Sergio Leone: "Leone's explicit employment of reflexive genre clichés in Once Upon a Time in the West, and again in his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, would seem to cast him as a trail-blazing post-modernist, but there is an important difference between Leone's referential system and the 'blank irony' that Frederic Jameson identified as being cental to a post-modern aesthetic. Leone has a profound emotional and intellectual investment in the cinematic mythologies he explores, however compromised and clichéd these mythologies may have become. Thus, as his films become increasingly self-conscious about the 'lost' classical American filmic tradition they are drawing on, they start to exhibit a meditative, melancholic quality that is completely absent from the energetic exuberance of the dollars trilogy. Adrian Martin admirably summed up this aspect of Leone's later work in his book on Once Upon a Time in America:

It was as if, for Leone, such disembodied 'quotations' – if they could be made to retain their mythic intensity and potency – might provide a kind of catharsis or ecstasy for modern-day cinephiles pining over their precious 'lost object'. That is why, finally, form can never be 'pure' in Leone's work: at stake in it is a psychic investment, a whole elaborate machine of selfhood, culture and longing… "