41 ARTS Page 8 Friday, June 15, 1984 The Michigan Daily r Noodles (Robert DeNiro, insert) and Max (James Woods) are two men who spend their lives striving to become, and striving to remain, part of the mob in Sergio Leone's disappointing new film, 'Once Upon A Time In America.' ANN 1AB JIDIIDUALHEATRES S tlbry701-70 DAILY 100 P.M. SHOW $2.00 1 WEEK RETURN ENGAGEMENT! "A SPECTACULAR FUSION OF IMAGE AND SOUND" -Newsday "RICH IN IDEAS AND OVER- POWERING BEAUTY" -Gene isket FRI. 1:00, 7:05, 9:05 SAT., SUN. 1:05, 3:05, 5:05, 7:05, 9:05 "A PURE DELIGHT" . -The Detroit News "THE FUNNIEST FRENCH FILM SINCE 'LA CAGE AUX FOLLES' AND A LOT BROADER IN ITS APPEAL" -Newhouse Newspapers PIERRE GERARD RKHARD DEPARDIEU A film by FRANCIS VEBER (PG) FRI. 100, 7:20, 9:20 SAT., SUN. 120, 3:20, 5:20, 7:20, 9:20 'Godfather III' tells tired tale Murphy plays hot guitar By Charles Thomson L AST WEEK at the Blind Pig was Robert Cray, a Chicago-blues per- former, who claimed that he had once done something for John Belushi, though no one-perhaps even including Cray-seemed to know exactly what. This week's contestant in the "I- Knew-Belushi-When" contest is Matt "Guitar" Murphy, a blues guitarist whose relationship to the Great Dead Samurai was considerably less at- tenuated (he was in The Blues Brothers band) although touted just as highly. But as with Cray, Murphy's talent and skill are such that the advertising really isn't necessary. Murphy's band's performance Monday night at Rick's was impressive and more than suf- ficient to stand on its own merits. Straying somewhat from traditional blues, Murphy and his newly formed band wandered into several Ben- sonesque jazz tunes. The two styles worked surprisingly well together and Murphy's band never wavered from a clean, tight performance. Except for a muddy sound mix, the five-man band sounded as though it were one person. Murphy's manner is pleasantly unassuming. Perhaps, because of the years spent playing in other people's bands, Murphy hasn't quite learned the outrageous stage mannerisms that cause heads to turn. Instead, Murphy starts out blending his sound into that of the band's and then inexorably causes your at- tention to shift until you real- ize that he's playing a miraculous solo. Just as the band was concluding "Born under a Bad Sign," Murphy stepped in and grabbed the spotlight with a blistering reworking of the tune's themes. For five minutes he cooked that melody over until, by some genius, it was transformed into a segue into the next song, "Gimme Some Lovin." Around the horn, Bob Laramie on bass played with skill and persuasion; Rick Marshall on drums was timely and efficient; Josh Schneider on sax played with tremendous abandon; and Shelton Lester made the synthesizer sizzle; and vocalist Dave Hughes sang with weak but insistant clarity. As the band came back on stage for their encore, Murphy answered a fan's continual request with, "No, we're not going to play 'Sweet Home Chicago,'" and then stormed into a white-hot ren- dition of that song that brought even the pool players out onto the dance floor. 0 By Byron L. Bull N O ONE COULD reasonably expect Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America to survive the truncating given by its distributor. With over an hour and twenty minutes gutted from it, and its whole narrative structure rearranged in a more simplistic order, it could only be a ghost of its original conception. Still, if there'd been any spark of brillance to begin with, one would expect isolated, tantalizing fragments to shine through from the rubble. Unfortunately, there's nothing here to offer even that frugal gratification. Leone's expensive ($28 million), panoramic epic is no more than a shod- dy, convention-burdened gangster melodrama. The bulk of Leone's early work, the spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly or A Fist- ful of Dollars, were myth-aspiring homages to Hollywood classics, with an appealing off beat slant. But here with a big budget and an American cast, he's fabricated a pretentious, uninspired rehash of genre cliches - a Spaghetti Godfather. This self-proclaimed fable of the American dream perverted is over- flowing with tired archetypes and stereotypes. Characters with names like Sharkey and Cockeye, trudge around dark alleys in their heavy over- coats, muttering monosyllables in drowned grumbles. There are numerous executions, big jobs, and bits of bordello debauchery, all done with a stilted familiarity. This is not a reinter- pretation as much as a derivative remake. At the center of Leone's tale are two characters, Noodles (Robert DeNiro) and Max (James Woods), boyhood friends whom we watch grow from small time thievery in New York's Jewish ghettos in the early 1900s, into bootlegging and smuggling in the thir- ties. As the stakes grow higher, and the risk more significant, the aspirations of the two diverge, and the bond between them disintigrates into betrayal. Both DeNiro and Woods do nothing more than put their characters through the old paces. As Max, Woods is cold, brutally calculating, and devoid of any humanity. DeNiro's Noodles is slightly more interesting, with a submerged, unsatisfied yearning for warmth and love, but even he is never explored to any satisfactory extent. Admittedly, much may have been lost in the heavy reediting, but even in the remaining in- dividual scenes, the two actors repeatedly fall back on the same super- fical gesturing that one would see in any mafioso potboiler. Leone's style reeks of heavy handed- ness. The childhood scenes are warmly lit, and played for nostalgic excess. The adulthood years all take place in moody darkly lit surroundings, with a distan- ced, impassive tone. Everything is photographed low, with a wide angle to emphasize the period architecture. And See SPAGHETTI, Page 10 0I 0