Adrian Martin,
Once Upon a Time in America

BFI Publishing, 1998
ISBN 0-85170-544-8

Uploaded 15 September 1998
Adrian Martin’s monograph on Sergio Leone’s last and greatest film is one of the best entries in the BFI’s distinguished Classics and Modern Classics series, which already boasts volumes by the likes of Salman Rushdie, Richard Corliss, fellow Aussie Sam Rohdie, Jonathan Rosenbaum and (most recently) Camille Paglia.

Part of the book’s strength is its fine writing, which never tips over into the kind of overwriting that marred David Thomson’s contribution on The big sleep. Always at the service of its object, Martin’s style blends interpretation with sensuous and felt evocation at almost every turn. The last memento mori, for example, in a paragraph on that subject is the image of Noodles returning to Moe’s place as an old man:

Part of the dark poetry of this lost hero’s reappearance at Moe’s bar derives from the fact that the establishment has previously been identified as ‘the joint that never closes,’ and here is Noodles, like some angel of death, instantly bringing down its shutters and closing its doors.

In a minor key, Martin’s essay adopts Leone’s method in this valedictory film, where every image, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Sarris writing on John Ford, is haunted by its “memory image on the horizon of history.” Ford is of course Leone’s master, even in this film whose story pointedly recalls every film Raoul Walsh ever did about friends made foes by class divisions, and in Once Upon a Time in America Time is more than ever Leone’s subject: its images are treasures at once dark and luminous recovered – less literally than James Cameron’s morphing of digitally recreated images of the Titanic onto documentary shots of its sunken skeleton – from the shipwreck of Noodles’ past. As such they are particularly apt for evocation by a critical style which keeps that impossible object, the film, before the reader’s eyes throughout, sending us back to it at the end with its essential mysteries still intact.

Among those, the film’s cruxes: the interminable scene in which Deborah removes the makeup from a face that apparently hasn’t aged in over thirty years; the garbage truck that carries Max out of the film – ground up or still living? – like the junk wagon that carried him into it, and the ghostly cavalcade of revellers that follows; the last zoom in on Noodles as the opium kicks in and his face lights up in a savage grin.

That last image, which was perhaps meant by Leone to sum up his oeuvre, is on the simplest level about “the brutish vulgarity of men” whose celebration by Leone is dealt with scrupulously by Martin in Chapters 4 through 6, circling back at the end of Chapter 7 – on the film’s melancholy – with this observation:

Central to the film’s portrait of masculinity is a feeling of torment, something ambivalent, tearing, wretched. It is a strange and plaintive moment in cinema history, this surge of male melancholia that reaches its peak with Leone’s last film.

Yet the film itself ends with Noodles’ smile, and Martin goes through all the answers given by Leone, screenwriter Stuart Kaminsky and the film’s critics to the question it poses – What is this man smiling about? – without settling on one, preferring to quote a favorite phrase of Leone’s: “I say it here, and I deny it here.” His final word on the subject: Noodles’ smile is made possible by an act of repression, “the massive blocking out of what he has come to learn in the course of the film.” This may in fact be confirmed by another quote from Leone, who described the film to an interviewer as a “dance of death in which a man moves toward forgetting.”

After that intriguing remark, Martin chooses to end his reading of the film with the scene that comes before the opium den finale, the scene between Max and Noodles when Noodles, asked if his refusal of Max’s contract is his way of getting revenge, shakes his head “fourteen times quickly before he replies ‘no…,’ and then, in a smaller arc (like a physical reverberation or aftershock), shakes it ten more times, before he says: ‘It’s just the way I see things.'”

Martin is quick to point out that the low-key heroism of this reply is poor comfort in a film “which exposes at every turn the fantasies, blind spots, masks and treacheries inherent in a drama of seeing.” That sentence, which concludes his reading, enables him to leave the question of Noodles’ smile floating in the air like the film’s final freeze-frame, just as he sidesteps the enigma of Deborah’s eternally young face (quoting and then rejecting Michel Chion’s interpretation of it as an Oedipal fantasy) by focusing on the looks that pass between Noodles, Deborah, David and Max in the same sequence.

This reading of the film as a deconstruction of the “male gaze” permits Martin to read it at its highest level of formal abstraction, while bringing rational closure to an argument that begins with the question of Leone’s attitude toward men (that “ancient race” sentimentally evoked by Bronson at the end of Once upon a time in the west). It is an eminently satisfying reading which even takes in, obliquely, the film’s long production history (detailed in a chapter titled “The Mummy’s Curse”), its tortured post-production history (including a description, based on the shooting script, of a still longer version we may yet see some day) and its influence on subsequent films (the chapter evocatively titled “The Ashes of Time”): If indeed the film is Leone’s funeral for his own cinema, the mourning work would be, in principle, interminable and ongoing, even after the filmmaker’s death.

