#//after elizabeth and evans deaths he throws himself into his work with a smile on his face and blood on his hands

[aftonrobotiics]

new year new william. leaning into the mad scientist vibe. it's what he deserves.

[aion-rsa]

Once Upon a Time in America Is Every Bit as Great a Gangster Movie as The Godfather

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This article contains Once Upon a Time in America spoilers.

The Godfather is a great movie, possibly the best ever made. Its sequel, The Godfather, Part II, often follows it in the pantheon of classic cinema, some critics even believe it is the better film. Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount in the early 1970s, wanted The Godfather to be directed by an Italian American. Francis Ford Coppola was very much a last resort. The studio’s first choice was Sergio Leone, but he was getting ready to make his own gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America. Though less known, it is equally magnificent. 

Robert De Niro, as David “Noodles” Aaronson, and James Woods, as Maximillian “Max” Bercovicz, make up a dream gangster film pairing in Once Upon a Time in America, on par with late 1930s audiences seeing Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney team for The Roaring Twenties or Angels with Dirty Faces. Noodles and Max are partners and competitors, one is ambitious, the other gets a yen for the beach. One went to jail, the other wants to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. 

Throw Joe Pesci into the mix, in a small part as crime boss Frankie Monaldi, and Burt Young as his brother Joe Monaldi, and life gets “funnier than shit,” and funnier than their more famous crime films, Goodfellas and Chinatown, respectively. Future mob entertainment mainstays are all over Once Upon a Time in America too, and they are in distinguished company. This is future Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly’s first movie. She plays young Deborah, the young girl who becomes the woman between Noodles and Max, and she even has something of a catch-phrase, “Go on Noodles your mother is calling.” Elizabeth McGovern delivers the line as adult Deborah. 

When Once Upon a Time in America first ran in theaters, there were reports that people in the audience laughed when Deborah is reintroduced after a 35-year gap in the action. She hadn’t aged at all. But Deborah is representational to Leone, beyond the character.

“Age can wither me, Noodles,” she says. But neither the character nor the director will allow the audience to see it beyond the cold cream. Deborah is the character Leone is answering to. She also embodies the fluid chronology of the storytelling. She is its only constant.

The rest of the film can feel like a free fall though. Whereas The Godfather moved in a linear fashion, Once Upon a Time in America has time for flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, and detours that careen between the violent and the quiet. It’s a visceral experience about landing where we, and this genre, began.

Growing up Gangster

Both The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in America span decades; it’s the history of immigrant crime in 20th century America. But they differ on chronological placement. Once Upon a Time is set in three time-frames. The earliest is 1918 in the Jewish ghettos of New York City’s Lower East Side. 

Young Noodles (Scott Tiler), Patrick “Patsy” Goldberg (Brian Bloom), Philip “Cockeye” Stein (Adrian Curran) and Dominic (Noah Moazezi), are a bush league street gang doing petty crimes for a minor neighborhood mug, Bugsy (James Russo). New on the block, Max (Rusty Jacobs) interrupts the gang as they’re about to roll a drunk, and Max makes off with the guy’s watch for himself. He soon joins the gang, and they progress to bigger crimes.

The bulk of the film takes place, however, from when De Niro’s Noodles gets out of prison in 1930, following Bugsy’s murder, and lasts until the end of Prohibition in 1933. Max, now played by Woods, has become a successful bootlegger with a mortuary business on the side. With William Forsythe playing the grown-up Cockeye and James Hayden as Patsy, the mobsters go from bootlegging through contract killing, and ultimately to backing the biggest trucking union in the country as enforcers. They enjoy most of their downtime in their childhood friend Fat Moe’s (Larry Rapp) speakeasy. Noodles is in love with Fat Moe’s sister, Deborah, who is on her way to becoming a Hollywood star. The gang’s rise ends with the liquor delivery massacre.

The final part of the film comes in 1968. After 35 years in hiding, Noodles is uncovered and paid to do a private contract for the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Christopher Bailey…  Max by a different name who 35 years on has been able to feign respectability and make Deborah his mistress. An entire life has become a façade.

Recreating a Seedier Side of New York’s Immigrant Past

While The Godfather is an adaptation of Mario Puzo’s fictional bestseller, Once Upon a Time in America is based on the autobiographical crime novel, The Hoods. It was written by Herschel “Noodles” Goldberg, under the pen name of Harry Grey while he was serving time in Sing-Sing Prison. 

