Once Upon A Time in America

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Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in America, which is an epic poem of violence and greed, is also a drama about the rise and fall of Jewish-American gangsters in New York at the beginning of the century through the 1960’s. The movie tells the story of five decades in the lives of four gangsters from New York City - childhood friends who are merciless criminals almost from the first, but who have a special bond of loyalty to each other. When one of them breaks that bond, or thinks he does, he is haunted by guilt until late in his life, when he discovers that he was not the betrayer but the betrayed. It's an astounding tale of friendship through a lifestyle of crime, betrayal, lust, and greed that spans over half a century. The plot of this movie fits in well with all the three major theoretical perspectives in Sociology: the Conflict Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, and Functional Analysis.

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One can find a lot of examples of the conflict theory throughout this movie. It is a story most of us have heard many times. The boys grow up, make their own gang, fight their enemies, chase their lovers, and eventually wind up in betrayal. But the story is not told from all their points of view. The tale is told through the eyes of David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro). Much of the story deals with his friends, Maxamilian (James Woods) and Philip "Cockeye" Stein (William Forsythe), and his childhood love interest, Carol (Tuesday Weld). Betrayal and friendship is the ...

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