Sergio Leone’s final film is a tangle of contradictions; at once both unflinchingly violent and wistfully nostalgic, a sweeping epic that is intensely personal. It is perhaps unfortunate that it is often referred to as a poor relative of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, given that although the settings of the two films may be similar, they are radically different in thematic content and ambitions. Once Upon A Time in America deserves to be recognised as a classic in its own right, and on its own merits, rather than in the shade of that other gangster epic.

Epic is indeed the word to describe the film in terms of length; the original cut shown at Cannes runs to 229 minutes, just shy of four hours. While this is still short of something like Bernardo Bertolucci’s ridiculously long Novecento (1976), which weighs in at five-and-a-quarter hours, this is still in the realms of a very long piece of work. Far too long, it was deemed, for an American audience, who were instead presented with a butchered 139 minute cut which destroyed the non-chronological order of the original film, a cut which Roger Ebert quite rightly described as ‘a travesty’ on its release. The structure of the film is absolutely crucial to the film’s integrity.

In describing this structure, it must first be emphasized that this is by no means a film which can be understood by conventional analysis, since the viewer’s reference timeframe is frequently changed. The film presents three separate timeframes: the protagonists’ childhood of the 1920s, their adulthood in Prohibition-era 1930s, and a much later late-1960s setting. Leone was always a director keen to subvert audience expectations, and what he does here is play with the viewer’s perception of which of these three is effectively the ‘here and now’. While a conventional drama would have the later of the timeframes as the reference, thus rendering the other two as flashbacks, there are times when the middle frame feels like the reference, making the last frame a kind of a ‘flash-forward’.

The idea of a ‘flash-forward’ raises serious problems, and has generated wildly differing interpretations of the film’s closing scene, some believing that the 1960s timeframe is merely a construct of Noodles’ opium-stoned imagination. For me, there are too many signposts which can discredit this theory: anachronisms such as the use of Paul McCartney’s Yesterday, and the presence of televisions, jet aircraft and even frisbees cannot, for me, be explained as a psychic prediction of the future by a pot-smoking Noodles in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it is a debate that will certainly rage on, much like the endless bickering between Shadean and Kinbotean readers of Vladimir Nabokov’s similarly enigmatic Pale Fire.

The purpose of this construction is more than just Leone mind-games; one of the key themes of the film is the passing of time, and its effects on relationships, friendships and the way society changes. Regardless of one’s own interpretation of the film’s structure, the core of the film is ultimately centred on an old friendship which is betrayed out of one character’s love for the other, despite the life-changing consequences of his actions, and also how friendships, partnerships and politics are affected by power, greed and corruption. What we don’t get, however, is catharsis or any happy endings, instead the film leaving a more melancholy sense of change and loss.

Accompanying these personal changes is one of the true stars of the film: the city of New York. Whilst the Vito Corleone segments of The Godfather, Part 2 wonderfully evoked the city’s Little Italy, Once Upon a Time in America does a similarly brilliant job with the Jewish ghetto in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. The costumes, music, cars and buildings of 1920s and 1930s America are superbly reproduced; it has often been called the greatest film reproduction of the Prohibition era, a not unimpressive feat.

A word about the music: it may seem heathen to even suggest it, but on first viewing I found the Ennio Morricone score a little too sentimental at times, perhaps more befitting the saccharine dewy-eyed romanticism of a film such as Cinema Paradiso. However, on later watches I came to understand why it is considered his best work, and in fact how crucial it is to framing the structure of the film.

Leone’s choice of aspect ratio is also noteworthy: the Spaghetti Westerns for which he is so synonymous with were shot in 2.35:1, giving them their sparse, epic feel. With America, he shot 1.85:1, making the film feel a touch less dynamic, but more personal. His camerawork is also much more restrained here, there is not much of the mesmeric style he had cultivated in his prior films, up to and including the peerless C’era Una Volta Il West.

Once Upon a Time in America took up seventeen years of Sergio Leone’s life in its creation, during which time he turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather. It would be his final film, and in many ways it is an exception to the films he had directed up until then, but it is also a wonderful culmination of his filmmaking talents. Sometimes, directors end up making too many films, ending their careers long after making their great works; others, perhaps, never reach a satifactory conclusion. Leone, though, managed to finish his career with a defining work: a meditation on life and loss, on the importance of friendships, and the interchangeabilty of past, present and future.

At once both beautiful and horrifying, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face has deservedly been recognized as one of horror cinema’s great treasures. The premise: a doctor, responsible for disfiguring his daughter’s face in a car accident, strives to find her a ‘new’ one by attempting to graft on ones taken from other women, whom he and his assistant kidnap and kill. However, attempt after attempt fails, and both doctor and patient become increasingly deranged.

