Inside the Mafia

A bunch of non-Italian actors culturally appropriate my heritage.

The film opens with the Blues Brothers pumping four bullets into mob boss Ted de Corsia, but he manages to survive, at least for a few reels. His lieutenant, Cameron Mitchell, decides to get even with the big boss. What follows is non-stop lack of action as Mitchell and Robert Strauss take over a house at an airport, hold everyone hostage, and wait for a plane carrying the head man from Italy. This sequence is just a ripoff of "Suddenly," which at least featured a real Italian guy.

The supporting cast includes Ed Platt as another mob boss, and James Brown (not the Godfather of Soul) as one of the most useless cops in film history. Frank Gerstle plays a hitman - but at least his suit fits for a change. Louis Jean Heydt runs the airport. The characters have names like Chins, Augie, and Julie (yes, that's a guy).

The climactic shootout at the mob meeting is something you'd expect from "The Naked Gun." The narrator then tells us this may be the end of organized crime. Yeah, right. Apparently he never heard of cable companies.

There is a black and white feel to this film, and a McCarthy era style of American idealism in the fight against the mob.

That is lost today thanks to movies supported by the mob to make people think mobsters are demi gods, movies like the Godfather. And anyone who denies that is either a liar or a moron. The Godfather movies, the Scarface with Pacino, the Good fellow movies, all are backed by mobsters to let people know they are a superior species.

And it worked. The mob reigns supreme due to their mental hold over the ignorant masses.

Come back to the fifties, before Hollywood completely sold out, before Hollywood was totally run by the mob, and we get an actually more credible look at mobsters.

What this film gives us that the later films don't is "credible characters in incredible situations." Like many other fifties era mob movies (Suddenly comes to mind), it revolves around innocent Americans threatened by a trio of hoodlums. And here the trio is almost as super human as modern mobster movies. One is a super tough that man handles even the tall policeman who has the drop on him.

The reactions and emotions of the characters are what make this a better film than what one gets today. The "Lucky Luciano" figure is pretty obvious, and tricks the hoodlums who think they are upwardly mobile in a very believable way. We see it coming, but we also see how the trio of hoodlums led by Cameron Mitchell (who does a remarkable job in this role, tops anything Brando, DeNiro, or Pacino did later in mob roles), we can see how they are fooled into their actions.

There are reviews of this film that make no sense, because they are either made by insiders who think they are part of the mob family and want the mythology of demi god standards to sell to the public, or they are complete morons, bubble boys who have lived in cubicles instead of on the streets on in Nature.

At the same time, this film has a fault in trying to label the events as being totally accurate. They are dramatized as far as the "end of the mob" goes, but that's about the only fault. The rest is very well told, certainly more real than the stories written by mobsters for idiots who believe mobsters.

Mafia gunmen sent by their boss to kill a rival gang leader take over a small airfield where their target is scheduled to land. While waiting for the man they're going to kill, they terrorize the employees of the airfield, one of whom starts to devise a plan to turn the tables on their captors.

Appalachin or Apple Lake? Clearly the latter is inspired by the former. But that is largely where the similarities end. Heck, it seems like not even all the guys in the film are supposed to be Italian. But, I guess that is a safe move.

How much was known about the Mafia in 1959? Today (2015) we are still learning more, but in 1959 it was quite fresh, with the FBI only just beginning to look into the men involved. In a way, this film is ahead of its time, whether strictly accurate or not.

Here's another one of the 25 or so films director Edward L. Cahn churned out in a three-year period for the same production company (which went under a few names), some of which are surprisingly good and most of which are at least admirable for the creative ways they get around their VERY low budgets. Cameron Mitchell starred in 3 of these (see review of PIER 5, HAVANA). Here we are in the gangland genre. These are the kind of gangsters who wear dark suits, dark hats, dark sunglasses, and chain smoke...just in case you forget who the gangsters are. The syndicate seems to have broken down into some competing factions, one led by Ed Platt of "Get Smart" fame, the other led by Cameron Mitchell. The main boss over all the units, who has been in exile in Italy, is coming back to the USA to a small airstrip in upstate New York, and the competing groups heat up the competition prior to his arrival. I won't give away any more of the plot. Like most low-budget films, this features a lot of talk, which builds up the tension, as does the tough-guy acting from the principals. The film also uses that low-budget staple--the rewrite of PETRIFIED FOREST, where a group of criminals hold some regular citizens hostage. It's cheap to film, is in one setting, and constantly refers to outside events that don't have to be filmed. As always, director Edward L. Cahn is a master of b-movie pacing, and writer Orville Hampton wrote a number of fifties b-movie classics, TV shows from Perry Mason to Scooby-Doo, and some of this group of Cahn-directed films. And of course Cameron Mitchell is convincingly tough as the gang leader--if you need any convincing of Mitchell's subtlety as an actor, watch the way his character keeps changing in small increments in the last twenty minutes of the film after gangland leader Johnny Lucero arrives back from Italy. If you like 1950s gangland b-movies and like cheap rewrites of Petrified Forest, or if you are a Cameron Mitchell fan who needs to see everything the master appeared in, you'll want to catch this film. People raised on the elegant, operatic gangsters of Coppola and Scorsese might find a film like this primitive and laughable (it's their loss!).

The term "ripped from the headlines" is always used when a film on the big or small screen has a plot taken from real life. In the case of Inside The Mafia the recent underworld stories of the exile of Lucky Luciano, the murder of Albert Anastasia, and the gangland convention at Appalachia are all elements in the plot of this film.

Ted DeCorsia is hit in a hotel barbershop Anastasia style, but he doesn't die right away. After the hospital stay he's moved to a secluded place and sends for his number 2 guy Cameron Mitchell. DeCorsia was trying a syndicate power play that obviously fell short. But he's not out of moves. The boss of bosses who is in exile is secretly flying in to a convention held in a secluded rural spot of Upstate New York at Edward Platt's estate. Mitchell decides to make a hit as Grant Richards arrives at the small county airport.

To do that involves taking Jean Louis Heydt the manager of the airport and his daughters Elaine Edwards and Carol Nugent hostage. Getting swept up in it is State Trooper James Brown and Nugent's boyfriend Michael Monroe. So they wait for the plane with Richards to arrive.

Film buffs will no doubt recognize the plot from Suddenly has been reworked from a presidential assassination to a gangland hit. Still Inside The Mafia is fine no frills thriller from United Artists and holds up well today.

Though a knowledge of gangland history helps one get the fine points of the story.