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The “Once Upon a Time Trilogy” is a loose thematic grouping of films by Sergio Leone, consisting of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Duck, You Sucker! (1971), and Once Upon a Time in America (1984). While not connected through a continuous narrative, the films are united by Leone’s expansive approach to storytelling, blending operatic violence, mythic character archetypes, and a meditation on the passing of eras, particularly the transition from mythic frontiers to modern industrial and urban worlds.
As the railroad builders advance unstoppably through the Arizona desert on their way to the sea, Jill arrives in the small town of Flagstone with the intention of starting a new life.
At the beginning of the 1913 Mexican Revolution, greedy bandit Juan Miranda and idealist John H. Mallory, an Irish Republican Army explosives expert on the lam from the British, fall in with a band of revolutionaries plotting to strike a national bank. When it turns out that the government has been using the bank as a hiding place for illegally detained political prisoners -- who are freed by the blast -- Miranda becomes a revolutionary hero against his will.
A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.