Once Upon a Time in America (Italian title C'era una volta in America) is a 1984 epic crime film directed and co-written by Sergio Leone and starring Robert De Niro and James Woods. The story chronicles the lives of Jewish ghetto youths who rise to prominence in New York City's world of organized crime. The film explores themes of childhood friendships, love, loss, greed, violence, the passage of time, broken relationships, and the appearance of mobsters in American society.
The film premiered out of competition at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival[1] in its original running time of 229 minutes (3 hours 49 minutes). However, against Leone's wishes, it was released in the United States in a heavily edited and truncated version (almost ninety minutes shorter than the original version released in Europe). The short version eliminates the elaborate flashback structure of the film, instead placing all of the scenes in chronological order.
It is the third and final part of a loose trilogy of epics called Once Upon a Time Trilogy, follows 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West and 1971's A Fistful of Dynamite (known alternatively as Once Upon a Time... the Revolution or Duck, You Sucker).[citation needed]
Once Upon a Time in America was Sergio Leone's final film. - wiki