We know the film is made in 1984 because the violence, even for Leone, is uncommonly strong. I was mildly shocked at the numerous reasons given by the MPAA for the R rating: brutal violence (of course), full frontal nudity, scenes of rape, strong language. Yet watching the film there is something highly disorienting about the saccharine, almost Disney-like treatment Leone makes of the film's myth-making: the music by Ennio Morricone, ultra-italianate and achingly sentimentalized, drapes itself over a consciously mythologized New York City (standing in for the whole of "America" as seen through the eyes of an Italian director) and one, moreover, devoted to the Jewish hallmarks of its historical erection. Take a family film by Spielberg and add in Italian elements of grotesque sex and violence, and you have a bizarre dish approximating to what Once Upon a Time in America tastes like. Despite the self-conscious refrain-making that (for me anyway) diminishes the resonance the film purports to build up with tireless humor (there are scenes, for example, in which characters repeat catchphrases that echo previous encounters in which a supposedly 'memorable' encounter originally took place -- such as when young Deborah [played by an angelic fourteen-year-old Jennifer Connelly] tells young "Noodles" to go run off, "your mother's calling you," and she says the same thing more than a decade later (in movie-time), right after an older Noodles [played now by De Niro] meets her again, upon being released from a long-term prison sentence, as if they had not missed a beat in the chinese box continuum of an imaginary New York city that seems to continuously refer to itself as its most admiring viewer), indeed despite all this belabored posturing and box-within-box remembrances, Leone manages to craft something of a final testament to the cinematic style which made him famous, using a multitude of clever camera touches and deft orchestrations that could only have been accomplished by a master who has grown old enough to let himself go, even at the cost of audacity. (It is clear, on this point, that the film was financed and produced under the influence of the 70s masterworks of Coppola and Scorsese -- and perhaps may have been instigated by those directors and their backers, all of whom were raised on the films of Leone -- and several actors, scenes, and dialogic encounters were swiped, borrowed, or lent to Leone as gifts, as a kind of collective tribute, to the Italian master's legacy and precursory rank.)
Witness, for instance, during the operatic opening sequence, how Leone layers a non-diegetic audio clip of an incessant telephone ring through a succession of scenes that always threaten to terminate in the answering of the phone, even at times when no telephone appears on screen, but is constantly delayed until De Niro 'wakes up' from a opium dream, just in time to evade detection from men sent to kill him -- a moment which happens when the telephone, all this time patiently shrieking with determination, is finally and fatefully answered. And indeed the film works as an incessant opium dream (as the ending seems to invite speculation on) and we can become content with the plausibility of a man (De Niro) who for the span of four hours indulges in recreating the past-present-future of an enclosed movie world within the privacy of a chinese shadow puppet theater, in which the shades of his dead friends and former lovers return from the past to haunt his waking life.
The film is a self-conscious recreation, a ceaseless anticipation, of scenes which are meant to be played back later like cues for sudden reveries or remembrances. The graphic rape scene that sits like a black hole in the middle of the film is, even more shockingly, preceded by a tender-is-the-night romanticism in which Noodles and Deborah fawn on each other over an extravagant Gatsby-era dinner (and we see here that De Niro could have been the better Gatsby, the uneducated man-of-color who compensated through charisma and sheer money-splendour). Noodles tells Deborah that he remembered two things during the long years he spent in prison: the echo of his boyhood friend Dominic whispering "I slipped" just before he died from a bullet wound, and the recollection of when Deborah read the Song of Songs to him when they were young and in love. Both are pivotal scenes that themselves seemed to anticipate, seemed to press upon us, the memorability of their own execution, as if they were already established in the permanent nostalgia not only of the real world but of the world in which the characters live, as if they were living out the lives of people who had lived before them in a mythical time, in a mythical New York. Noodles asks Deborah, "Do you remember?" expecting her to remember, to acquiesce, to give him her love; she loves him, but she chooses "Hollywood" instead, ironically, because she is already in Hollywood, making a big-budget Sergio Leone film, in which Noodles pleads with her to remember her lines, the very lines (the Song of Songs, the time she told him to run off, "your mother's calling you," etc.) that made him fall in love with her like a boy at the movies falling in love with her talking image (remember, for example, how he first sees her through the peephole, like a boy watching a film at the Cinema Paradiso through the projector hole). When he sees that she refuses his phantasy -- his celluloid opium dream -- he proceeds to rape her. The rape scene is shocking because it is so unexpected; and a lot could be said about Leone's critique of the homosocial ethos and misogyny of the four gangmembers (notably the homosocial relationship between De Niro and James Woods) which seems to make the rape happen by implication, thru atmospheric pressure -- but in any case the scene is disturbing, as Leone intended, because it is put into effect by what is obviously a staged car in which the windows are nothing more than screens of moving pictures of outside traffic, in simulation of an actual car (in which Noodles and Deborah are seated, in the back), and the driver (who oddly only becomes "conscientious" after the rape is over) at first seems to be part of the machine (a head, of which we see only the back, and a pair of hands on the steering wheel) that enables this moment of brutality to occur; and Morricone's score haunts the echo chamber, here and elsewhere, in tones of confusion, exorcism, and sappyness/corniness, which only makes the sex and violence of the film loom so bizarrely on the horizon of a recent history of 70s films devoted precisely to those values.
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