Coppola’s vision in The Godfather is aesthetically comparable to Leone’s projection. From the opium pipes at the Chinese puppet theater to the take-out Lo Mein during execution planning, the multicultural world of old New York crowds the frames and the players in both films. Most of Once Upon a Time in America was shot at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. The 1918 Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan was a street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was made to look exactly as it had 60 years earlier.

Leone skillfully, yet playfully, captures the poverty of immigrant life in New York. The first crime we see the four-member gang commit could have been done by the Dead End kids. They torch a newspaper stand because the owner doesn’t kick up protection money to the local mug. And like the Dead End kids, they needle their mark, and joke with each other. At the end of the crime, Cockey is playing the pan pipe, and the very young Dominic is dancing. They are proud of their work and enjoy it. It’s fun to break things for money. And even better when they get a choice between taking payment in cash or rolling it over into the sure bet of rolling a drunk.

Violence without the Cannoli

Gangster films, like Howard Hawks’ Scarface and William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy, were always at the forefront of the backlash to the Motion Picture Production Code. Which might be why gangster pictures were one of the first genres to benefit from the censors’ fall. A direct line can be drawn from the machine gun death which ends Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to the toll-booth execution of Sonny Corleone (James Caan)  in The Godfather. Another from when Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) gets one through the glasses and Joe Monaldi gets it in the eye in Once Upon a Time in America.

The Godfather has some brutal scenes. We get a litany of dead Barzinis and Tattaglias, horse heads and spilled oranges. Once Upon a Time in America ups the ante though. The shootings and stabbings are neat jobs compared with the beatings, which allow far more artistic renderings of gore, and pass extreme scrutiny. The one time the effects team balks at a payoff is when it’s not as gruesome as the setup.

“Inflammatory words from a union boss,” corporate thug Chicken Joe asks as he is about to light Jimmy “Clean Hands” Conway O’Donnell on fire. The mobster has such a nice smile, and the union delegate, played by Treat Williams, looks so pathetic while dripping gasoline that it feels like it might even be a mercy killing. It is a wonderful set piece, perfectly executed and timed. When Max and Noodles, and the gang defuse the situation, rather than ignite it, it is a lesson in the dangerous balance of suspense.

Like many specific scenes in Once Upon a Time in America, Conway’s incendiary introduction would’ve worked in any era. This is the turning point for the gang. The end of Prohibition is coming and all those trucks they’re using to haul liquor can be repurposed for a more lucrative future. 

“You Dancing?”

Music is paramount in both Leone’s and Coppola’s films. The Godfather is much like an opera, the third installment even closes the curtain at one. Once Upon a Time in America is a frontier film. The score was composed by Ennio Morricone, who wrote the music behind Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The film opens and closes with Kate Smith’s version of “God Bless America.” Though the scene occurs during the 1968 timeframe, the song comes out of the radio of a car seemingly from another point in time.

Morricone’s accompaniment to Once Upon a Time in America is as representational as Nino Rota’s soundtrack in The Godfather. Characters, settings, situations, and relationships all have themes, which become as recognizable as the Prohibition-era songs which flavor the period piece’s ambience. Fat Moe conducts the speakeasy orchestra through José María Lacalle García’s “Amapola” while grinning dreamily to Deborah who is chatting with Noodles. He’s a romantic.

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The music becomes part of the action in Once Upon a Time in America. Individual couples cut their own rugs, doing the Charleston between tables as waiters and cigarette girls glide by. Cockeye, who has been playing the pan pipe since the beginning of the film, wants to sit in with the band. 

Forsythe almost steals Once Upon a Time in America. He cries what look like real tears at the mock funeral for Prohibition and drinks formula from a baby bottle during the maternity ward scene. The blackmail scheme, which involves swapping infants, plays like an outtake from a Three Stooges movie, something Coppola would never dare for The Godfather. The ruse is choreographed to the tune of Gioachino Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie,” which elicits the youthful thuggery celebrated in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. 

Devils with Clean Faces

One ironic difference between the two films is whimsy. The Godfather, which glorifies crime as corporate misadventure, is a serious movie with no time for funny business. Once Upon a Time in America, which is an indictment of criminal life, has moments of innocence as syrupy as in any family film (of the non-crime variety) and can be completely kosher. It’s sweeter than the cannoli Clemenza (Richard Castellano) took from the car, or the cake Nazorine (Vito Scotti) made for the wedding of Don Vito’s daughter. 

