely unhinged. 

Travis picks up a passenger (played by Scorsese) who has been spying on his cheating wife, and the passenger speaks of what horrors a .44 magnum can do to "a woman's pussy."  Sex and violence are linked again.

Travis turns his sights on Iris, the literal and also figurative whore of the Madonna-whore equation.  Travis has idealized Iris as well (we don't learn her last name until post-massacre), and wishes to rescue her from prostitution.  (This part of the plot is borrowed from John Ford's The Searchers.)

Travis buys several guns from a black market seller, with the camera eyeing the phallic guns as if they were penises.

Travis is seen getting into tremendous physical shape and taking target practice.

He goes to a porn movie and pantomimes firing a gun, again stressing the nexus between sex and violence.

 
In one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, Travis eyes himself in the mirror and delivers the "You talkin' to me" monologue.

De Niro improvised here, probably borrowing "You talkin' to me?" from the movie Shane, which contains similar dialogue.

Travis watches television while holding his gun fetishistically.  He pushes the tv stand with his foot back-and-forth as if performing sexually, until the tv falls over and breaks in a metaphorical climax.

Travis buys time with Iris, who Sport explains is available for any sexual act Travis might desire.  Travis does not want time with Iris for sex, but rather wishes to talk her into leaving Sport.

With Iris's blonde hair she looks like a younger version of Betsy, and Travis wants to remake Iris from whore to Madonna.  Iris, however, wants to stay.

Travis shaves his head into a mohawk and heads to a rally to assassinate Palantine, but is thwarted by security. 

Unable to get close enough to kill Palantine, Travis instead sets off to kill Sport and "rescue" Iris.  Travis kills Sport and several others in a bloodbath, while suffering serious wounds himself.

Travis then tries to kill himself but the chamber is empty.  Leaning against the wall, Travis pantomimes shooting himself in the head.

What follows is something some viewers interpret as Travis's fantasy, but I believe the better interpretation is literal.

Iris is returned to her parents, who write a letter of gratitude to Travis, who has become a public hero for rescuing the 12-year-old hooker.

Travis, who had been in a coma, recovers and returns to cab driving.  He picks up Betsy as a passenger.  Betsy's aware of Travis's "heroism" and seems to flirt with him, but Travis does not respond. 

Betsy exits the cab and we get a final close-up of Travis's eyes.

Those eyes inform us that maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but one day Travis will go on another killing spree, because for this lonely, disturbed man, it's the only release he knows.

Scorsese's Underrated Gem

I recently read Roger Ebert's book on Martin Scorsese's films (Scorsese by Ebert), which led me on a quest to review Scorsese's filmography, including ones I've never seen (New York, New York, Kundun) and those I turned off before completion on a first viewing (Bringing Out the Dead).

Today I watched the movie I consider Scorsese's most underrated, The King of Comedy.

The biggest obstacle the movie has to overcome is expectations: people expect a comedy, when King is more in the Taxi Driver vein, a very disturbing portrait of insanity. Robert De Niro, in a performance that rivals any of his others, plays Rupert Pupkin, the self-declared "King of Comedy," who kidnaps Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), a Johnny Carson type of character, and extorts ten minutes of air time on Langford's late night program.

One of the movie's surprises is that when we do finally get to hear Pupkin's comedy, it's not bad -- he has some talent. The not-so-buried message is that you can be talented and slip through the cracks, that it's not necessarily the best that rise to the top. This is emphasized even more by the ending of the movie, which if read literally and not as another Pupkin fantasy, sees Rupert become a bona fide star not because he's funny, but because he's the nut who took Langford hostage.

Scorsese has a lot to say about the nature of celebrity, and those desiring fame might think twice about it after watching this movie (or even after watching just the scene where Jerry tries to walk a few blocks without being accosted by fans, one of whom wishes cancer on him when he refuses a ridiculous request).

With the exception of Taxi Driver, it ranks alongside Scorsese's other masterpieces (Taxi Driver to me is a top ten all time movie and stands alone).

In addition to De Niro's stunning performance, there's Sandra Bernhard's as another delusional fan, and she equals De Niro's intensity if not his brilliance.

King is sadly overlooked in discussions of Scorsese's great films and that's something that I'm sure one day will be corrected, when it's seen for what it is rather than what it sounds like it will be.

Dark comedy as Rupert prepares his audition tape.