What is it that makes the film so great? For a start, it functions so well on a horror level: some scenes, while not especially explicit, are too gruesome for even this hardened viewer to stomach. Secondly, the pacing of the film is night-on perfect; this is no splatter-fest, instead we have an almost Hitchcockian air of tension throughout, as we discover the full horror of what has been happening. It makes me think of Vertigo; the daughter Christiane’s haunted, ghostly quality echoing Kim Novak’s Madeleine/Judy, while Dr. Génessier’s manicly grim determination to succeed whatever the costs remind me of James Stewart’s increasing sense of detatchment from reality.

But surely the greatest aspect of the film, aside from these points, is the haunting imagery, which gives the film an almost fairytale-like feel. As fairytale-like as, for instance, Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete, another great French film about beauty and loneliness; as with the beast in that film, we sympathise with Christiane’s isolation from society, but we also withdraw in horror at what is being done by others to restore her beauty. This dichotomy is a classic one in horror fiction, and is certainly a tradition which continues today; one thinks of the work of Mexican auteur Guillermo Del Toro, or Lucky McKee’s underrated May (2002).

The film was released in 1960, a landmark time in French cinema history, with the rise of the Nouvelle Vague and the apparent reinventions of the artform. Godard and Truffaut’s backgrounds were from film criticism. Franju was a similarly influential character from the French cinema scene – he was co-founder of the influential Cinémathèque Française – but he was no critic, not coming armed with theory under one arm and iconoclasm under the other; he was simply a man who loved films, and enjoyed the process of their production. That he was separate from the New Wave movement, in a sense isolated from his peers, is evident from the vast difference in styles between he and they. I always get the feeling that Jean Luc Godard loved the idea of being a film director; Georges Franju simply loved making films.

Ricordati che è un film comico: ‘remember, this is a comedy film’. So, legend has it, Federico Fellini reminded himself with a note positioned near the camera’s viewfinder during the shooting of 8½, his now legendary ‘film about filmmaking’. It is more than just this, though; it is an examination of the challenge every artist faces in the act of creation, the struggle to articulate a representation of one’s own experiences into a work which communicates to somthing to others.

The film is representative of the situation Fellini himself faced in 1963; he had had the thing that all artists both strive for and dread simultaneously: a hit. Despite his earlier critical acclaim for films such as La Strada and Le Notti Di Cabiria, it was La Dolce Vita, released in 1960, that catapulted the director into the worldwide limelight. In 8½, the main character Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is similarly faced with the task of producing a follow up to a succesful film. The trouble is, he doesn’t know what film to make, and is constantly hampered by the demands of critics, mistresses, actors, producers, fans and hangers on. Of course in the plane of reality, the film Fellini was making was 8½.

The film naturally contains many autobiographical elements, in particular childhood recollections; in one particularly memorable scene, the young Guido experiences his sexual awakening with Saraghina, a rather buxom prostitute, who performs a raunghy rhumba for him and his friends. 8½ marks the point in Fellini’s career where autobiography began to become more and more an inspiration for his films: whilst the earlier film I Vitelloni touched on his past in the seaside town of Rimini, it was in later films such as Roma and Amarcord where he would most explicitly deal with his past.

This use of autobiography was not without controversy; Fellini came under domestic critcism for having been seen to have broken with his background with the Neorealist movement of post-war Italy. This accusation was also levelled at a similar time at his filmmaking peers Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica. Of this triumvirate, it is perhaps Fellini against whom the charge seems weakest; even his earlier films, particularly his ‘trilogy of loneliness’ (La Strada, Il Bidone, Le Notti Di Cabiria) never formally adhered to the neorealist structure. Perhaps this was merely jealousy on the part of his critics.

There are so many things to say about how wonderful the film is, and so many scenes that stick vividly in the memory, but one thing i will flag up is the simply wonderful soundtrack. Nino Rota, who would work on all of Fellini’s films until the composer’s death, outdid even his supremely high standards with the score for 8½, the signature passarella wonderfully encapsulating the ‘beautiful confusion’ of the film, and indeed filmmaking. It has been said that the music is the one thing which really binds the film together; certainly the repeating motifs and melodies help to add more of a sense of coherence to what is at times a rather scattergun narrative. In the film’s closing scenes, a small boy with a flute plays the film’s title theme, leading a procession of the film’s characters, characters taken from Fellini’s life, in a large circular dance. The great director is showing us how he sees himself: as that young boy, leading the dance.