Scene Slash Video

Once Upon A Time In America swoons in the heady sorrow of nostalgia, every frame aflame with Autumn’s burnished keening, every moment an elegy for the dimming of the day, heaving with the dread sense that  all this must pass, is passing, has already passed, even as the heart holds hopelessly on to the memory of what could be.

Arguably, its most resonant, crystalline scene marks a rare moment of defiance against the passage of time, a Phyrric victory over age’s indomitable armies. Ostensibly a tangential longueur, regarding a peripheral figure, it encapsulates in perfect miniature the film’s bittersweet concerns, and succeeds as a memorable vignette in its own right; a charming, fully-realised story within a story.

We follow, as Patsy – a cub member of the gang, teetering on the cusp of mere adolescence – seeks to lose his virginity, having learnt of a precocious local prostitute who will sell her body for the princely price of a cream cake. Dapper in his Sunday best, Patsy painstakingly chooses the richest, fullest confection from the baker’s lavish display, and waits anxiously on the stairwell outside her tenement apartment for the girl to appear, and his childhood to vanish. Having already caught tantalising sight of the girl’s naked body, her lush, creamy skin, Patsy’s famished gaze turns gradually in the lag of time to the lush, creamy folds of the cake, all trussed in its bodice of bow and ribbon. Unable to resist, he steals a taste; then another; then another; slowly surrendering himself to childish desire, until he has finally devoured the cake whole.

The camera savours the spectacle with an equally deliberate delectation, languidly relishing the moment in a single, lingering shot, Morricone’s wistful score swelling like a fond memory, as the boy – poised poignantly between innocence and experience – momentarily chooses to remain a child, the future held back like a baited breath, all the dubieties of adulthood staved off for a short time yet. Beneath the scene’s sweet icing, there is also possibly a taste of less palatable things to come - the incident providing, as it does, a benign insight into the apprentice gangster’s impatient lust for instant gratification that will ultimately lead Noodles to rape the love of his life – but all of that is in the future. For the time being, like Patsy, we may savour this sweet moment, and leave the worries ahead to themselves.

Walker is the bursting erection of cinema - an upright, tireless fuck of a man. The menacing metronomic intent here is haunting, forged from the elements a strangely ethereal, essential kind of threat. Walker is the disruptor, the restless ghost of his own afterlife. The series of formally askew cuts starts to work into the mind of the viewer, each anxious set-up evocative of a distracted mind, unable to properly order its crippling obsessions. As the fantastic trailer tells us, Walker is "an emotional and primitive man" and Boorman has infused this mesmeric scene the kind of perfect virile aggression that forces the rest of the film into pure focus. There's nothing absent in this scene, it tells us everything that we need to know about Walker: his determination, his inner-turmoil, his unreal passage through time and space, his cruel self-loathing, his absolute targeting of revenge, his warped understanding of being alive. And always, always the clipping click-clack, click-clack of the hard floor - the pounding, fractured beat of vengeance that has replaced his own lost heartthump. He is the ultimate objection. A man living fear.

Please Don't Kiss Me...

This scene was never supposed to exist. Panicked that a Rita Hayworth film without a musical number would sink at the box office, producer Harry Cohn ate $60,000 of his own money and ordered Orson Welles to shoot it. As it turns out, it’s impossible to imagine The Lady from Shanghai without it.The scene begins with the camera lingering over Hayworth’s body, as if it were a lover bearing down on her, uncomfortably forced to heed the title of the song. The allure of her vacant expression feeds an unconsummated tension. If ever the limitations of the cinema were apparent, it’s here. Somehow Welles, only Welles, makes this tormenting restriction of the medium a key element of the drama. Of course Arthur Bannister, crooked of body and mind, could never satisfy a woman like Elsa. He, too, hangs over her — looking, but not touching.

While quite beautiful, there’s also something deathly in Elsa’s delivery. She lays still, as if on a slab, disturbed only by the cigarette she brings to her lips. Her movements seem unnaturally premeditated, hinting at the fate—the unerring heartbeat of noir—which will befall her. Her delivery is the antithesis of Gilda’s ebullient “Put the Blame on Mame.” Here she seems to have withdrawn so far into herself that the revelation of her murderous greed later on comes as no real surprise. The slow, mournful song comes to an end with Elsa mouthing “away,” the lingering lover leaving her mouth unkissed. Elsa closes her eyes, turning away before the slow fade out, as Welles ends the scene with the same deathly imagery with which it began. It’s possibly the finest concession to an anxious studio ever made.