Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2657 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-08-07
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Formats: Box set, PAL, Special Edition
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 219 minutes

Synopsis
Two boyhood friends grow up to become the kingpins of a prohibition-era criminal empire until their own greed and ambition cause their downfall. Based on Larry Grey's novel, "The Hoods."

Customer Reviews

Classic Cinema
This is Sergio Leone's last and perhaps best film. Epic in length, scope and cinematography "Once upon a time in America" follows a group of kids and their rise to fully fledged gangsters.

Running at almost 4 hours and including an interval the story covers childhood, their 20's/30's and Noodles (De Niro) 70's.

The story is plays with time, cutting between 3 periods in cleverely crafted arcs. When originally released in the US the distributor re-arranged the whole film chronologically, destroying the suspense of the story. Here it is shown in it's proper, full length edit.

This really is cinema at it's best. Yes it's long and may take a couple of sittings, but once finished you know you've seen a film and a great one at that.

[Spoiler]

The final shot is a perfect ending to the film and Leones career. Noodles smiling in the opium den indicating that some, if not all of what you'd seen was infact a 'pipe dream' or hallucination. So perhaps the whole thing was fake, a story, but in the end you're there to watch a story being told, which is what Sergio did best.

Tell The Truth
Never have the twin themes of childhood innocence and trade unionism been so lengthily or so incoherently explored...

Approach this pompous "masterpiece" with extreme caution.

Gangster-film fans be warned - well over an hour of the film is devoted to the characters' childhood, with the effect that, once the film draws to its end, one has no proper sense of any of the characters. This is particularly true of De Niro's character, who commits two rapes during the course of the film, one of them after a protracted and boring candlelit-dinner-for-two scene (it makes no sense). There is a single action scene, which requires a disc-change in the middle, and the plot about trade unions is as boring as one might expect, and inadequately explained.

The children scenes, which are so frustrating when first viewed, actually emerge as the best bits of the film.

If it's "great film-making" you're after, then buy the box-set, but if you want entertainment, look elsewhere. Save this one for the film buffs, who'll also tell you Apocalypse Now is the greatest film ever made (it isn't).

great movie sahme about the dvd
this is one of the best movies made by any director, but it is a shame that the dvd release was let down by badly placing the break in the movie to change from disk one to disk two.
The movie had a natural intermission but did WB use that logical place, no, they put it in the middle of one of the main action secquences that totaly destroyed the flow of the second half of the movie
So 5 stars for the movie and 2 stars for the DVD release