Happy Birthday, Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone turned down the opportunity to direct "The Godfather" (1972), in favor of working on another gangster story he had conceived earlier. He devoted ten years to this project, based on the novel The Hoods by former mobster Harry Grey, which focused on a quartet of New York City Jewish gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s who had been friends since childhood.
The four-hour finished film, "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984), featured Robert De Niro and James Woods. It was a meditation on another aspect of popular American mythology, the role of greed and violence and their uneasy coexistence with the meaning of ethnicity and friendship.
Leone was thrilled at meeting the "real" David "Noodles" Aaronson (played by De Niro), Harry Grey, and said he resembled Edward G. Robinson: "The grotesque realism of this elderly gangster who, at the end of his life, couldn't stop himself using a repertoire of cinematic citations, of gestures and words seen and heard thousands of times on the big screen, stimulated my curiosity and amused me. I was struck by the vanity of this attempt, and by the grandeur of its bankruptcy."
Leone was contracted to deliver a film that would run for two hours and forty-five minutes. His final cut was nearly four hours long. The American distributors reacted by excising an hour and twenty-five minutes from the running time (though Leone's intended cut was seen in its entirety in Europe).
"'Once Upon a Time in America' is my best film bar none, I swear, and I knew that it would be from the moment I got Harry Grey's book in my hand. I'm glad I made it, even though during the filming I was as tense as Dick Tracy's jaw. It always goes like that. Shooting a film is awful, but to have made a movie is delicious."
In his later years, Leone had a falling out of sorts with Clint Eastwood. When Leone directed "Once Upon a Time in America," he commented that Robert De Niro was a real actor, unlike Eastwood. This may have been in response to Eastwood declining to play the Irish police detective in the aforementioned film, according to one biography. However, the two made amends and reconciled before Leone's death in 1989. When Eastwood won the Oscar for "Unforgiven" (1992), Leone was one of the two directors whom Eastwood dedicated his award to (the other was Don Siegel) and the film contains the dedication "To Sergio & Don" before the end credits roll. (IMDb)
A favourite film and I consider the soundtrack [Ennio Morricone] the best in film ever!
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