Robert De Niro

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Film and Plot Synopsis Small-time hood David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson and his lifelong partners in crime; Max, Cockeye and Patsy and their friends grow up in the rough Jewish neighborhood of New York’s Lower East Side. Once Upon a Time in America follows them from the 1920s to the last years of Prohibition in the early 1930s, and then to the late 1960s where an elderly Noodles returns to New York after many years in hiding. Buy the Film *As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ Movie Summary The summary below contains spoilers. We open the film with three thugs hunting 1932 New York’s Lower East Side Jewish sector for a marked man in a Chinese wayang theater. Before they could find him, the Chinese owners warn the opium-addicted man, a 30-something gangster named “Noodles”, and help him escape, but not before his girlfriend is gunned down and his friend, Fat Moe, is brutally tortured for Noodles’ whereabouts. Noodles sneaks in and saves Fat Moe by killing one of the gangsters. Shortly after, he finds out his three childhood friends, Patsy, Cockeye, and the char-broiled Max, were all killed in an ill-fated bank …