The scene where young Patsy brings a Charlotte Russe to Peggy in exchange for sex is a masterwork of emotive storytelling. He chooses a treat over sex. On one level, yes, this is a socioeconomic reality. That pastry was expensive and something he could never afford to get for himself. But as Patsy sneaks each tiny bit of the cream from the packaging, he is also just a child, a kid who wants some cake. He learns he can’t have it and eat it. It is so plainly laid out, and so beautifully rendered.

The Corleone family never gets those moments, not even in the flashbacks to Sicily or as children on the stoop listening to street singers play guitars. We know little of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) or Sonny as youngsters, much less teenagers, and are robbed of their happier moments of bonding. We know they are close, they are family. But Michael has his own brother killed while Noodles balks at the very idea. Twice, as it turns out.

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“Today they ask us to get rid of Joe. Tomorrow they ask me to get rid of you. Is that okay with you? Cos it’s not okay with me,” Noodles tells Max after the gang delivers on a particularly costly contract, double-crossing their partners in a major diamond heist. They are not blood family, but from the moment Max calls Noodles his “uncle” to fool a beat cop, they are all related. 

Noodles then does what young men in coming-of-age movies have done since Cooley High: Something really stupid. An indulgence the Corleones could never enjoy. He speeds the car into the bay. The guys can’t believe it. It adds to his legend. The scene could have been in Diner, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or even Thelma & Louise. It is hard to dislike the gangsters in these moments. We know them too well, even as they do such horrible things.

How Women are Really Treated by an Underworld

The Godfather is told from the vantage point of one of the heads of the five established crime families; organized crime is as insular as the Corleone mall on Long Beach. That motion picture reinvigorated the “gangster film,” long considered a ghetto genre, but its perspective is insulated. By contrast, no matter how far they climb, Leone’s characters never really get off the block. They are street savages, even in tuxedos. Once Upon a Time in America whacked the gangster film, and tossed its living corpse into the compactor of a passing garbage truck.

The Godfather doesn’t judge its gangsters. The Corleones are family men who keep to a code of ethics and omerta. They dip their beaks in “harmless” vices like gambling, liquor, and prostitution. While there are scenes of extreme domestic violence, and a general dismissal of women, the film stops short of challenging the image of honorable men who do dishonorable things. Leone offers no such restraint. His history lesson is unabridged.

Long before Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman stripped gangster lore to a tale of toxic masculinity, Once Upon a Time in America robbed it of all glamor. There is a very nonchalant attitude toward violence and other demeaning acts against women in Leone’s film, from the very opening scene where a thug fondles a woman’s breast with his gun in order to humiliate her civilian date.

This is deliberate. The director, best known for Spaghetti Westerns, wants to obliterate any goodwill the gangsters have accumulated through their magnetic antiheroism. One scene between Max and his girlfriend Carol (Tuesday Weld) is so hard to sit through, even the other members of the gang squirm in their chairs.

Noodles sexually assaults two women over the course of the film. While there is some motivational ambiguity in the scene during the jewel heist attack, the rape of Deborah is devastatingly direct. It kills any vestige of romance the gangster archetype has in film. The camera does not look away, and the scene lingers with terrifying ferocity and traumatic intimacy. There is a visible victim, and Noodles’ wealth and pretensions of honor are worthless.

The Ultimate Gangster Epic

Once Upon a Time in America brings one other element to the genre which The Godfather avoids, a lingering mystery. Coppola delivers short riddles, like the fate of Luca Brasi, which are revealed as the story warrants. But the 35-year gap between the slaughter of Noodles’ crew and the introduction of Secretary Bailey is almost unfathomable. How did Max go from long-dead to a man with legitimate power?

What happens to Noodles in those years is fairly easy to guess, without any specifics. He got by. The gang’s shared secret bankroll was empty when he tried to retrieve it as the last surviving member. He put his gun away and eked out a quiet life. But even as the details spill out on the true fate of Max, it is unexpectedly surprising, as much for the audience as Noodles.

“I took away your whole life from you,” Max/Bailey says. “I’ve been living in your place. I took everything. I took your money. I took your girl. All I left for you was 35 years of grief over having killed me. Now why don’t you shoot?” This final betrayal, and Noodles’ inert revenge, take Once Upon a Time In America into almost unexplored cinematic depths. 

Max has gone as low as he could go. The joke is on Noodles, everyone’s in on it, including “Clean Hands,” who is tied in to “the Bailey scandal.” The cops are in on it, and so is the mob. Max admits even the liquor dropoff was a syndicate set-up. He’d planned this all along. Just like Michael Corleone had a long term strategy to make his family legitimate. 

