This is a still from one of the most epic gangster movies ever made.

Once Upon A Time In America was the final film by the Italian maestro Sergio Leone, who had made the Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood, plus the equally epic Once Upon A Time In The West. I saw …America when I was reviewing movies for the student newspaper while at university, and I wrote a long and glowing review of it. Press screenings took place very late evening at the local cinema, and as Leone’s masterpiece is almost 4 hours long it would have been the small hours of the morning before I staggered out of the cinema, still buzzing.

The bum-numbing length of the movie however was a problem upon release for the US distributor, who hacked it down to 2 hours, and rearranged the scenes chronologically. Given the movie intercuts between 3 separate periods in the characters’ lives, and has a lot to say about how time affects us all, this rather destroyed Leone’s intentions and was seen as something of a travesty. Its not a perfect movie (for starters, it has a rather troubling attitude towards women – the 2 main female characters both end up getting raped), but one that definitely deserved to be seen in its original cut, which is how it was screened in Europe.

The two main gangsters are played excellently as adults by Robert DeNiro and James Woods, seen here in old age make-up. This still was released to the press as part of the pre-publicity, which rather spoils a key plot point, but there you go.