Blog 16

The film “Once Upon a Time in America” plot was based on a group of Jewish gangsters in New York’s Lower East Side in 1920s from early childhood to the early 1930s in the last years of Prohibition through there glory years and into the late 1960s when they meet again. The film is told from the perspective of Noodles a character played by Robert De Niro as an adult; in a series of flashbacks.

The early childhood scenes in the film were during Prohibition which was put in effect in New York City on January 16, 1920 to ban all manufacturing, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcohol and alcoholic beverages. In the film Noodles and the gang would commit small crimes that would earn the money like stealing from homes and local stores or preying on a drunk person to steal there money. Noodles came up with an idea that he pitched to a local Italian mobster names Capuano, that would saved the the illegal goods he would normally have to dispose of overboard when stopped by harbor custom agents.

The movie was actually shot in New York where an entire city block was reconstructed to resemble the 1920s since the film was shot in the 1980s. All the of scenery definitely looked like the era with all the vendors on the street and even small details like in the building everyone would share a bathroom and would have a bathtub in there living room. Some of the shots were also filmed in nearby New Jersey and Florida but also out of the country in Montreal, Quebec and even the Grand Central Station scene in Paris.