WTI Magazine #19    2014 Feb, 28
Author : Simone doc Bracci      Translation by:

The genius of Sergio Leone has always been in front of us: his vision of the events, the space that joins the time and together get shaped as a work of art, to become pure cinema with a mastery that few have had in history. His incredible talent has led him to play the role of Italian ambassador in the world for much of the 20th century. 

Succeeding by the audiovisual language to domesticate time is the privilege of a few: this is what's at the bottom of the Trilogy of Time by the great director Roman, the sense of time expansion that flows into a single story, specimen of rare beauty. This trilogy is composed by "C'era una volta il west" (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968), "Giù la testa" (A Fistful of Dynamite, 1971) and the marvelous "C'era una volta in America" (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984: the latter celebrates these days its thirty years of life, and We the italians wants to honor it.

The making of the movie took more than ten years and Leone, who was obsessively perfectionist, was furious when in New York, for the first time in the February of 1984, an incomplete version of the film was presented, showing a movie that was far away from what would have been the final version of the masterpiece, eventually and officially screened out of competition at the 37th Cannes Film Festival.

Due to its narrative power, the movie is able to embrace the whole life of its protagonist: Noodles, the criminal played by Robert De Niro, who summarizes in a single role the imperfection of the man in the background of an America among the turning of the century, until the post- prohibition in a New York which is actually a natural set.

Sergio Leone so dyes a generational painting in painful shades, tragic, dramatic, but also beautifully human. An artistic masterpiece directed with skill in order to give us one last great message, namely that our path is ephemeral on this Earth. Thirty years have passed now, but that happy smile at the end of the movie remains a cornerstone of the universal cinema, the mockery of someone who has the knowledge (of the cinema) and gives us a glimpse of it. C'est la vie, that's life.