FILM / Homoeroticism in "Once Upon a Time in America" / Anthony Perrotta
Image © Warner Bros.
The potentially gay undertones in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood have generated some discussion in the last couple of years. But what about the eighties gem that helped inspire its title?
A nearly decade-old blog post highlights the perceived "homoeroticism" in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. Dan Hassler-Forest begins the piece by taking issue with the film's "sick depiction" of its female characters. "In Leone's world," he writes, "the classic Madonna/whore complex that is typical of many Italian narratives seems to be going full throttle, its women characters neatly divided into two categories: total sluts and angelic virgins."
Robert De Niro's character, Noodles, commits sexual assault twice onscreen. One instance involves the love of his life, Deborah. Forest suggests rape is sometimes utilized in film to "distinguish crooks with a moral center from those who are true villains."
The writer adds, "Not so much in Leone's world."
Forest then proceeds to make the case that Max (played as an adult by James Woods) is gay. He first points to the rooftop scene where the boys take turns with the neighborhood floozie. While the boys may be inexperienced, sexually, Max can't get it up until taking a quick glance over at Noodles.
Max also spies on Noodles during his first kiss with Deborah, then interrupts them (perhaps out of jealousy) and uses bros before hoes to pull him away.
"Throughout the film," Forest writes, "Max is repeatedly shown in close-up leering lasciviously at his friend, and frequently making off-color comments about his sexuality."
Max asks Noodles after he gets out of prison, "You didn't turn pansy on me, did ya?"
"Max’s sexual attraction to Noodles is most obvious in the scene where Noodles rapes Tuesday Weld’s character, assaulting her from behind as Max watches them," Forest continues. "Their relationship and its complex twists and turns of animosity and betrayal clearly serve as the basic engine for the plot, while their various heterosexual affairs are all defined in terms of violence and/or objectification of women."
It’s also ironic that Max begins dating Tuesday Weld’s character, Carol, after Noodles rapes her. While trying to get Noodles to sabotage the upcoming Federal Reserve heist, Carol tells him Max isn’t interested in sex anymore (at least not with her) because all he can think about is the job.
But Max isn’t the only male character who seems infatuated with Noodles. Walter Film, which sells a wide range of movie memorabilia, states in a product description that the screenplay “makes clearer some things that are only slightly hinted at in the [finished] film, for example, that the character of Fat Moe (Larry Rap) is gay.”
Moe, who is also Deborah’s brother, waits on Noodles hand and foot, and acts rather subservient to his old friend when he shows up at the bar after a decades-long absence.
Once Upon a Time in America, Leone’s final film before his death in 1989, is based on the novel The Hoods by Herschel Goldberg, a gangster-turned-informant who wrote the source material under the pseudonym Harry Grey.
Leone once recalled his first meeting with the book’s author at a bar in Manhattan. “The barman was fat, but seemed benign and of uncertain sexual orientation… He was exactly in the mold of Fat Moe in ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’ And this place — relaxing and secretive at the same time — was maybe the model for the 1968 version of Fat Moe’s bar. The sequence where Noodles, after forty years’ absence, comes back to New York and calls Fat Moe from a telephone kiosk in front of the bar — that was exactly like how we met Harry Grey.”
So, assuming that both Max and Moe are gay, it’s only appropriate the feelings they have towards Noodles mirrors the unrequited love he feels for Deborah.
In his piece, Forest also refers to other Leone films with potentially gay undertones, including The Man with No Name trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West.
“Over and over again, we see strong, very macho men in these films who are somehow always more interested in each other than they seem to be in the gloriously beautiful women with whom they share the stage,” he writes. “A Fistful of Dollars revolves around the phallic rivalry between Clint Eastwood and Gian Maria Volonté (the latter has the bigger gun, but Eastwood’s quicker on the draw!).”
Forest adds, “For a Few Dollars More can be read as the tender courtship between Eastwood and Lee van Cleef; in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Eastwood himself becomes the object of sexual attraction that causes rivalry between Van Cleef and Eli Wallach; and in Once Upon a Time in the West, even the lustrous presence of Claudia Cardinale has no noticeable effect on the strangely ascetic Charles Bronson. Jason Robards’ Cheyenne character, who comes closest to at least noticing Cardinale’s curvaceous shape, ultimately still prefers to hang out with Bronson rather than linger for a roll in the hay with Jill McBain.”
Another minor but still noteworthy scene in Once Upon a Time in America involves Burt Young’s character, Joe, harping on male genitalia during a long and elaborate joke centered around “cock insurance.”
Now, I know what some are thinking; can’t men tell each other dick jokes without being over analyzed? Can’t men be best friends, or sworn enemies, without their sexual orientation coming into question? Even Forest ends his piece asking whether the film’s “fascination with homosocial/homosexual relationships is grounded in Italian culture, derives from the director’s weird perspective on gender, or both.”
There is one last example, though. When Noodles questions Deborah about Secretary Bailey’s true identity, she begs him not to attend the party on Long Island because it’ll ruin his “memories.” The mysterious businessman turned politician turns out to be Max, alive after all these years, and Deborah is his lover. The couple even has a son named David, which is also Noodles’ given name. Deborah asks Noodles to leave out the back door, to which he responds, “Are you afraid that I’ll turn into a pillar of salt?”
This is a direct reference to the Book of Genesis. “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.” Deborah and Noodles used to read the Bible together as teenagers, so quoting certain passages isn’t completely unwarranted. But why this one in particular?
Being a Bible passage, there’s countless interpretations that bear little interest. But it’s this exact passage that Gore Vidal uses in the opening lines of The City and the Pillar, which is perhaps the most famous gay novel of the post-World War II era.
The story follows Jim Willard, an aspiring tennis player who has a summer fling with his best friend, Bob Ford, during a camping trip towards the end of high school. Jim then spends the better part of a decade traveling the world with the Air Force and Merchant Marines, along with a stint teaching tennis to gay celebrities in Hollywood.
Jim then returns to his Virginia hometown and reconnects with Bob, who he has been thinking about ever since the camping trip. His friend is married, but that doesn’t stop Jim from making advances while the two are staying at a hotel in New York City. Bob ultimately resists the advances, which leads to a physical altercation. The original version, published in 1948, has Jim kill Bob as a result, where a revised edition, published in 1965, ends with Jim raping his friend.
Like Jim, Noodles spends his adolescence “away” (in prison) after murdering a police officer, and like Jim, he rapes the person he loves when they don’t accept his advances.
Is the takeaway of the film supposed to be that numerous people around Noodles are gay and therefore, by extension, he might be gay as well?
Possibly, but that’s not the point.
Like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, which subverts the prison film genre, Leone, as antiquated as some of his techniques may be, reimagines the gangster genre, the overly masculine figures that populate them, and the very concept of love, friendship, and betrayal in a work whose title includes “once upon a time.”
Anthony Perrotta is an aspiring novelist, screenwriter, and recovering film school graduate. His short fiction appears mostly on the literary blogs East of the Web and LitBreak. Originally from Long Island, he currently lives in Albany, New York with his girlfriend and works in local television.