This is an ambitious story. Beyond genre, this bends American celluloid into European cinema. By sheer virtue of being outside of Hollywood, Leone transcends traditional boundaries. He has a far more limitless pallet to draw from. He can aim a camera at De Niro’s spoon in a coffee cup for three minutes and never lose the audience’s rapt attention. Leone can pull the rug out from everything with a last minute reveal. Coppola bent American filmmaking for The Godfather, but stayed within proscribed parameters. He never gets as sweet as a Charlotte Russe nor as repulsive as the back seat of a limo. 

Once Upon a Time in America ripped the genre’s insides out and displayed them with unflinching veracity and theatrical beauty. It is a perfect film, gorgeously shot, masterfully timed, and slightly ajar.

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[idornasequel]

Chapter Five: Calix

“You have come to a decision, my boy. Have you not?”

Doctor Evans sat beside her protégé, gazing out the windows of the infirmary at the changing colours of the Gladur. The leaves had turned a lush and palatial green, a promise of new beginnings stored in the pent-up buds ready to explode into a display of lively fervour.

Watching the wind play with the foliage, like faeries dancing in the ether, Calix felt awful. The vitality of the forest seemed like a vile mockery of those who had died not long ago, of those whose rich blood fed those power-hungry buds. Like the siblings reunited within, the trees blotted out and swept away what was meagre and weak for their own selfish ends.

Calix wanted none of it.

“Yes, I have,” Calix said sombrely, his lower lip caught between his teeth. His heart was high in his chest, knell-like tolls making it hard to breathe as his decision loomed above him like an executioner’s blade. “I really can’t see myself coming back, Doctor.”

“Are you sure, Calix? You have just two years left,” Evans asked, a hint of a plea in her steady voice. She took his hand in hers, forcing Calix to meet her gaze for the first time. In her eyes, he saw the plea clear as the forest in front of them, a desperate and dolorous entreaty that wracked Calix to his very core.

“In two years the medical world will be your oyster. Are you sure, wholeheartedly sure, you want to cast all you have done to the ground? You will leave without Idorna’s blessing if you take this path.”

Calix understood Evans’ concern. He felt guilty about leaving after everything she had done for him. She had been his mentor, his teacher and his friend since the moment he arrived at Idorna, as a young wizard who had taken his vows too quickly and for personal gain, a wizard she openly chided for the colour of his magic, a wizard that under her watchful eye developed into one of the greatest mediwizards of his age.

Did he really want to throw it all away? Did he really want to leave without seeing his tenure through?

“I think I am. Doctor, if I’m honest, I’m not happy here. How could I be?” he said, unable to control the swell of conflicting emotions that leaked past his patient reservations that rambled suddenly from his mouth. “I spent the last year chasing Chantal, Teddy, Ibori, murderers and miscreants; I put my trust in a woman who revealed herself to be a nothing but spite and hatred; and although it’s someone different, there’s still a distrustful and sickening headmistress on this school’s throne.

“There’s very little here for me now, nothing that I want to return to see once more in September. I would happily live the rest of my life without ever laying my eyes on this place again.”

With the floodgates opened, Calix plated his soul on silver without remorse or restraint:

“I’ve been tortured and poisoned - I’ve had a chunk of wood put through my chest! If I wasn’t a healer, I’d be lying in a shallow grave right now with a stake through my heart, watching those killed by magic walk among those I care most for, without a single explanation of how that’s done without dark witchcraft. I’m leaving with the scars to prove I’ve been to hell and back. I’ve seen friends die,  right in front of me. And to be honest, I think I’ve given enough for this goddamn school in my lifetime. I see an out - and I’m going to grab it.”

“I see your point, my boy.” Evans whispered, her eyes starry with tears. Her lower lip quivered as she patted his hands, her eyes searching the room for anything to look at other than the boy to whole she had to say goodbye.

“Don’t mind me. I will simply be disappointed to not have you here when I return. I have no replacement for you, nor do I want one. You were,” she paused, shaking her head wildly, “You are, you are, the best mediwizard I have ever had the privilege of working beside.”

“Thank you, Doctor…”

“Call me, Elizabeth,” she choked, fighting back tears, “Call me, Elizabeth, Cal. You have earned that right, Doctor Galen.”

Calix wrapped his arms around the old witch, her head resting on his shoulder. They hugged for what felt like a lifetime, both of them crying their fill until nothing else could be cried.

“I’m no Doctor,” Calix eventually said, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “Especially now that I’m walking away from it all.”

