Corman Writ Large?

Rating: 6/10 (31 March 2010)

I know this must be a good movie -- more than a collection of point-blank gun shots, close ups of greasy faces, and crude sex jokes -- because everyone tells me so. Therefore, there's something wrong with me because so many of its purported virtues escape me. Is it that I am actually a terrified anxiety neurotic trapped in this body of a robust, tattooed skinhead? Hmm. Nope. It can't be that, because for that I'd need the body of a robust, tattooed skinhead. Let me think.
First, this story strikes me as a kind of Kugel gangster story. Sure, the characters all have Jewish names but beneath that we can easily discern the fun-loving, solidary male society of the Italian cowboys on the plains of Spain.
Second, this must be the biggest budget Sergio Leone ever handled, and it must have left him tickled pink. He was already into his 50s and this was his biggest chance. It's like a Roger Corman gangster movie, only with money and ambition.
Roger Corman never seems to have thought behind the next scene, whereas the length, multi-generational script, and star power of the cast has enable Leone to give this the gloss of nostalgia. Corman wouldn't have bothered. And to a great extent it works too. There is the score of Ennio Morricone to remind us, lest we forget. Not only do we hear Zamphir or somebody on the Peruvian nose flute or shakuhachi or whatever it is, the score even borrows from the Beatles' "Yesterday." So, although it has all the earmarks of Leone -- the first 25 minutes have about a dozen words of dialog and they all come in a rush in the last ten -- I guess it has some virtues after all. I'm a sucker for nostalgia and male bonding. I'm a sucker too for the thirteen-year-old Jennifer Connolly waltzing around to "Amapola" in a mist of magical dust like something out of a fairy tale, criminal, prompting every man to dream of San Quentin. She's serene. She seems secure in her own Alice-in-Wonderland beauty, as if in the thrall of a belief that it will last.
It's a lengthy movie and at times slow. The director uses part of that allotment to give us a couple of grown-up scenes. In one, a doomed man holds a casually ominous conversation with his betrayer standing on the opposite sidewalk. A garbage truck grinds along the street between. When it passes the victim is gone.
In another, Robert DeNiro learns that the virginal love of his life is about to leave for a career in Hollywood. He rapes her repeatedly in the back seat of a limousine while she kicks and screams until the chauffeur, whom we've never met, brings the car to a screeching halt in the middle of nowhere and opens the back door. DeNiro stumbles out, arranging his clothes, offers the driver a handful of bills and says, "Take her home." Wordlessly, the driver goes back to the car, leaving the money in DeNiro's outstretched hand. The scene undoes a little of the damage done by Tuesday Weld and the array of penises.
Yes, thinking it over, I'll forgive the adolescent gag of the masked criminals demanding that the sluttish Tuesday Weld identify her rapist by his penis alone. Weld is the whore to Connolly/McGovern's Madonna. This movie has two kinds of women -- whores and Madonnas. The latter you take home to Mamma. The first you adopt as a mistress. You see what I mean? It's a little hard to squeeze past these calcified clichÃ©s.
But, okay. Leone has done one thing he deserves credit for. He tries, for the first time in his career that I'm aware of, to illustrate on the screen a genuine sense of loss, loss of friends and of love, of both men and women, not just through the script but Morricone's elegiac score and the judicious use of New York locations, and he comes close enough to get a pass.