A flawed but magnificent masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (17 September 2001)

This is a 6 hour epic that was cut down to 4 hours for it's initial release and then butchered down to 2 hours and 15 minutes for it's showing in the U.S. Fortunately, I caught the 4 hour version on HBO and ran off to buy it. The plot-line (and I won't go into it in depth) involves four friends from the slums of Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century who rise to become big-time Jewish gangsters. Like Sam Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, these are violent, wicked men, propelled by their lusty desires and big appetites - yet honest and loyal to themselves and true to their own arcane code, and yes, their deep love for each other. The story jumps forwards and backwards like a piece of cloth being run through a sewing machine - like "Catch-22" you never know when the present really is. Try to comprehend it all and you'll be lost - see it as an opium dream, and it begins to make sense. I only wish Leone were still alive to restore the film to the length he might have envisioned. Then perhaps we'd know what Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld and Joey Pesci were supposed to be doing there. The sets are magnificent, the music haunting. De Niro is in fine fettle in a role that the late John Garfield was born to play and James Woods as his life-long best friend holds his own in scenes where they square off mano-a-mano. And don't overlook that endlessly ringing phone that makes your teeth itch, a motif Leone used in both "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." Overcome by its own greatness, like "Apocalypse Now," or Michaelangelo's "St Matthew," this film can be viewed as a magnificent failure.