7. Once Upon A Time In America
Warner BrothersSergio Leone's epic gangster film Once Upon a Time in America will probably never been seen exactly the way he would have wanted. His original edit of the film was an astounding 269 minutes, too long to realistically be released commercially. The director then painstaking cut out 40 minutes for the film's European release, which was enough to make the film an undisputed masterpiece. The only problem? The American cut of the film was a paltry two hours long, less than half the length that Leone had originally intended. This not only rendered his sweeping crime drama virtually unintelligible, but also restructured the film so that the scenes were laid out in chronological order. Any amateur can tell you that with a carefully constructed film like this, making those kind of changes was going to totally disrupt the narrative flow and make the emotional content next to meaningless. Leone was heartbroken by the state of the American version, and never made another film. But the extended director's cut that we have now, clocking in at 251 minutes, stands as one of his greatest cinematic achievements.