ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. (1984) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. (1984) DIRECTED BY SERGIO LEONE. MUSIC BY ENNIO MORRICONE. BASED ON THE 1952 BOOK, ‘THE HOODS,’ BY HARRY GREY.
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.
 
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…  

       AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
 
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/

HOLOCAUST. (1978) THE TV MINI-SERIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

holocaust meryl streep

HOLOCAUST. (1978) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY GERALD GREEN. DIRECTED BY MARVIN J. CHOMSKY.

STARRING MERYL STREEP, JAMES WOODS, MICHAEL MORIARTY, FRITZ WEAVER, ROSEMARY HARRIS, JOSEPH BOTTOMS, MARIUS GORING, TOM BELL, IAN HOLM, CYRIL SHAPS, ANTHONY HAYGARTH, SAM WANAMAKER AND DAVID WARNER.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This magnificent television dramatisation of some of history’s darkest and most shameful events clocks in at a whopping four hundred and forty six minutes, or five easily digestible ninety minute blocks.

It’s the story of two fictional families in wartime Germany, the Weiss family and the Dorf family, and how they were both affected by Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, his anti-Jewish laws and his World War that laid waste to most of Europe.

The Weiss family are Jewish, and the Dorfs are not, and therein lies the reason why the lives of two such ordinary German families could have run along such divergent lines in the exact same time period, intersecting nonetheless in places during times of the most dreadful stress and terror.

Let’s get right down to business. Joseph and Berta Weiss are a typical German couple for the time, wealthy, cultured, civilised and decent people who love their children, Karl, Anna and Rudi, and want only the best for them.

When we meet them first, the Weisses are celebrating the mixed marriage (already frowned upon by the Nazis unofficially; soon to be outlawed in Germany by law) of their eldest son Karl, an artist (James Woods) to Inga Helms (Meryl Streep), a beautiful German Christian woman.

Every time Hitler and his Nazis, whom the Weisses are too genteel to call thugs and barbarians outright, lay down another anti-Jewish law, Joseph and Berta tell themselves that it won’t go on for much longer, that, after all, they’re Germans too, aren’t they, and Hitler couldn’t really mean them to be banished from their own country like lepers, could he…?

Berta’s Jewish Pops, a delightful old ex-soldier who proudly displays the Iron Cross he won for fighting for his country (Germany) in World War One, thinks that Germany isn’t stupid enough and cruel enough to treat her loyal German war veterans, regardless of their religion, like vermin. He finds out differently on the black, black night that history refers to as ‘Kristallnacht,’ or ‘The Night Of Broken Glass…’

Berta and Joseph leave it too late to flee Germany. This is partly down to Berta, a classical pianist and a gentle, peace-loving kind-hearted woman, who keeps stubbornly reiterating that she’s German, they’re all Germans, and this is their country too. Why should they up sticks and leave Germany to those jack-booted, black-suited thugs, the Nazis?

By the time her beloved husband, a doctor who’d go to any lengths to help someone in need, is deported to Poland to what eventually becomes the Warsaw Ghetto, Berta realises her mistake. They should all have read the signs and fled Germany when they had the chance…

Her son Karl has been arrested purely on the grounds of being Jewish and sent to Buchenwald, a concentration camp. Her daughter Anna has already suffered a terrible fate at the hands of the Nazis, and even Berta, her mother, doesn’t know just how terrible it is. Berta’s youngest son Rudi has run off to join the partisans, although his mother hasn’t a clue where he is or what he’s doing. She mightn’t ever even see him again.

Rudi, by the way, is a great character. No way is he going meekly like a lamb to the slaughter, as he sees his fellow Jews doing. He’s going to fight those bastard Nazis, and he’ll damn well make sure he takes as many of them down with him as we can. It’s good to have fighters like him and Uncle Sasha and Uncle Moses in a film that touches painfully on the awkward subject of Jewish apathy in the face of Nazi hostilities.

Inga is having to submit to being raped repeatedly by a Nazi in order to get her letters through to Karl in Buchenwald and, when Karl finds out what she’s had to endure to contact him, the ungrateful bastard turns against her. She even gets herself sent to Theresienstadt later on to be near him (he’s working here in their artist’s studio, believe it or not)but he still isn’t grateful for all her sacrifices. I’d leave him to rot where he is, seriously.

Erik Dorf is a handsome young lawyer and father of two who is looking for work. He joins the Nazi party because he needs a job, and also because his fanatical wife Marta is extremely ambitious for him and she thinks that ‘the Party’ is the way to go for their little family.

Erik doesn’t feel like he’s cut out to swagger about in a fancy Nazi uniform, pushing people about, but he gets used to it remarkably quickly. He quickly rises through the ranks after becoming invaluable to Reinhard Heydrich (David Warner doesn’t look much like this young blond god!), the man tasked with carrying out Hitler’s ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.’

Erik’s involvement in ‘Kristallnacht’ earns him a promotion. Before too much time has elapsed, he’s Major Dorf, with a sort of travelling commission as part of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate. His job seems to be speeding up the killing process and making the camps more efficient as death factories.

