Notably, he is the only one of his friends (and, in fact, one of the few men at the party) who is not wearing a tuxedo or any sort of black tie ensemble. Noodles wears a charcoal gray flannel suit with thin red chalk stripes that – perhaps coincidentally – evoke the image of his friends’ blood spilling out that evening against the dark pavement streets. When the two hear the news that Prohibition is coming to an end, Max immediately begins putting plans into place for an even more lucrative and dangerous criminal enterprise… leaving Noodles at a conflicted crossroads on the eve of repeal.
Max (James Woods), the group’s ambitious de factor leader, has grown quite successful in the underworld with the rest of Noodles’ criminal comrades, and his grandiose dreams for further success draw an almost immediate contemptuous divide with the simpler and newly paroled Noodles. Having served nearly a dozen years for killing a ruthless racketeer that murdered the youngest member of their teenage criminal enterprise, Noodles is released from prison during the waning months of Prohibition. The non-chronological narrative leaps around from 1921 to 1933 with cuts to 1968 that may or may not be the elaborate dreams of an opiated Noodles. Ten years later, he took on the complex role of “Noodles” Aaronson in Sergio Leone’s even more complex cinematic tome Once Upon a Time in America.īased on Harry Grey’s novel The Hoods, Once Upon a Time in America follows the lives of four young Jewish criminals from their teen years in the early 1920s through the height of their criminal career at the end of Prohibition, effectively exploring relationships and friendships, greed and lust, masculinity and insecurity, and the role of crime in America’s foundation. His role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II in 1974 shot him to the top of Hollywood’s most-demanded actors. This Mafia Monday post checks in with Robert De Niro as a mobster coming to terms with what that means for his career and personal life in 1984’s Once Upon a Time in America.īefore becoming Martin Scorsese’s poster boy for headlining mob movies in films like Goodfellas and Casino (see last Thursday’s post), Robert De Niro starred in not one but two crime-centric epics that used the better part of three hours using America’s criminal past as a microcosm for its own history. Robert De Niro as David “Noodles” Aaronson, mob bootlegger and violent ex-convictĬostume Designer: Gabriella Pescucci BackgroundĨ3 years ago today, the 21st amendment was ratified to officially repeal Prohibition, delighting a thirsty American public but leaving many criminals who had made their fortunes from bootlegging effectively “unemployed”.
Robert De Niro as “Noodles” Aaronson in Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
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