Once Upon a Time in America

  Straight away on the opening of Once Upon a Time in America, the audience is shown nothing but a black screen and God Bless America playing in the background. This is ironic as the film is actually critisising America and it's corrupt system.

 The first character seen is a woman and instantly the audience see connotations of a classic Femme Fatal with the pearls (which are often assosiated with pureness and wealth. However, the mother of pearl is also assosiated with death), 1930's/40's hat and red nails and lips. Red lipstick is assosiated with glamour and is seen as a sensual colour to be worn. We then see her obvious beauty as she turns on a light. All the action is in the dark so far, a convention used in thrillers to connotate mystery and nightmare.

the camera pans to a high angle shot of the bed as if from Eve's point of view. The tension builds as the audience see her pull back and reveal the outline of a body, made with bullet holes. They are instantly put on edge because of the uncertainty of who is around,  This fear is then made real as the viewers hear a gun shot. The camera (a point of view shot, as if it were the woman) then turns around to reveal three men, all wearing long trench coats, typical of spies, or detectives.They instantly know they are villians as they have guns, it plays on our mind that perhaps these are the men who put the bullet holes in her bed. This is dramatic irony as the audience know that something is about to happen.

 They then interregate her of the whereabouts of a man, whom we can only assume to be her partner or husband. When she tells them she doesn't know, they appear to become angered and impatient with her. We see an over the shoulder shot from 

behind the woman as she is talking to the three detectives/police men. The men realise they are going to get no information from her and one pulls out a gun, shooting her in the chest- perhaps to prevent her telling anyone the conversation she had just had with them. The shot showing her dead uses rule of thirds with her lying across the bottom horizontal line and then men connotating the vertical lines. They are almost framed against the doorway. 

The action then seems to die down the audience enter an Opium den, this is where Noodles (the person the policemen interrogated Eve about) is hiding. The sequence in the Opium Den reflects the decadence of the era, the lifestyle of Noodles who is a flawed hero, whilst providing a link between the flashback and the action.The atmosphere is very chilled (I wonder why?!) which gives a refreshing break from the somewhat rushed and edgy tension of the action so far. We see Noodles lying down and the sound of a phone rings. This is both diagetic and non diagetic as it is in his head, so we hear it, although it is not directly within the mise-en-scene. The noise of the phone causes agitation. Noodles has a flashback, and the ringing is a sound bridge, which anticipates reaction. In his flashback, go to go a scene where three men are lying dead on a wet cobbled street, there is fire in the background giving a sense of hell to the shot.