Rating: 3.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 23/52 | Euro Crime
It’s the 1930s. Eve walks into her apartment. On her bed, she sees burn marks. Pulling back the sheets, she finds the outline of a person made from the burn marks. Three men leave the shadows and break a picture on an end table. They’re looking for the man in the photo named Noodles. When Eve answers that she doesn’t know, they shoot her. The men continue their search, beating Fat Moe bloody. Fat Moe gives up Noodle’s location: Chun Lo’s Chinese theatre, which has an opium den in the back.
There, we find Noodles on his back in an opium daze. Next to him is a newspaper about three bootleggers slain by the feds. He hears a phone ringing and sits up. A man hands Noodles the opium pipe and tells him to lie down. Noodles looks into the lamp, and we transition back in time. Rain falls as firefighters put out an overturned truck fire and line up three dead men for the coroner. Noodles looks from the crowd: they are the same dead men we saw in the newspaper. The phone is still ringing.
Cut to a prohibition-era nightclub. Noodles crosses the floor to his office. He picks up the phone. The phone is still ringing. He dials a number, and we see the phone of Sgt. P. Halloran. The phone comes off the receiver. The phone is still ringing. It erupts into a siren, waking Noodles from his opium trance. The three men hunting for Noodles enter the theater. The theater people help Noodles escape out the back. He arrives the following day at the place where the three beat up Fat Moe. One still stands over Fat Moe’s body. Noodles calls the elevator but then sneaks around back, killing the man and grabbing the keys to Eve’s. But Fat Moe tells him it’s too late. The other key is to a lockbox at the train station.
Noodles opens the lockbox and takes out the briefcase. He looks inside and only finds newspapers. So, Noodles buys a one-way ticket on the first bus leaving. He sees a painted advertisement for Coney Island, a glass door underneath. He walks up to the glass door and sees himself white-haired and wrinkled. A symphonic rendition of Yesterday by The Beatles plays. Noodles steps away from the door, and the ad is now a LOVE-themed ad for the Big Apple. He rents a car and drives to the Beth Israel cemetery, where a construction crew digs up the old graves. He calls up Fat Moe, and the two converse over J&B. It turns out the men looking for Noodles found him in hiding after thirty-odd years.
Throughout the film, we move through time, the future, and the past to see how Noodles and three of his friends became involved in the Jewish mob and how everything crumbled. It starts with a suitcase that once contained money—who took it?
The film uses things like windows and mirrors as gateways to different points in time, starting in the 1930s, moving to the 1960s, and then returning to 1918, where it all began.
I like it when the kids whistle Ennio Morricone’s score. It’s weird when Cockeye plays it on the pan flute. The score itself is pretty good—it sounds like someone put The Godfather’s score through a pan-flute synth patch.
The casting for young DeNiro and young James Woods is pretty perfect. Whether intended or not, the actors play them with homoerotic chemistry.
There are two graphic scenes of SA—one with a zany, Tinto Brass quality. The other is long and horrifying. The first rewarded Noodles with attention from a woman he wasn’t interested in, so like a child who became a man in prison, he learned a life lesson. Based on that lesson, the second destroyed any hope he had of being with someone he loved. While there are myriad ways to communicate this, the film chose these unforgivable acts to remind you how sick and dangerous this guy is. Ultimately, it doesn’t amount to much to the story, so…
The film makes many mobster troupes more explicit, saying what is usually understood out loud. Early in, Noodles tells Max that when you’re helping folks double-cross, that double-cross will soon be on you.
In some ways, the movie also goes against some troupes. For example, Noodles is never on board for any of it. He’s always the voice of dissent, yet he still ends up part of it. The film goes out of its way to railroad Noodles. Or maybe that’s how he remembers it.
— It wasn't my choice. — Yes, it was. It still is.
Those two lines sum up this movie, and the mobster movie in general.