Once Upon A Time In America (DVD)

Although the film itself had good content it could have been structured in an easier to read format.
The film switched continuously from present day, to the past. Robert De Niro being a young lad, a young man and an old man in a short space of real time.
This made the film less watchable than if it had woven its way from youth to old age without informing us of the outcome and ten all that was left for the viewer was to see how this end result came about. As the audience I felt that this left me feeling cheated because the element of surprise, the 'boo factor' as A. Hitchcock used to say, was weakened substantially. The other person I watched it with felt similarly, they hated the jumping from era to era throughout. A little of this would have been acceptable but there was far too much of it.
A Good film the directors, in my opinion, had 'choked' by trying to tell it through this hard to follow structure. Many other 'gangster' genre films have been better put together than this one.
But, having said that, the acting
was superb and especially the performance of Robert de Niro who 'made' the film.
Once Upon a Time in America needs to be seen more than once, I believe, because the first 1/2 hour of watching this film the brain is just storing disjointed segments and then they start to unify into a semblance of a whole.
Worth watching and my friend said he got more out of it after several viewings than when he watched it fir the first time which he considered was a difficult viewing because of the 'time jumping'. I agree with him on this.
A good film but not in the same class as others like The Godfather etc.