MUBI brings you a great new film every day.  Start your 7-day free trial today!
Watch a new film every day for $4.99.
Try MUBI for FREE.
 

Synopsis

Ten years in planning, Sergio Leone’s epic Once upon a Time in America portrays 50 years of riveting underworld history and offers rich roles to a remarkable cast. Robert De Niro and James Woods play lifelong Lower East Side pals whose wary partnership unravels in death and mystery. Strong support comes from Tuesday Weld, Joe Pesci, Jennifer Connelly, Elizabeth McGovern and the young actors playing the central characters as ghetto kids. To see this film (offered for the first time in the full version 1984 Cannes Film Festival audiences cheered) is “to be swept away by the assurance and vitality of a great director making his final statement in a medium he adored” (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times). –Warner Bros.

Director

Original

Sergio Leone

Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema – he was the son of Roberto Roberti (aka Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy’s cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and American directors working in Italy (usually making Biblical and Roman epics, much in vogue at the time). Towards the end of the 1950s he started writing screenplays, and began directing after taking over Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (1959) in mid-shoot after its original director fell ill. His first solo feature, Il colosso di Rodi (1961), was a routine Roman epic, but his second feature, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), caused a revolution. Although it wasn’t the first spaghetti Western, it was far and away the most successful, and shot former TV cowboy Clint Eastwood to stardom (Leone wanted Henry Fonda or Charles Bronson but couldn’t afford them). The… read more

Wall

Displaying 4 of 67 wall posts.
Picture of Graveyard Poet

Graveyard Poet

4Jun13

Once Upon a Time in America is an underrated classic which is superior, in my humble opinion, to the overrated Godfather. Leone's swan song is the definitive gangster film.

Picture of Barbara Giambartolomei
Picture of Bibi Lamy

Bibi Lamy

27May13

dur mais magnifique

Bibi Lamy likes this

Picture of Insert cool name here

Insert cool name here

20May13

The definitive gangster film. Yet, this film is not about the gangsters or prohibition, its about Noodles and how the film studies his character and his soul. In my top 5 favourite films.

Related Films

Fans

Displaying 5 of 3835 fans.

Articles

Our roundup of essays and articles on this film.
W184

Cannes Classics 2012 Lineup

By David Hudson on April 26, 2012

Leone, Polanski, Varda, Spielberg, Hitchcock, Kinoshita, Rossellini and more.

read article
W184

Daily Briefing. Cannes, Hitchcock, Lynch

By David Hudson on April 18, 2012

A roundup of Cannes news on the day before the lineup’s announced.

read article

Lists

Displaying 5 of 459 lists.

Reviews

Displaying 4 of 5

THE Film

By joey Noodles on January 4, 2013

For me, at least, Once Upon a Time in America is THE ultimate gangster film, and the ultimate film, it is the finest film of all time. Sergio Leone gives us one of the most complex plots to think over…  read review

A Masterpiece

By Jaspar Lamar Crabb on September 7, 2012

The 229 minute version of Sergio Leone’s epic is a masterpiece…so rich, so much character development (it’s appalling to even remotely like Noodles as he’s a degenerate/sociopath/rapist). A movie…  read review

Great Movies

By tuyabid on June 20, 2012

This is, for me, one of the finest examples of cinematic art. It isn’t a simple, cut-n-dried 90 minute little package that gets wrapped up with a pretty bow at the end. You get pulled in by the enigmatic…  read review

He's my uncle!

By sodr2 on September 21, 2011

I’ll give this movie some time in the future to develop into one of my favorite films of all time. I didn’t quite feel like I grasped everything at first, yet all that I could grasp was like grabbing…  read review

Forum

Displaying 6 discussion topics.