The film is adapted from David Aronson's autobiographical novel "The Hooligan". The director skillfully and unrestrainedly applies the tactics of a police film to turn this shocking literary work into an intertwined entanglement of love and hatred. The American legend of shameless prince and bravery, despicable betrayal and righteousness, hearty and sad and compassionate. What's commendable is that the film is not just a legend. Its objective and calm attitude and sharp and ruthless analysis are more like an image fable. Generally speaking, dramas in the traditional sense like to whitewash the protagonist as a hero who can fly over the walls, but Leoné never beautifies the gangs from beginning to end. The life of the protagonist Noodle is more like it under its lens. It was a fantasy, even close to a nightmare, but even the director of the nightmare was unwilling to let him keep it, and finally let the ruthless reality crush the dream to pieces ().
The film is like an aria in an Italian opera, with emotions and the complex relationship between emotions as the core expression content, vividly expressing all Leone's views on friendship and love (). Maybe Noodles is a positive character in the classic American police film. He is so righteous and chivalrous; and Max should be the object of condemnation. He is scheming, sinister and vicious, and even sells his best friend in order to achieve his personal goals. However, the picture that the director Leone wants to present to the audience is not as simple as good and evil. What he wants to express is a kind of suspicion and questioning from outsiders to the legend advertised by the United States. In fact, it was Max, not noodles, that constituted an American "miracle." That is a foreign immigrant who can one day make a facelift and become an upper class society, with officials and ministers in power. If measured by the standards of capitalist society, Max is undoubtedly a winner, while Noodles is a loser. All the weaknesses of Noodles are exposed in Max's realistic, sharp, and calm eyes. In the end, the winner Maxgar was admitted to the title, while the loser Noodle was in prison for 12 years, losing all his property and even his beloved woman. It is the pros and cons presented by Noodles and Max that constitute a complex mixture of reality and poetry, cruelty and tenderness, punishment and sin, which makes people who are accustomed to gratitude and enmity have to find themselves in this psychological gap. Think about society and human nature ().
