Once Upon a Time in America

A closer look at the story

David "Noodles" Aaronson and his closest friends grow up together in 1920s New York, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. In the Prohibition era of the 1930s these tight-knit friends storm through the gangster world, but in time their paths divide. More than thirty years later, at the end of the 1960s, an ageing Noodles returns to his old neighbourhood. What awaits him there are the ghosts of his former life, his regrets and accounts that were never settled. Figures from his past such as Max and Deborah lie at the heart of this reckoning. Directed by Sergio Leone, the 1984 film stars Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern and Joe Pesci in an epic crime drama spanning decades.