I was not surprised to learn, in an exchange of e-mails when I thanked the author for an advance copy of his book, that another interpretation of Noodles’ smile – the one I have always assumed – had occurred to him, too, although it is an interpretation that belongs to a different tradition of criticism altogether, the theory of influence elaborated in my country by literary critic Harold Bloom as a way of talking about Romantic poetry, and eventually about all “post-Enlightenment art.” That would be my own interpretation of the film, which was sketched out in my eulogy for Leone in the Cahiers du cinema as a Romantic poet whose last work carries out the movement of internalization by which the Romantics turned quest romance into inner questing. This way of reading the ending of Once Upon a Time in America, I believe, averts a danger which Martin rightly points out in the “upbeat, transcendent reading” implied by a “New Age” interpretation of the film as Noodles’ heroic quest.

For the internalized questing of the Romantics is a darker achievement than any portrayed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, one predicated on “reduced expectations” with a vengeance (a vision that once encompassed Ford’s Monument Valley dwindling to the space between a gangster’s ears) and inexorably destined for defeat: the central poem in the Romantic tradition, according to Bloom, is Browning’s ghastly poetic monologue by a failed quester,Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which may have been in Arthur C. Clarke’s mind when he conceived the monolith at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Noodles, like the puppet Bowman in 2001, is definitely of Roland’s company, and his smile is eerily reminiscent of the smile on the face of the Star Child at the end of Kubrick’s film.

As Martin shows, the meaning of that smile hovers between fantasy (an opium dream?) and reality, between past (Noodles childhood? the film we have just seen?) and future (a prophetic vision brought on by the drug?), with no room in the middle for a living present. As it happens, that is a precise description of the “ratio of misreading” (a defense mechanism for creative forgetting) which ends most post-Enlightenment poems, according to Bloom, who calls the ratio “transumption.” It is indeed based on a powerful act of repression, by which a belated poet imagines that he is in fact the predecessor of the great predecessor whose work would otherwise cripple his own imagination, and its closest Freudian analogue, according to Bloom, is the repression which founds paranoid psychosis.

The Star Child, I have argued elsewhere, is a transumption of all human culture – the monolith was here before us, and continues to shape our ends – through the Wordsworthian paradox “The child is father to the man,” but Noodles’ drug-addled moment of transumption is a strictly personal one: hovering between past and future, he sees it all and embraces it with his savage smile. Moments of timelessness like this occur at the end of many Ford films – Lincoln walking into his stormy future, Roddy McDowall seeing his past rise up luminous before him – but Leone’s last variation on Fordean transumption recalls Nietzsche: in the Eternal Return, the past is the future, eternally recurring, and one must have the strength to will both and laugh about it. In that sense only does Noodles’ quest succeed, but at the price of “nihilistic despair” (the last words of Adrian Martin’s excellent and uncompromising book).

Another line of investigation started by the book’s first chapter, but not followed up, would require the author to engage more with the roots of his own cinephilia, which he has described in a letter published in Trafic as part of an ensemble on “Movie Mutations.” In his book Martin holds fast to a view of Leone as the creator of an “impure” cinema, and one way of expanding on that would be to go back to the founding contradiction of Martin’s criticism: his early love for what he calls cinema as an “arte povera…open to the energies and intensities of life” (Wenders, Godard, Ruiz, but also Rouch and Vigo) and his acquired taste for the modern cinema of spectacle which springs, in part, from Leone’s films.

My favorite scene in Once Upon a Time in America is the quintessentially Leonesque moment when one of the young gang members, waiting in the hall with the creamy cake he has brought to purchase a neighbor girl’s sexual favors, begins licking his fingers and ends up gradually, very gradually, eating the whole thing. The scene has many meanings, one of which (if I recall correctly) is macabre: I believe the character dies in a brawl not long after, presumably still a virgin, a life wasted. Scenes like this which play on duration (another, described by Martin, is the scene where Noodles rivets his colleagues’ attention by stirring his coffee with a spoon) are at the heart of Leone’s cinema, and they have as much to do with an arte povera as they do with the epic qualities imitated by Leone’s many admirers.

I am told, for example, that Titanic heralds a rebirth of American classical cinema, and I would love to believe that that is true. Perhaps I would be more inclined to do so if it contained one example of minimalist magic like that moment with the cake, which stops Leone’s $30 million epic dead in its tracks for at least two minutes, and in so doing somehow empowers the mysterious images of Time transcended which gather at the end.

Bill Krohn