Vacuous spaghetti eastern

Rating: 7/10 (9 June 2017)

This film has its visually beautiful moments, poignant scenes, and revealing dialogue -- very few, scattered one per ten minutes of viewing. It also has mindless gore, unrealistic rape, and laughable motivation -- lots of them. Read another review for details.
So, why was this film made rather than a much better one?
In "High Noon," the tenuous social institutions can't stand up to a few bad guys; the institutions are weak, though not evil. Ditto for "Who Shot Liberty Valence." We resort to individual violence as a last resort against evil.
That's not the case here. Institutions are strong, just evil. Cops are on the take, protect scabs, ignore crime, while bosses hire gangsters to machine-gun union organizers, politicians organize business and union fronts for crime. It's everyone for themselves. There is no morality, just the strong and the weak. The time in "Once Upon a Time in America" runs from the start of Prohibition to end of the sixties, so this is most of 20th century America, including a period where they had some of the strongest, most responsive institutions in world history.
It is not America itself that is of interest here -- 35 years of history are skipped over without a mention and another 12 years get only passing reference. There is a perception of something about America, something about those American westerns and gangster movies of someone's childhood otherwise spent under oppressive European institutions, something freeing about amorality and lack of social control, something justifying disobedience and adolescent rebellion. I am reminded of "Love Actually" and the character certain that if he gets to America girls will love his British accent and fall into bed with him. In the film, they do. And in this film, America is supposed to swoon over the Italian schoolboy daydreaming his American Gangster life.