The Movie: This is a very long film about a former prohibition-era Jewish gangster who after 30-some odd years receives a cryptic message that brings him back to his hometown of New York City. Due to its length, Once Upon a Time in America sat unwatched... I just never got around to dedicating the nearly 4 hours it would take to watch the film, but finally, after having it from netflix for over two months, I popped that bad boy into my DVD player and checked it out.

Sergio Leone's last film started out as a novel with a story he loved, but after collaborations with numerous authors, the story ballooned into a serious epic, with some people saying Leone wanted to make it six hours long (broken into two, three hour films), but the studio didn't go for that and made him cut it down to the slightly less than 4 hour length we have today. And even at four hours in length, there are some serious gaps in the story line that resulted from having nearly two hours cut out.

Overall, this was a pretty good film, following a group of boyhood friends in three different time periods - as boys, as young men, and as old men, switching back and forth through time, though not in a cheesy gimmicky way, but in a way that actually helps tell the whole story a little bit better. As boys it shows their beginnings of hustling and building a strong bond. As young men it shows their successes running an illegal club through the prohibition days, and as old men... well, being old, I guess. It's got a solid plotline, and some great performances from a whole lot of great actors.

The only thing that I didn't really like about this film was its pan flute heavy sound track. It was just too much, going beyond adding a little western flavor (after all, this is a Sergio Leone film), becoming obtrusive, or even annoying at times.

Anyways, I guess my overall verdict is "pretty good" and definitely worth watching, but probably not good enough for me to want to sit through the entire thing again.

The DVD: This is a two disc set, with the movie spread across both discs. As was the case with the Superbit version of Lawrence of Arabia, the intermission comes part way into the second disc, as the part of the film before the intermission really is a bit too long to get maximum picture quality on one disc.

This actually brings up a major annoyance with the way in which these discs are authored. Most of the films I've encountered that were split across multiple discs were set up so that the second disc starts up the second half of the movie right away after you put the disc in to your player. This particular DVD release has you watching the WB logo come up again, and dumps you in at the main menu. This is especially annoying because the disc break comes in the middle (or right at the end) of a big action scene, and makes for a much bigger break in the action than what you'd get if the second half just started up right away.

The video was 1980's film grainy, with some crushed blacks (perhaps intentional?), and with a bit too much edge enhancement which resulted in some occasional "ringing" artifacts, but the transfer was otherwise clean, with very low occurrence of dust or debris in the image.

The audio was about as good as you might expect from a mid-1980's film, meaning that there wasn't as full of a dynamic range as you might expect from something more recent, however, it was plenty functional, and overall, just fine.

Extras on this release include a modern look at the making of this film called "Once Upon a Time: Sergio Leone" which was done in anamorphic widescreen, and a trailer, also in anamorphic widescreen. There's also a commentary track, but not one by anyone who actually worked on the film, and the text-based features seemed pretty sparse, even as far as text-based extras go.