We see him assisting Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, with the introduction of Zyklon B, the pesticide used to gas millions of Jews. We see him attending a demonstration of the gas in action (‘Fantastic, utterly fantastic! It’s like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.’), against real people, and we can tell he hasn’t the stomach for it. Is this because he feels that what he’s doing is inherently wrong, or because he’s simply squeamish?

From time to time, we get the impression that Erik Dorf knows he’s going to hell for what he and his precious ‘Party’ have done, and yet there are other times when he can stand and impassively watch an atrocity taking place without batting an eyelid, such as when he’s a witness to the murder of 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine in 1941. He’s fascinated at the way in which they passively go to their deaths, but I guess we’d all be the same if a bunch of guys were pointing machine-guns at us.

He constantly parrots the Nazi and SS mantra, that he’s only following orders, orders from above, orders from the highest office in the land. Does he really believe that it’s okay to murder women and children though, just on the basis that he’s ‘following orders?’ Does he really believe that blindly following orders justifies the massacres he constantly oversees?

Sometimes it looks like there’s a flicker of remorse behind his dead fish eyes but then, at other times, he’s a blank, a robot, an automaton. He’s the most important character in the show, in my opinion, because he helps us to see the logic, if you can call it that, behind the actions of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

And, no matter what Dorf tries to make out after it’s all over, he’s a perpetrator. Even his wife, who makes her husband join the Nazi Party so she won’t have to stand in line at the butchers’ for the best cuts of meat any more, is a perpetrator. She makes Erik turn away Dr. Weiss when he comes to them for help when Karl has been arrested and incarcerated in Buchenwald. Goddammit, she’s nearly as much of a perpetrator as he is.

The mini-series does an excellent job of portraying the different situations that arose during the time of the Holocaust. We see the concentration camps, the Sonderkommando (the work details of Jewish prisoners who attended the gassings and afterwards burned the bodies in the crematoria) and the actual killing machinery. We see the Warsaw ghetto and the brave men who tried to defend it at the end. (Uncle Moses, you ROCK, and so does that old Rabbi who’s with you at the end!!!)

We see the Jewish Council (or Judenrat), of which Dr. Joseph Weiss is a member, having to select six thousand people a day to go on the dreaded transportations out of the ghetto to the death camps. We actually see the Jews on these transportations being bullshitted by the Nazis regarding this so-called ‘resettlement in the East.’ It’s not so bad, it’s only a work camp, and families can stay together, see? A wonderful new life awaits everyone in the East, now all aboard…

We see the Jews chosen by the Nazis to ‘police’ the ghettos, and we know how they too end up. ‘Don’t worry, Dr. Weiss, it’ll be my turn soon enough…’ We see the smuggling of food that went on in the ghetto even though the Nazis forbade it, but without the smugglers, even more people would have died in the gutters of starvation, a horrible slow death that no-one deserves.

We see the liquidation of the ghettos and how it was achieved, albeit with much bloodshed on both sides. We also see the Nazis’ T4 Euthanasia Programme (of the sick, the old and the disabled) in action, even though we might feel better for never having seen it at all.

We see Rudi taking part in the Sobibor concentration camp uprising and escape in October 1943, and his brother Karl being tortured by the Nazis over paintings he does in Theresienstadt that accurately represent the various desperate situations in the concentration camps, instead of the nice happy paintings commissioned by the Nazis.

We see how Theresienstadt in Prague was used as the ‘model’ concentration camp, trotted out whenever the International Committee of the Red Cross (the ICRC) wanted to send a few inspectors in. ‘Oh, we didn’t see any signs of any maltreatment,’ they invariably said when they’d completed their inspections there.

Well, d’uh! That’s what the Nazis wanted them to think. They went to a lot of trouble, with their fake coffee shops and their fake post office and their fake bank and their fake happy healthy prisoners, to make sure that the ICRC thought just what they wanted them to think.

The Jews are getting on grand here, the ICRC always said after a visit. They never seemed to question the right of the Nazis to imprison the Jews in the first place, but never mind. As long as they never saw any signs of maltreatment when they inspected the camps, well, I guess that’s all right then…

Tom Bell is utterly odious here as Adolf Eichmann, the number-cruncher of the entire Holocaust, and Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins to you!) almost unrecognisable as Himmler, the third point of the ‘Final Solution’ triumvirate that had Eichmann and Heydrich as the other two points.

The assassination of Heydrich takes place off-screen, ditto the murder of a German bureaucrat/diplomat called Ernst Vom Rath by the Jewish Herschel Grynszpan, that prompted the shattering events of ‘Kristallnacht.’ 

Two one-off members of the cast of ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em,’ starring Michael Crawford as the hapless Frank Spencer, can be seen in HOLOCAUST in small but important roles. See if you can guess which two…!

The whole mini-series is pretty much faultless. James Woods as Karl Weiss is a terrible husband- frankly Inga would be better off with that fat Nazi (a ‘fatzi?’) Heinz Mueller- but other than that I’ve no complaints. Top-notch viewing, recommended viewing in fact for students of the Holocaust. It certainly proves the point that, for bad men to triumph, all it takes is for good folks to do nothing…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. 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

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

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