“Leone’s original version tells this story in a complex series of flashbacks, memories, and dreams.” – Roger Ebert “Sergio Leone was known for his Westerns, but his last film and one of his greatest was set in New York City” – Martin Scorsese ‘Once upon a time in America’ is the immortal work of the famous Director. The film, which touches the most important questions of life, such as love, friendship, duty, death, betrayal, happiness and unhappiness, education and outlook. This film is an entire cinematic heritage. The film, as it is widely known, was put on the autobiographical book by Harry Grey - the Jewish gangster, who, while serving time in prison, wrote this piece. The picture tells the story of four friends - David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson, Maximilian ‘Max’ named …show more content…
“Essential for the movie is the time and the years; here I’m more interested in realistic and allegorical. The most important thing is the feeling of hallucinations, travel in dreams, born because of opium, which begins and which ends the film.” – Leone. This essay is an attempt to investigate how Leone, in his film Once upon a Time in America, created a narrative that involves the spectator, gives more impact, tells a number of stories, and moves between time frames. Leone claimed that under the influence of opium people rather dream about the future than about the past. And in an interview added that the finale may equally well occur in a hazy drug consciousness that in reality, and everyone can understand him as he wants. No wonder that we see the hero with the opium pipe at the beginning and the end. Maybe everything that happened later - the Secretary Bailey, the great actress, the garbage truck, grinding the people and their stories, imagining David Aaronson named Noodles in the opium dream, which he tried to deal with the guilt for the death of friends? Sergio Leone asked - but not answered. And the more you watch this film, the more ambiguous seems to be the