Is Once Upon a Time in America worth watching? 

Once Upon a Time in America is a crime film directed by Sergio Leone. The story chronicles the lives of Jewish ghetto youths who rise to prominence in New York City's world of organized crime. The film explores themes of childhood friendships, love, loss, greed, violence, the passage of time, broken relationships, and the appearance of mobsters in American society.

The film is made up of two extended flashback sequences(in 1922~1923 and 1932~1933, respectively), along with a framing device set in 1968. Summoned back to New York after thirty-five years of hiding in Buffalo, New York, aged Jewish mobster David “ Noodles“Aaronson is forced to confront his past as he searches for the mysterious person who tracked him down. The bodies of three of his former friends are moved from a Jewish cemetery, which is dug up to make room for a new building complex, to a crypt in another cemetery. He also receives an invitation to a party from a mysterious Secretary of Commerce, Christopher Bailey. In order to find the answers as to who sends for him and why, he must look back into his painful boyhood and young adult years.

The 1922~1923 childhood sequence shows young Noodles’struggles as a poor street kid in the Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn. His gang consists of Patrick “Patsy” Goldberg, Phillip“Cockeye” Stein, and little Dominic. They nominally work for local hoodlum Bugsy, The scenes deal with Noodles and his gang as they first meet Max and become an independent operation under his and Noodles’ leadership, the establishment of the gang funds (the suitcase in the train station locker which later becomes a crucial plot piece), and Noodles’ fruitless flirtation with Deborah Gelly, a local girl who aspires to be a dancer and actress. The sequence ultimately ends in tragedy as Bugsy, furious over the boys' becoming independent of him, shoots Dominic in front of his friends. Noodles retaliates by stabbing Bugsy to death with a switchblade, along with a police officer who intervenes, and he is sent to jail for nearly nine years. Max, in charge with Noodles’ absence, is left alone on the outside with the group.

Now a young man, Noodles is released from jail in 1932 and quickly becomes reacquainted with his old gang, who are now major players in the bootlegging industry during the waning days of Prohibition. The gang is recruited by the Minaldi brothers to steal a shipment of diamonds from an insurance dealer and deliver them to Joe.

Determined to show Deborah he is more than the poor street kid he once was, Noodles goes on an extravagant date with Deborah and he pours out his soul to her. However, he is left feeling rejected by her after she informs him of her intention to leave for Hollywood to become an actress. Enraged, he rapes her in the backseat of their limousine, but he instantly regrets this after she leaves without a goodbye.

Meanwhile, Max drives the gang in even deeper with the Mafia. union, and politics. Max is very willing and eager to advance his gang's position, but Noodles still expresses deep misgivings about what they are doing. After Prohibition is repealed in 1933, Noodles balks when Max suggests that they launch a robbery of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Realizing that it would be a suicidal gesture, he is convinced to tip off the police about a planned liquor run; after he places an anonymous phone call, Max, Patsy, and Cockeye are all killed in a shootout with the police after Max starts shooting in an attempt to get killed. Having been hiding out in an opium den, Noodles barely escapes his pursuers and saves Moe from his abuser. Having retrieved the key to the locker, he makes his way to the gang's money hoard, which they all agreed, as boys, belongs to all of them. However, Noodles is shocked to discover that the money is missing, and he is forced to flee to Buffalo, where he lives under the name Robert Williams.

In the 1968 sequences, Noodles returns to New York and reunites with Fat Moe, When visiting the mausoleum where the bodies of his friends were moved, he discovers a plaque dedicated to them by himself(which he has not done) and a key to the same locker where they kept their savings, Upon arriving, he discovers a suitcase of money with a note stating it is payment for a contract killing. Later, he learns from an elderly Carol that Max deliberately wanted to die rather than end up in an asylum like his father, and Deborah has become a famous actress. While meeting with her after a performance of Cleopatra and Antony, he discovers from her that Bailey had a son whose mother died in childbirth and that Deborah has been living with him. He is shocked to learn that the son David waiting outside (named after him) bears a striking resemblance to Max.

It is then revealed to the audience that Max survived the shootout, faked his death with help from the Syndicate, stolen the million dollars and taken on the identity of Secretary Bailey. Throughout the present day scenes, Bailey is said to be under investigation for claims of corruption, and he has hired Noodles to assassinate him allowing him to finally obtain his revenge on Max and give him a chance to settle the score. Not wanting to kill another person, Noodles simply refuses. Furious that this is Noodles’ way of getting revenge, he steps into the back of a garbage truck and kills himself.

Gangster Film

Gangster film genre matured and changed over time from the year 1925 through 1950. Major elements of the genre, as well as the style, influences, themes, and mythic resonance's contained in gangster films.During the mid-1920s, the gangster film began to attain its status as a movie genre.

Throughout its development, the gangster film genre provided an index of the social, political, and cultural values of the times. As a popular form, gangster films reflected the ideas and concerns, which held the attention of the general public, As the genre developed, the moral stance, which these films presented kept pace with the changing attitudes in vogue at the time. Perhaps the most important gangster film to be made was Little Caesar, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and released in 1930. This picture clearly defined the genre of the gangster film as it is thought of today. However, it is important to note that “the roots of the gangster film go back to the movies’ infancy." As early as 1912, D.W. Griffith's one-reeler Musketeers of Pig Alley already featured “ such soon to be standard ingredients as the innocent hero and heroine unwittingly embroiled between rival gangster factions”.

The gangster genre surged in popularity during the 1930s, and most historians locate the beginning of its classical phase at this time .“ The gangster picture became an excellent format to display cinema's sound capacities: ballistic machine gun fire, screeching tires and sharp streets electrified the screen. The rise also coincided with historical conditions of Prohibition, notorious real gangsters, like Al Capone, and violent outbursts, such as The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929.

Film historian Robert Warshow has argued that gangster films represent an American form of tragedy, pivoting on capitalism's dark underbelly. Warshow's formula for all gangster films typically involves a poor immigrant so desperate for the American dream money, position flashy clothes and cars that he falls prey to a life of crime. His rise is feverish, and his downfall complete, usually culminating in a spectacularly violent death. This climactic ending was necessitated, in part, by censorship's demands for compensating moral values. Filmmakers couldn't glorify crime; they had to make sure that it didn't pay in the final analysis.

Yet, the interest center a film's most memorable and influential qualities of the gangster film rests squarely with the use of guns, cars, piles of cash and street smarts. As with the Western, the gangster film reinvents the public's fascination with the swaggering male Western outlaw who has an underlying distrust of modern society, this time set in a decidedly urban milieu.

During the 1930s, cultural anxieties continued to mount over the ghettoization of major urban cities across America. Public attention was focused on individual's fight to access financial security, in addition to new forms of contraband. These factors ensured the success of the gangster film genre, which developed at this time. Key examples of classical gangster films include Little Caesar (1930), Scarface, ThShame of The Nation (1932), and The Roaring Twenties (1939).

Motion pictures, though often viewed as no more than fantasy and escapism, often reflect the society and time in which they are produced and for all the melodrama and " fantasy" of the gangster film genre, this one type of film that seems destined to be a reflection on the society which produces it, Such as Public Enemy ( William Wellman, 1931) and  The God father (Francis Coppola, 1972). Though they are separated by 40 years of time, the two films have much in common, they both reflect different views of their respective social settings and specifically of the nature of the experience of organized crime in America.