The Valachi Papers

I give this a 7 stars because it was made the same year as Godfather I, so it didn't benefit from all the film-industry wisdom that followed that production. Rather, this is a character study of one mafioso, which is a separate issue from the operatic, all-systems-GO no-holds-barred approach Coppola was able to employ in The Godfather. it's a smaller film, and should be compared to, say, Mobsters (1991), which deals with the same period and some of the same characters as V.P. Charles Bronson's Valachi is adequate. He's a workaday, uneducated, down- home mob guy, and Bronson plays him as if he were Polish, with a job that he goes to every day, where everyone talks Italian. Because it is through his eyes that we see his world, some of the other characters become more vivid, e.g., Joseph Wiseman as Salvatore Maranzano. When I compare the casting of the incomparable Joseph Wiseman in this role as opposed to, say, Michael Gambon in the same role in Mobsters, or Anthony Quinn as an equally old-school rival in the same film, I wonder: None of these actors are Italian -American or even simply Italian; why do some of them work, and the others don't? Granted that Wiseman, Quinn and Gambon are all consummate professionals and true craftsmen as actors, if anyone mentions Salvatore Maranzano and the Castellammarese gang war of 1929, the face that will come to my mind is that of Joseph Wiseman. He and Charles Bronson make this film worth seeing.

Charles Bronson starts to break out of spaghetti westerns and good character roles and becomes a leading man around the time The Valachi Papers came out. It was a big milestone in his career, playing the most famous gangster stoolie of all.

It's not quite true that all Valachi's testimony managed to do was get a lot of high television ratings for some re-election hungry Senators. Not that they didn't get it and didn't appreciate the side benefits of those famous televised hearings, but eventually what came out of the Valachi hearings was the RICO law which has in fact put quite a dent into organized crime.

The Valachi Papers has Charles Bronson telling FBI man Gerald S. O'Loughlin about his life and times in organized crime with La Cosa Nostra from the days of the Marranzano-Masseria wars until the present which would have been 1962. He doesn't really tell anything new to them, basically he confirms what had been gangster legend about the circumstances of many a demise. But with some hard documentation now, new laws are created to meet the problem.

Bronson does his best with Valachi, but the story has him pretty one dimensional. It's far from The Godfather where you really get inside the characters of the fictional Corleone family. Bronson sure has no conscience about what he did and I'm sure the real Valachi didn't either. In fact the only reason he turns informer is that Vito Genovese already mistakenly has him down as one.

Fans of the gangster genre and Charles Bronson should give this one a look. Others should see The Godfather all three parts.

I truly think if this film had come out earlier it would today be thought of as a better film. After all, it's FAR better than its current rating of 6.8. That's because 1972 was the same year that "The Godfather" debuted and the utter greatness of "The Godfather" probably overwhelmed "The Valachi Papers"---as both touch on very similar subject matter. The main difference is that "The Godfather" was based fictionalized characters and had a true elegance about the film. "The Valachi Papers" in contrast was a much more straight forward story based on real mob figures--and it's a dandy film.

The film begins in the early 1960s. Mobster Joseph Valachi is in prison and multiple attempts are made on his life. It seems that someone in the organization has talked--and the mob of bosses, Genovese (Lino Ventura) believes it was Valachi. And, not surprisingly, a contract has been placed on Valachi's head. This has the unintended consequence of forcing Valachi to to authorities. Almost all the rest of the film consists Valachi giving his story to the government agent. What follows is a very long story about Valachi's earliest days in the mob (about 1930) up to the arrest that brought him to prison--and a bit beyond.

The story is helped a lot by the films's length--a little over two hours. You'd need at least this much to tell such a long and complicated story. It also helps that Charles Bronson is given some excellent support. Among the many wonderful actors, one really surprised me--Lino Ventura. I've seen him in many French films (mostly Pierre Melville productions) and have LOVED his acting--he plays a great mobster--cold and tough. I never realized that he spoke English so well--everything I've seen him in up until now has been in French. Here, he very credibly plays an Italian-American! The script also was quite good. While not quite as human and interesting as "The Godfather", it sure was good...very, very good.

There's almost nothing negative I could say about the film other than very minor things. Bronson was too old for this role. When the film began he was supposed to be 27--but looked about twice that. Also, a few times anachronistic elements somehow made their way in--such as cars that were from the wrong time period. But, as I said, this is all very minor.Aside from this, a top quality production that deserves more recognition. Gritty, exciting and fascinating as well.

