At the end of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America (1984), Max (James Woods) appears finally to be dead. Max, alias Secretary Bailey, Secretary of Commerce, has been killed on the eve of testifying before a Congressional Investigating Committee, late in 1968. Others due to testify have died in suspicious circumstances. Max has told Noodles (Robert de Niro), minutes before his disappearance, that he (Max) is “a dead man.” There is little doubt, it would seem, that he is dead, ingested by a refuse wagon. But he appeared to die once before in the spring of 1933, when Max, the bootlegger and labour fixer, was shot down and burned on his last liquor run before the end of Prohibition. Indeed, a full sized confectionary coffin to Prohibition is seen in the sequence, set in Moe's bar, just prior to his death – one coffin going, apparently, before another. If Max has died once, and lived … perhaps he can do it twice.