STARRING ROBERT DE NIRO, JAMES WOODS, ELIZABETH MCGOVERN, TUESDAY WELD, DARLENE FLEUGEL, JOE PESCI, BURT YOUNG AND DANNY AIELLO.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
Okay. I’ll keep this short enough as so much has already been said about this iconic gangster film set in America in the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties. It’s one of Sergio Leone’s masterpieces- he’s the King of the Spaghetti Westerns, as if you didn’t know- and it’s visually stunning, it’s got a fantastic score by Ennio Morricone and a top-notch cast and it’s very, very long. It clocks in at three hours and forty minutes.
There is a shorter version, I believe, but it would simply feel butchered to your average devoted Sergio Leone fan, and the director himself doesn’t care for it. The best way to watch it is in its entirety, with a nice bottle of vino to wet your whistle, on a night you’re free for approximately four hours. Then just relax, sit back and enjoy a masterclass in acting and directing of the kind you don’t often see nowadays…
Robert de Niro plays Noodles and James Woods portrays Max, two little Jewish wannabe-thugs living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the second decade of the twentieth century. The streets are old, some practically derelict and teeming with Jews selling their wares and developing businesses such as barbering, shoe-and-boot-mending, and selling religious items, books and leather-work, to name just a very small few.
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With three pals, Noodles and Max start off committing crimes for a local gang boss by the name of Bugsy, but by the time they’ve grown facial hair, they’ve formed their own little tight-knit gang of street hoodlums and petty criminals. Max and Noodles are firm friends for life, the kind only something monumental can put asunder.
Noodles loses his virginity early to a local girl called Peggy, a rough-and-ready type who will accommodate all comers for a plate of free dessert. His real interest lies with Deborah, though, the sister of one of his friends, Fat Moe, who runs Moe’s Bar. Yeah, like in THE SIMPSONS, lol.
Deborah is a beautiful but uppity young lady with upwardly mobile notions of being a dancer and actress in Hollywood, whom Noodles brutally rapes when they are both adults, because he can’t stand the fact that she ultimately chooses Hollywood over marriage to him. How very dare she…?
The first ninety minutes portray the five lads, Noodles, Max, Cockeye, Patsy and Little Dominic, building up their burgeoning crime empire on the Lower East Side. Noodles goes to prison for several years, however, for killing the gang boss Bugsy after Bugsy shoots their youngest member, Dominic, who then dies in Noodles’ arms. ‘I slipped, Noodles…!’
When Noodles comes out of prison, he and his gang are all adult men. It’s 1930, and his old gang have all become Prohibition millionaires from supplying local bars like Fat Moe’s with illegal liquor. This film has the distinction of being considered one of the best Prohibition movies ever made, if not the very best, in case I forgot to say that.
I love all the Prohibition stuff, all the jazz music, the Speak-easies and the Irish-American cops raiding some bars to see if anyone’s drinking anything stronger than lemonade, and turning a blind eye to others they probably have shares in. It was a very colourful and exciting time, certainly for us today looking back on it and watching films about it.
A diamond heist brings the sexually masochistic sometimes-hooker Carol into all their lives. Then the end of Prohibition spells the death of the gang’s bootlegging success; what should they do next…? Max comes up with the idea of robbing the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Noodles and Max’s new moll, Carol, both agree that Max must have lost his mind. A heist like that would never work. It’s certain suicide for all concerned. Can his friends stop him from throwing away his one wild and precious life like it’s yesterday newspaper? Or has Max’s fate already been decided by the gods…? Take nothing at face value, folks…
The story is told in a non-linear fashion that will drive some viewers to distraction. The story hops back and forth between Max and Noodles as tough, fit, sexually vigorous young men to Noodles in the late ‘Sixties, returning to Fat Moe’s and his other haunts from wherever he’s been for years and years in answer to a pair of very strange invitations. One is an invite to visit a certain memorial in a certain cemetery, which might just offer a key to a past mystery. The other is to a party at a politician’s home…
I don’t like the ending, with the garbage truck. I’ve heard there’s an alternative, with a single gunshot being heard offscreen, which I think would have worked better. Still, that’s only a small point. A small point, but mine own, lol.
The fabulous musical score was composed by Ennio Morricone, but the pan-flutings of a Romanian musician called Gheorghe Zamfir, who also did the haunting musical score for the 1975 Australian horror film PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, just elevates it even more into the realms of unforgettable film soundtracks than it already was.
There now, I’ve gone on for much longer than I meant to, and after me saying I was going to keep it short and everything. There’s a lot to say about such a long film, though. And, anyway, I really wanted to do it justice, which I hope I have.
It’s perfect viewing for a quiet Bank Holiday night, and there’s a bit of humour in it as well, for example, in the baby-swapping and in the, erm, the identity parade of, um, cocks. No, for once the real thing, not the feathered kind. Could Number Three please step forward and turn to the left? I think that eye might have winked at me before. I just need to see it again… Â
       AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
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Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Stops-Later-Book-ebook/dp/B091J75WNB/
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