Watching Them Be by James Harvey

Author:James Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374712068
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The epic scale and style of Leone’s Proustian gangster film (Noodles and his boyhood gang after a successful heist)

The solution, of course, was to begin at the start of things and simply straighten it all out, cutting an hour and a half (even shorter than The Deer Hunter!). This made what was left intelligible (sort of) but finally pointless, except as a sort of badly out-of-date genre piece, a feebler, less authentic Godfather—as the universally hostile American reviews noted. Leone wanted his name taken off it: “It was never my intention,” he said, “to make a gangster film.” (Had he told them that before? you wonder.) “But the American version looks like one now because they have left only the squalid episodes, one after the other.” It became his third-in-a-row American flop. But after the initial release, the full version got shown that same year at the New York Film Festival, and that’s the version we see now, of course—thankfully.

So it begins—with a dim, distant, barely audible playing of Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” recording over the opening titles (white letters on black). Then a succession of unexplained, seemingly disconnected scenes: a beautiful young woman is blown away by gunsels in her bedroom; a bartender in his saloon is beaten and tortured. Then De Niro is shown in what seems to be an opium den. As he puts the pipe to his mouth, a phone starts ringing. And ringing and ringing, over a nighttime crime scene with flashbulbs popping around some covered bodies in the rain. Then we’re in the middle of a speakeasy jamboree, celebrating the end of Prohibition, with charged-up-looking people exchanging significant looks across the room and over the heads of the revelers. And the incessant phone, still ringing on the soundtrack, finally stops, as a cop in a police station somewhere picks it up to answer, waking (it seems) De Niro in the opium den, just in time, as it turns out, for him to escape the young woman’s killers, who have tracked him there.

The woman is his mistress, Eve (a radiant Darlanne Fleugel); the bartender is his friend Fat Moe (an almost equally radiant nonactor named Larry Rapp). You find all this out fairly soon, but it takes nearly three hours to learn about that phone call, who made it, and why it was important. But the deliberate disorientation, apart from being a fairly usual film noir procedure, gets you to focus on the question of where you are in time at almost any given moment. Just so—as Leone later said, his movie, his magnum opus, is all about time, and about memory and “about cinema itself.” “That’s why you can’t see it in chronological order,” he also said.

The cinema itself—yes. Because you feel the power of old movies, of movieness itself, in every foot of this film, from its very first images onward—of Leone’s childhood movies and your own. That time when movie houses were not only like palaces (not by accident) and movie screens like towers of light, but when even the spaces outside were bigger.

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