La musique

Ennio Morricone, compositeur attitré de Sergio Leone, composa même la partition du film plus de dix ans avant le tournage. Mais ceci était une habitude des deux compagnons.Sergio Leone pouvait alors diffuser la musique sur haut parleur durant le tournage pour que l'équipe du film et les comédiens s'emparent de l'ambiance particulière de ses productions.Cela l'aidait aussi personnellement dans son propre travail, afin d'adapter le rythme de mise en scène, le découpage déjà présent dans sa tête, etc.

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Roger Ebert (fin)

A speakeasy scene comes before a newspaper headline announces that Prohibition has been ratified. Prohibition is then repealed, on what feels like the next day but must be six years later. Two gangsters talk about robbing a bank in front of a woman who has never been seen before in the film; they've removed the scene explaining who she is. A labor leader turns up, unexplained, and involves the gangsters in an inexplicable situation. He later sells out, but to whom? Men come to kill De Niro's girlfriend, a character we've hardly met, and we don't know if they come from the mob or the police. And here's a real howler: At the end of the shortened version, De Niro leaves a room he has never seen before by walking through a secret panel in the wall.

How did he know it was there? In the long version, he was told it was there. In the short version, his startling exit shows simple contempt for the audience.Many of the film's most beautiful shots are missing from the short version, among them a bravura moment when a flash-forward is signaled by the unexpected appearance of a Frisbee, and another where the past becomes the present as The Beatles' "Yesterday" sneaks into the sound track. Relationships are truncated, scenes are squeezed of life, and I defy anyone to understand the plot of the short version. The original "Once Upon a Time in America" gets a four-star rating. The shorter version is a travesty.