It took six screenwriters to produce the mammoth script – and it shows.
Leone's last film, the story of Jewish gangsters in Prohibition-era
New York, is long, chaotic and confusing, but is nevertheless held
together by the strong performances of De Niro and Woods. It suffers
from the tempting comparison with the Godfather films, and the absence
of the mythic grasp Leone displayed so masterfully in his westerns
underlines its failure to work as a Proustian parable of time and loss.
