Once Upon a time in America

The disappearance of Ennio Morricone has made us rediscover the value of music, of a soundtrack within the history of cinematography.
An immense value, which too often takes second place.
The Roman composer had produced over 500 soundtracks in his career.
He had collaborated with dozens of the best directors in history.
A column, a giant in the film industry, which had won two Oscars, one for his career in 2006 and one for Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight".
If we had to identify the most successful, known and glorious association in the career of Ennio Morricone, and probably in the history of cinema, it was definitely the one between the Italian musician and one of the greatest directors ever, also Italian:

Sergio Leone
The 2 were schoolmates in Rome, both with their dreams and visions. Fortunately for them, and especially ours, Leone had the intuition to entrust Morricone with the music of his films. From the trilogy of the dollar to "Down The Head".
But it is perhaps another film where their union has forever consigned them to the concept of eternal:

Once Upon a Time in America

For many, this is one of the films that would constitute a definitive top 10 in the history of cinema.
It's a 1984 film that, imperceptibly, changed the way a film is written.
The "American" edition did not honor the film, released in the rest of the world with a different editing.
The American edition, in fact, reproduced the film in a temporally linear way and without the part dedicated to the childhood of the protagonists, fundamental to outline their personality and beginnings.
Perhaps that bad choice by the American majors has undermined the impact of this film in the history of cinema.
In Italy, in Europe, there is no doubt that this masterpiece is a cornerstone of cinematography.
In the cast, a Robert De Niro, in the role of Noodles, perhaps at his best, flanked by James Wood in the role of Max, definitely in his most iconic character played in his career.
Once Upon a time in America is a silent watershed in the history of cinema as it is one of the first films that manages the concept of time in an "anomalous" way, mixing it with the concept of dream.
It is no coincidence that the beginning of the film and the end of the film represent a unicum.
Sergio Leone took with him to his grave the true meaning of that wonderful ending.
Did Noodles dream it all? Was he just a tormented man who had imagined a parallel story for him and his friends?
Or did Noodles and Max really climb a gangster empire, finding themselves to be influential and important people in the America of prohibition?
We'll never know.
That ending remains one of the most mysterious open endings ever.
It's a nebulous film, where the fog and smoke blend together, and the story blurs inside.
The cover image is perhaps one of the cult images in the history of cinema. Anyone who has walked around New York City has been obsessed with going to Brooklyn to capture that perfect photograph live, in the Dumbo neighborhood.

Once Upon a Time in America wants to be for 20th century American history, what Once Upon a Time in West was for Wild West history.
Sergio Leone embraces the gangster movie to carry on this operation.
The incipit is all for a foggy, tormented, and lost in the mists of opium.

From there, the story will go back and forth, with a very contemporary, not very linear, not very classic use of "time".
Noodles, Max and companions united by pain, death and ambition.
A different ambition that Max will become obsessed with, Noodles victim.
The 2 friends for life will become, almost naturally and unconsciously, enemies. Fighting each other. Max would want more and more, Noodles would want to stop, settle, bend to simpler desires, such as that for his beloved Deborah.
A little girl turned into a woman, who Noodles was spying through the keyhole while she was dancing, dreaming of Hollywood and fame. Very similar to Max in this, as Noodles will tell her during their special evening.
An evening that breaks Noodles' daily nightmare and gives him back some of that natural beauty, that warm love, that lost simplicity.He and Deborah, a love never dormant but never definitively blossomed, broken by Noodles' violent life and Deborah's sacrifices.
A romantic evening, in a restaurant open only for them 2, with music (by Morricone) in the background, with a dedicated driver and 100 tables to choose from.

That evening will be just a parenthesis, a drop in a sea of suffering in which Noodles drowns and drowns.
It will end in the most violent way possible, with a rape that will definitively end the dream of a life together with the woman he loves.
On that night, which was supposed to be a redemption, Noodles will lose his love, definitively to his innocence and will see any hope of redemption, of a different life lived with Deborah, escape through his fault.
It is incredible to think how that scene (the rape scene) probably would have been censored today, in the era of the #metoo and the statues torn down in the squares.
Sergio Leone charges on it almost 2 minutes of atrocious violence, a violence that hurts the spectator and allows him to break the empathy that until then had bound him to Noodles. At that moment Sergio Leone reminds us that Noodles is a dreamer, but he is also a violent man, a murderer, an extortionist, a criminal, a smuggler.
We had forgotten him, lost in the criminal epic of a romantic and lost man.
From that moment on, Noodles' life will be a purgatory.
Less violent but less lived, quieter but flat, less tormented and therefore without jolts.
In the meantime the images flow. Noodles comes and goes from the film with his childlike face mixed with his old one and returns in the astonished face of his adult version.
The time, the legend, the rhythm that beats, with the music of Morricone, an America that flows, evolves, but is corrupt within itself, in the marrow, in the bones, unable to redeem itself.
I leave you with the 4 minutes and 19 of the legendary music of Ennio Morricone that accompanies Sergio Leone's film: