Lucky Luciano

Francesco Rosi's film is a very fine and unglamorous treatment of the most famous mafioso of the 20th Century. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style, with un-enhanced sound recorded directly in real-life settings, we constantly have the feeling that we are watching real characters and not actors, even if one of the greats, Gian Maria Volontè, plays Luciano. And apparently many of the cast are indeed non-actors, and a few are even playing themselves. The movie is genuinely refreshing in that it does not romanticize or glorify or gloss over Luciano or the gangster's life. Early on it shows extremely violent scenes that condense a tremendous amount of background story into just what we need to know about Luciano's rise to preeminence in the underworld. And it's a great hook to start the film when the gangster's famous American life is ending. It's definitely a film for thoughtful adults, no cartoonish tidbits that would appeal to adolescents.

A sort of biography of Lucky Luciano the Italian mobster who was deported to Italy by USA's government after years in the jail, directed by the fine Francesco Rosi, the movie starts in this point when Lucky Luciano (Gian Maria Volonté) has been headed toward to Sicily at Italy by boat, mixed with few flashbacks concerning his violence background, he established at Sicily his homeland and Naples, where he manages all drug smuggling targeted to Europe and America, at its time post war the whole Italy was occupied by USA's Army and all major positions were chosen by American authorities, suggesting some agreement with local corrupts practices, upon this establishment the smooth Luciano feels free to work hidden over the shadows and becoming untouchable, however the unrelenting traffic ongoing peeves the American justice, sending to Italy an inspector to catch Lucky Luciano, the casting is the highlight of the slow paced picture, Gian Maria Volonté simply is great as Lucky, the almost unknowable Edmund O'Brien as Commissioner Anslinger also Rod Steiger as akind cheap mobster and Vincent Gardenia as the corrupt Colonel Charles Poletti, but don't expect too much, has many striking flaws strangely allowed by Rosi as portraits a modern New York as if it was on 1946, I'm trying wondering how it should happened over so magnificent director!!!

Resume:

First watch: 2020 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7

This movie is boring. Plain boring, nothing else. And I've a great tolerance of movies that most people find boring.

I still wonder what I just watched. Is it a documentary? Most gangster films are pretty slow, but this one is more than that. All action happens in 15 minutes, then...nothing. It's like there was no editor, or that the material was shot for some kind of documentary.

Gian Maria Volontè plays his role very good. Rod Steiger is nice, but doesn't get enough time to be as great as he usually is. The rest of the cast is OK, not a problem here. Gangsters look like gangsters, cops look like cops and the dames are plenty.

For some seven years now I have been collecting gangster films, read books about the subject and even collected news articles about the mafia and such. Most of what I saw in this film is not new for me. Luciano was famous and is nothing short of legend these days. When he moved out of the US, he kind of got into the darkness. When this film dragged on, I saw some potential stories come by, but all just passed and went on. So nothing happened until the end where that thing happened that everyone that ever read a book about the mafia knows that happened.

The soundtrack doesn't help. Piero Piccioni can't even live up to his usual 'clone morricone' music and seems only to have written about 7 minutes of music.

The DVD I got was a UK version without any subtitle. I can watch English spoken films without much trouble, but half of this is in Italian, so beware! At first I feared this would have been a action movie disguised as a gangster film, but even that wasn't true. It is slow and all that. Of course, I never thought I was going to watch a true classic, but I almost felt asleep. Still, I cannot give it less than a 4. Gian Maria Volontè and Rod Steiger together in a film, and the sets were good enough. The production itself felt okay. So maybe they should have fired the writer and maybe the editor.

It could have been so much more!

In this country, Lucky Luciano is one of those 20s legends who have so often been glamorized in movies; we tend to be fascinated by such characters, and although films tend to either explicitly condemn them or show them coming to bad ends, they are among the most infallibly popular Hollywood staples. We also would concentrate on Luciano's years in America, which could be a familiar plot of the rise and fall of a gang boss. But Rosi's film begins with him leaving this country; it relates the long career that he had in Italy, in the drug trade, a time that Americans know little of -- it doesn't form part of the legend. Most of all, Rosi deliberately downplays the glamor. The drug trade is big business, and this middle-aged Luciano is a very solid businessman; the director (and the actor) have undercut the expected charisma. The efforts of police and government against him are portrayed as "factually" as possible (which makes aspects of their discussions rather unintelligible to Americans). Of course, all these things will make the movie seem rather boring to many viewers here! If you're looking for gangster thrills, go elsewhere; this is a movie of ideas, a critique directed at Italy in particular.

This biography of notorious American racketeer Charles "Lucky" Luciano would have probably worked better if they had made it into a TV mini-series which traced his entire life from his poverty-stricken childhood in Sicily to his rise to power in New York's gangster underworld to his extradition to Italy in 1946 and, finally, his death from a heart attack in 1962. As a 2-hour movie covering the events of his life in Italy after his extradition, it just doesn't work. There's not enough action (eg. shootouts and fistfights) to make it worth watching. Plus, it moves slowly and it's very talky. The English dubbing of the French and Italian actors is great, but not enough to sustain your interest.

Rent "The Godfather" movies instead.

Rating: *1/2