Once Upon a Time in America, one of the classic gangster films , is still imprinted in the minds of the audience. Being a long running time film, each scene brings different themes of childhood friendship, lust, love, greed, deception, destruction, and shattered relationships in sync rise of American mobsters.
Apart from the details, it is full of ambiguity. What impressed the audience the most maybe the film’s open ending, the scene where the garbage truck rolls away the elderly Max. It’s reported that director Sergio Leone set it up to be ambiguous deliberately.
Did Max throw himself in the garbage truck to commit suicide or not? Did he jump in voluntarily or was he forced to? And what does it mean to get dissappeared?
The director did not want to give a clear answer to these questions, but left an open ending. It’s not even certain that the person who appeared next to the garbage truck was Max.
The most common explanation for this scene is that Max committed suicide by jumping into the garbage truck by himself, but this does not hold water, because before Max disappeared he had a forward motion, which is quite obvious that Max was intended to walk towards Noodles, and probably he still had something to say to his old fellow Noodles.
There is another explanation for this ending, which is that Max/Mr. Bailey was assassinated.
There is a scene about garbage truck: elderly Noodles returned to his hometown, where he visited the gravestones of his three brothers, he found a car following him. He took down the license plate number and tracked it all the way to the entrance of a giant mansion, in front of which the garbage truck number 35 was working. As he wondered, the car that was following him drove out of the mansion and didn’t get very far before it exploded. Afterwards, from the news Noodles learned the car belonged to the Mr Bailey, who survived that time for not being in the car but the prosecutor in charge of investigating Bailey.
About the mysterious ending related to the garbage truck, another explanation also sounds reasonable. That is it might be Max’s joke, just like how they played tricks in the water at their young age.
No matter how many different explanations the audience may have, the open ending of Once Upon a Time in America is so intriguing that each time the audience would gain a new understanding when they review it. Even the director Sergio Leone intended to leave that scene open to the audience’s imagination. And that is what made the film Once Upon a Time in America a Classic worth repeated viewings.
