"Once Upon a Time in America" is a gangster epic movie that describes the conflicts of human nature such as friendship and opposition, loyalty and betrayal. Director Sergio Leone changed the pattern of traditional Hollywood movies and created the image of the underworld people in the United States with a unique perspective. The film is quite imposing, and the violent depiction has a poetic touch. The time span spans 40 years, with major events such as the Great Depression, Prohibition and the First World War as the background. The film only selects a few characters and events in the original work, using a typical Hollywood narrative structure. The difference is that the film’s temporal and spatial structure processing is quite distinctive. The story is gradually unfolded through the memory of the protagonist Noodles. The story is always carried out in a sort of tangled debt entanglement between Noodles and Max ().
The protagonist of the film Noodle is not like a gangster character in a traditional gangster movie. He is more like an ordinary person succumbing to the environment and intuition. At the same time, he has paid the price of his life to seek the ultimate salvation. "Once Upon a Time in America" is, to a certain extent, a purely author's film. It carries all the "American complex" of director Sergio Leone. What he wants to tell is not a logically complete tradition. The story is a pure self-expression of the American history, culture, and spirit that he loved all his life. Because his understanding of the other side of the ocean is not Italian-Americans who grew up on the street like Coppola, but acquired and accumulated through American movies on the screen, so he will shoot such a movie with nonsense. American-style American-themed movies ().
