Although Leone spent a full decade working almost full-time on his magnum opus and final film, he had begun to envision the project even earlier, in the late 1960s when he first discovered Henry Grey’s 1952 novel The Hoods and began to imagine breaking free from the Western with his own reinvention of the American gangster film. His most cherished and personal film, Once Upon a Time in the West offers the purest expression of Leone’s obsession with time and memory, revealed in the complex structure of inter-nested flashbacks that triggers the film’s hallucinatory collage design, and in the figure of Robert De Niro’s lonely aging gangster looking back at the past with regret and confusion. Tragically, Leone was unable to prevent the US distributor from butchering his vision by removing ninety minutes of crucial footage and, outrageously, “correcting” his radically non-linear narrative by insisting that the film’s events should proceed in chronological order. Restored to the complete length and structure of the film’s successful European release, Once Upon a Time in America reveals the full dimensions of Leone’s vision, a sweeping panorama of Prohibition-era New York conjured with astonishing attention to detail – and at tremendous expense – as seen from the perspective of two childhood friends, Jewish bootleggers played by De Niro and James Woods, each in revelatory mid-career performances. – HG