There’s no mob whacking in movie history as gruesome as the job Warner Bros did on Sergio Leone’s final feature, Once Upon a Time in America, a sumptuous crime epic that Leone tried to cut down from 269 minutes to 229 for its premiere at the Cannes film festival in 1984, only to have 90 more minutes lopped off for its US release, taking it all the way down to 139 minutes. The changes, done without Leone’s supervision or approval, had the predictable effect of alienating critics, who’d lauded the film at Cannes, while tanking the film at the box office, and it has taken decades to restore its length and reputation. Longer cuts have circulated – a 251-minute version returned to Cannes in 2012 – but the 229-minute European cut has now become the standard, better late than never.
The excruciating irony of the situation is that time may be the film’s most important theme, and Leone’s signature style, established in classics like Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, is to elongate time as much as possible, squeezing every bit of tension and detail out of crucial moments. Through the full scope of its hero’s life – from his hardscrabble upbringing as a street tough on the Lower East Side in the 20s to his ascendence as a Prohibition-era gangster to his obsolescence as a regretful old man in the 60s — the film reflects the rotten, corruptible soul of the country itself over the same period. That’s not a story that could be told quickly. It was The Godfather for an era that had grown hostile to auteur visions.
