The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Once Upon a Time in America
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Polish: I always felt it was strange that it was about Jewish gangsters; I
know pieces of it came from the book The Hoods, but I don’t know if they
were Jewish or not. I thought it was nice that they were Jewish.
But how Jewish do you think they were, aside from the odd Yiddish
phrase?
Polish: I know. The Star of David was everywhere. He had a different sense,
and I don’t know comparably how that plays out but there was a little difference
to me—that Noodles didn’t have this over-machismo. It wasn’t totally
over the top in any way. For some reason you had more innocence there; I
felt there was more innocence in those younger boys and in Noodles. They
were little street hoodlums.
Although the scene was cut out, there was a conversation about the difference
between Jewish gangsters and Italian gangsters. According to
Leone, the difference was the Jewish people didn’t celebrate the fact
that Jewish people were gangsters, whereas the Italians looked up to
them with pride.
Polish: You can see that in his film; they seem to hide it more. I’m not sure if
that’s due to Prohibition, when you really saw them flourish as gangsters, but it
was something. They had respect, were proud of it, but it wasn’t flaunted at all.
Leone hit it big in 1964 with A Fistful of Dollars—that was despite the
prevailing opinion the Western genre was dead. He seems to face the
same problem with this film. He was in the shadow of the first two Godfather
movies, and he shared a flashback structure with Godfather II.
Polish: I sympathize with him on that. Personally, I think he did Westerns
better than anybody. I would never think Once Upon a Time in America
would cancel out or be better than The Godfather, but those movies didn’t
speak to me like Once Upon a Time in America spoke to me.
I was also much younger when I viewed both of them. When I saw Once
Upon a Time in America, I was twelve or thirteen, and for that movie I didn’t
have to make sense of everything to get an overall impression of it. Which, to
me, if that film could do that at thirteen, and I kept rewatching it for twenty
years—this was something very special. It evoked such great feelings in me.