Sometimes even a masterpiece can get better — as audiences at the New York Film Festival will discover when a new, extended restoration of Sergio Leone’s enigmatic gangster epic “Once Upon a Time in America” makes its American debut Saturday.
At 4 hours and 11 minutes, that’s 22 minutes longer than the acclaimed 229-minute version that showed at the 1984 NYFF — which, in turn, was 90 minutes longer than the butchered general-release version.
That widely panned 139-minute travesty rearranged a complex and elusive story — about a pair of criminals from Williamsburg (brilliantly played by Robert De Niro and James Woods) that weaves back and forth over five decades — into a strictly chronological, gap-filled narrative.
While the longer version that’s circulated for the last 30 years is brilliantly crafted — it’s one of my favorites from the era — there’s always been a sense that pieces are missing.
Before Leone — the Italian auteur best known for the “Fistful of Dollars” trilogy — died in 1989, at the age of 60, he claimed to have shot 10 hours of film for a longer version.
The director also encouraged speculation by critics that the film’s decidedly weird sequences set in 1968 are actually an opium-induced hallucination experienced in 1933 by De Niro’s character — who believes he is responsible for the death of his friend, Max, played by Woods.
This odd interpretation is supported by some of the sequences that were added into the new restoration, out on Blu-ray Sept. 30.
The most surreal of the new scenes features Louise Fletcher (unseen in previous cuts) as a cemetery manager who, in 1968, informs De Niro’s character, Noodles, that “he” paid for a new mausoleum supposedly containing the remains of Woods’ Max and two others.
At the end of the scene, there’s a shot of a black limousine that we later learn belongs to the disgraced secretary of commerce. As in the previously seen versions, this character turns out to be Max, who stole Noodles’ money and faked his own death.
Unless, and this seems more likely than ever, it’s all part of the guilty Noodles’ dreams in a Chinatown opium den — like another odd new scene where a corrupt union leader (Treat Williams) explains why he will have to die rather than go to jail. Or the even weirder sequence where Noodles watches the love of his life (played by Elizabeth McGovern) perform on Broadway.
There are also a couple of intriguing new scenes set in 1933, bookending the horrific scene where Noodles rapes McGovern’s character after she turns down his offer of marriage. Preceding it is a conversation about the rise of the Nazis in Germany between Noodles and his chauffeur; and afterward, there’s Noodles’ tender encounter with a prostitute named Eve (Darlanne Fluegel), who pops up without explanation as his girlfriend in the previous versions.
Longer isn’t always better: “Heaven’s Gate,” another epic flop of the era that was drastically cut and later restored, remains an incoherent, self-indulgent bore. But adding 22 minutes to “Once Upon a Time in America” only enhances Leone’s brilliant saga of guilt and betrayal.