The sea breeze carried a chill that bit through Calix’s shirt. Shiverish goosebumps started to dot his golden skin, the wind cutting into his arms. The little veranda outside the Observatory, nestled in rocky outgrowths high above the surrounding landscape and overlooking the ocean and the foamy waves that lapped at the golden sands, was where Calix spent most evenings with Beatrice, entangled together and discussing the beautiful stars that decorated the night sky, and Calix found himself gravitating towards it in his loneliness.

He sat on the deck, his knees drawn close to his chest, watching what he hoped was Perseus move across the sky. Beatrice would have clipped his ears if he’d gotten it wrong, demanding he find the hero. She even threatened to withhold kisses until he got the constellations right.

Lost in his joyous memories, Calix mistook his tears as droplets of seaspray, until he heard his breathing crackle with sadness.

For the first time since he had left Idorna, he felt unhappy again. It was a horrible feeling. It felt like death.

Calix had said goodbye to Beatrice that afternoon, knowing that by this stage Helena would be giving her welcome speech to all the returning students and the newest recruits. He had left work in the hospital early, having finally managed to swap his shifts with a co-worker to get more time to see her off to the portal, Ryker huddled by his side. It was one of the hardest things he had ever had to do. He hadn’t imagined it to be as hard as it was for a wizard who was used to saying goodbye to loved ones since he first attended Hogwarts.

Nevertheless, when Beatrice disappeared through the portal, a part of Calix left with her.

He softly touched the watch fastened to his wrist, his heartbeat fluttering through the metallic filigree. The wristwatch was a parting gift from Beatrice, a stunning and perfectly fitting reminder of the woman he loved. It was fiery bronze with a central raven-black face, where embedded within were each of the planets and the stars glistening and revolving around a sunny, glowing gemstone. The time was engraved on the outer rim, a shooting star tracking the seconds as they passed.

It was beautiful. Calix couldn’t thank her enough, promising never to take it off.

In his final few seconds with her, Calix charmed the watch, twinning her gift with his necklace around her neck, into which he had poured months of protective spells upon which she could call. He didn’t tell her about his charm work, but he knew she’d figure it out. He could feel her pulse against tickling his own, and she could feel his.

There was a rule against communication at Idorna, but there was no rule against transmitting heartbeats.

“Cal, are you crying?”

Calix spun round when he heard the tiny, meek whisper. He exhaled loudly when he saw his younger brother leaning against the Observatory, anxiously pulling the tails of his shirt. He looked as distraught as Calix, possibly even more so.

“No, no,” Calix lied, scraping his cheeks with his balled up fists. He swallowed heavily, hoping to hide the fracture in his voice. “No, buddy. Come sit down with me.”

Ryker walked over, sitting down on the wooden veranda. Beside him, Calix could see how blood red Ryker’s eyes were, how the tears had carved trails down his cheeks. Calix gently put an arm around his brother, pulling him close and tussling the younger Galen’s mop of hair.

“You okay, Ry?”

Ryker softly shook his head: “I miss her already.”

“Yeah,” Calix murmured, finding it harder and harder to hide his sorrow. “I do too. The Observatory feels empty without her, doesn’t it? But, she’ll be back for Christmas.”

“I know,” Ryker nodded, “It just means summer’s over again. Do I have to go back to Appletower tomorrow?”

“What?” Calix asked, reeling backwards, “Jesus, Ry, not at all. You can stay here with me, as long as you want. You can go to college in the morning, come back here at night. I’ll just open and close the portal for you.”

“Really?” Ryker said, his eyes looking up at Calix with a plea that reminded him of the person who gave him the ornate box in his hand.

“Really, buddy. I couldn’t send you back. Who would I spend my surfing time with?”

Ryker chuckled, pulling away slowly. He gazed out across the water, taking deep breaths like his brother.

“Are you gonna stay with Bea’s mom?” he eventually asked.

“You mean working here?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know yet, Ry. Bea’s dad doesn’t want me back at St. Mungo’s, her mother and sister don’t like me as much as her ex, and I’m at the bottom of a ladder I should be furiously climbing.”

Ryker elbowed him, poking his side. “At least, if nothing else, you’re home.”

Calix smiled brightly, rustling his brother’s hair once more. It wasn’t lost on him that this was the first time in ten years he spent more than three months with his brother without leaving. As much as he missed his unlikely company, his girlfriend, his roommate and his professors, and felt bogged down by the disappointment of his lost career, spending time with his brother, and waiting for his love to return, made him the happiest he had been for years.

“Come on,” Calix shouted, “I’m so going to beat you in a race before bed!”