Once Upon A Time In America's Theatrical Cut Almost Destroyed The Film
Once Upon A Time In America is considered a masterwork by director Sergio Leone, but here's how its terrible U.S. theatrical cut nearly destroyed it.
Once Upon A Time In America is regarded as a masterwork, but its heavily trimmed U.S. theatrical cut almost destroyed its reputation. Director Sergio Leone rose to prominence with his Dollars movie trilogy, consisting of A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. These groundbreaking "spaghetti" Westerns broke the established rules of classic American Westerns - down to details like showing a gun firing and killing its target within the same frame - in addition to revitalizing the ailing genre for a time and making Clint Eastwood a star.
Leone went on to direct two more Westerns in Once Upon A Time In The West and Duck, You Sucker! The director then spent over a decade developing his passion project Once Upon A Time In America and was so focused on getting it produced that he passed on other offers like The Godfather. Once Upon A Time In America is based on the novel The Hoods by a former gangster named Harry Goldberg, with the story spanning over 50 years. It follows Noodles, played by Robert De Niro (who has made many movies with Scorsese) and Scott Tiler, who becomes part of a gang. The movie is framed by the old Noodles returning to New York in the later '60s to confront his past, with flashbacks to his younger self and the gang's rise and eventual fall.
Once Upon A Time In America tells an epic story and is now considered a masterpiece. However, Leone famously had a difficult time editing the project, cutting down around ten hours' worth of material into a six-hour version. While he hoped to release this version in two parts, the producers nixed that concept and he went back to re-cut it again. His eventual 229-minute long cut of Once Upon A Time In America premiered to rave reviews at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, but after a bad screening of this version in the U.S., the film's distributors insisted on cutting down the Sergio Leone movie to 2 hours and 19 minutes. The removal of around 90 minutes of footage was expressly against Leone's wishes, and Once Upon A Time In America's theatrical cut was met with terrible reviews and bombed.
Leone himself was left heartbroken by Once Upon A Time In America's reception in the U.S., and the stress of making the movie and his disputes with distributors over length had a detrimental effect on his health, contributing to his death from a heart attack in 1989. Once Upon A Time In America's theatrical cut almost destroyed the film's reputation too, with this edit recutting the story into chronological order, instead of the flashback framing device. Instead of making it easier to follow, this rendered the story almost incomprehensible, while famous scenes such as the ambiguous final shot of Max (James Woods) near the garbage truck were removed entirely.
For all the behind-the-scenes issues with Once Upon A Time In America's U.S. theatrical cut, this version is now very difficult to find, though a VHS copy of rough quality does exist on the Internet Archive. Thankfully, Leone's intended version of Once Upon A Time In America was made available in Europe, and over time, this is the version that became best known and has been praised as Leone's greatest work. That have been efforts - led by Martin Scorsese - to fully restore Leone's original, but while a version that screened at Cannes in 2012 contained some deleted material, over 20 minutes worth of excised material had to be removed due to rights issues. Whether or not Once Upon A Time In America's fabled 269-minute cut is ever made available remains to be seen.
Next: The Actor Who Almost Replaced Clint Eastwood In The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