By the way, although IMDb lists the movie as being rated PG, the version I saw was way too bloody and filled with nudity to have been rated PG. The lesbian scene along would have merited a rating of R. Perhaps this was a director's cut or perhaps it was not rated PG or perhaps there were just multiple versions.

(Minor Spoilers) Facing the death penalty for the murder of a fellow inmate Joe Saupp, whom he mistakenly thought was assigned to murder him, Mafia button man or soldier Joe Valachi, Charles Bronson, is now facing death from both the federal government and his boss Mafia Kingpin and fellow convict Vito Genovese, Lino Ventura, who put a $50,000.00, later $100,000.00, contract on his head.

Don Vito the boss of bosses of the five New York Mafia families has been suspicious of his friend and mob associate Joe Valachi for some time of rating him out and setting him up in a government sting on a narcotic rap and has decided to have Valachi who had nothing to do with it hit. The final straw for Joe Valachi was when Don Vito gave him the "kiss of death" after he had a friendly talk with him in his prison cell.

The movie "The Valachi Papers" is no where as good as movies about the Mafia like "The Godfather" or "Goodfellows" but has the distinction of being the very first Hollywood-made movie,as far as I know, to show the inner workings of the Mafia and it's secretive and shadow-like organization La Cosa Nosra; roughly meaning "our thing" in Italian.

In protective custody and being prepped for the upcoming 1963 Sen. McClellan/Kennedy hearings on Organized Crime we and federal agent Ryan, Gerald S.O'Loughlin, get the truth about the Mafia/Cosa Nostra straight from the horses mouth Joe Valachi himself. In a long flashback Valachi takes us through the turbulent 1930's 40's and 50's when the mob went from a group of petty and unimaginative crime bosses to the powerful and well oiled crime machine that it eventually became.

There are those who feel that Joe Valachi's claims of his being somehow involved with almost every major Mafia figurer over those 30 some years is a bit overdone and boastful on his part in order to give himself much more credit then he really deserves. The fact that his expert testimony didn't have a single Mafiso, from solider to mob boss, even indicted tends to confirm that. Still there's no denying that he was in fact the first made Mafia member to talk and expose what ever he knew about the crime syndicate that he was involved with. All that will always have his name, Joe Valachi, as a major force in exposing the Mafia to the unaware public despite his low standing, he never rose above a button man, in that crime organization.

Charles Bronson did a better then average job as the Mafia thug Joe Valachi with him acting more then using his fists and his real-life. Bronson's wife Jill Ireland was more or less window dressing playing Valachi's wife in the movie Maria the daughter of Joe's boss Gaetano Reina, Amedeo Nazzani. The person who really stole the acting honors had to be Joseph Wiseman playing the first Mafia Boss of Bosses hyped-up Sal Maranzno. Wiseman was so tuned, or wired, into his role that he looked and acted like he was doing a stand-up comedy routine aided by downing a bottle of uppers. There was also the rest of the legendary "murderers row" of the mob in the movie that included Albert Anastasia Lucky Luciano & Joe "The Boss" Masseria played by Fausto Tozzi Angelo Infanti and Alessandro Sperll.

Valachi a good soldier almost to the end broke from tradition and the Mafia code of "Morte" or silence. Thats when he saw that after all the hard work he did in dedicating his heart and soul to the Mafia he was given the short end of the stick by boss Vito Genovese for something he didn't do. It's then that Valachi spelled the end of the powerful mob organization that took the likes of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, incidentally a non-Italian, over thirty years to build. If Joe Valachi was only treated with more respect and understanding by the paranoid and homicidal Vito Genovese things may well have been different for all those represented in the movie.

P.S Joe Valachi did in the end get his wish from the Federal Government by outliving his boss and the person who put a price on his head, for $100,000.00, Vito Genovese by almost two years. Joe Valachi died in prison in 1971 at age 67 of natural causes.

This is an unfairly underrated crime film directed by Terence Young for whom it is also one of his best, a movie where he put all his "guts", if I may say. Charles Bronson and Lino Ventura, two heavies of the US and French cinema playing together, only missed Marcel Bozzuffi and Leo Gordon....yes, it is an accurate and detailed document about actual events, without excessive useless, gratuitous violence as we often saw in Italian polizziotescos of this period, the seventies. But it remains brutal, bloody in a factual violence, factual and not gratuitous. No clichés nor good guys vs evil ones scheme either. I am sure that many French Lino Ventura buffs don't know this film. Such a shame.