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BACK
ISSUES Kingfisher
Journal, Vol. 2, No
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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting, Autumn
2003, Volume Two, Number
Four
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Once Upon a Time in America . . .
Roger Ebert asks: "Is the film too long? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it takes real concentration to understand Leone's story construction, in which everything may or may not be an opium dream, a nightmare, a memory, or a flashback, and that we have to keep track of characters and relationships over fifty years. No, in the sense that the movie is compulsively and continuously watchable and that the audience did not stir or grow restless as the epic unfolded."
Here are some of the specific problems with the shortened version. 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 Prohibition is then repealed, on what feels like the next day but must be six years later.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. from Cinemania 1997, copyright Microsoft Corp.
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Salute
to Fishtown, Once upon a time in America, too, there was a small renaissance in the world of regional poetry and art. A series of abandoned fishermen's shacks were strung out along the north fork at the mouth of the Skagit River, not far from the art colony of La Conner. One by one they became available as cheap rentals. They drew their water from Buster and Margaret Lee's well, nearly a quarter of a mile away. No electricity at the cabins, they were dependent on wood fires for heat and kerosene lamps for light. In winter it rained nearly all the time and the nights were long, cold, and damp. The place was called Fishtown, and it is lost, gone forever. It has vanished into a past that has been swallowed by time, development, and progress. First its environs were threatened by logging. Then Fishtown was sold and private homes built along the dike. But for about ten years it existed in the marginalia of the Pacific Northwest history and ar. A grubby existence at best, those who braved it out there created some wonderful paintings and poems. I, for one, am grateful to them for what they accomplished. Why would anybody want to live in such miserable conditions? Ah, there is the enigma. It was in the time of the hippy counter-culture, and living in such a community was, in some ways, highly fashionable among intellectuals. And because it was nearly free and you could be an artist or poet (or both), and people would leave you alone to do your work and waste your time in whatever way you wished, so long as you didn't have to hold a job. A regular job, that is For art is hard work.. "Sing we for love and idleness/Naught else is worth the having," sang Ezra Pound, and he may have meant the words only symbolically. Getting drunk, getting stoned, making music, sleeping late, reading all night by the wan light of your lamp: these were the disorders of the day. Some of the days lasted for weeks, for months. They could even be stretched into years, for the most hardy. These included Charles Krafft, Robert Sund, Bo Miller, Paul Hansen, Arthur Jorgenson, and Steve Harold.
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