Mobster Movie  / Black and white

You have to love a film that starts with the moral message that the film is trying to convey instead of using the movie to tell the story and let the audience infer their intent. No, these guys straight up called out the government and the police for letting the mob run wild with little to no law enforcement.  I guess knowing it’s a morality tale helps defray some of the excessive (yet bloodless) violence in the movie.

Basically the movie starts with a mob boss getting whacked by a mysterious whistling hit man causing a power vacuum that coincidentally is filled by mob boss Lovo and his lieutenant Tony. Lovo is a calculating and careful boss who wants to expand in south Chicago only – due to the north being controlled by a pretty powerful mob boss O’hara. Tony, however, is a lunatic who embraces all the lovely Italian immigrant stereotypes and refuses to listen to his boss and starts causing trouble in the north side. Eventually he starts taking over the territory and has O’hara gunned down in his flower shop.. But they didn’t finish the job so they had to storm a hospital to execute him in cold blood (how’s that for a morality tale)

The new boss of the north side tries to gun down Tony while he’s having dinner with Poppy (the boss’ girl!) using newly imported tommy guns but he manages to escape (grabbing a machine gun in the process) and then uses the machine gun to go on a full scale murder rampage (seriously – it’s a murder montage.. Murtage?) in retribution killing most of O’hara’s crew except Gaffney (Boris Karloff in a starring role!)

Tony’s now a rising star. O’hara’s second in command is in hiding and all of sudden Lovo’s girl Poppy starts to respond to Tony’s flirting and invitations to come see his new place.  Bad news for Lovo (still technically the boss). One night in a dance club they’re both sitting a table with Poppy and she pulls out a cigarette.. And Tony and Lovo both offer her a light.. Who will she choose?! You guessed it – Tony. Lovo does NOT look pleased.

Coincidentally that night there’s an assassination attempt on Tony and he believes it was Lovo who hired guns from out of town to do it – he has someone call Lovo’s office while he’s there saying the hit went down and Lovo tried to play it off as wrong number. Well Tony knew then it was Fredo all alo.. I mean Lovo all along. He took care of business (as in he machine gunned Lovo too) and now was the big boss of Chicago.

This is a good spot to talk about Cesca, Tony’s sister. She’s a rebellious 18 year old girl who wants to get involved in the ‘scene’ and refuses to take no for an answer even though Tony is a controlling psychopath who refuses to see her as anything other than a child which only makes her more determined to prove she’s old enough to hang. We also introduce Tony’s right hand man Guino always seen flipping a coin and is fiercely loyal to Tony and operates as his fixer – taking care of problems.. Permanently.

Some of you can see where THIS is going.. Cesca keeps pursuing Guino and he’s just a man and eventually  unwisely gives into the very persistent Cesca. Where’s Tony during all this? Hiding in Florida waiting for the heat from his murder spree to die down.  Tony comes back and hears the Cesca is shacking up ‘with some man’ and goes into a rage and murders his best friend! Cesca is inconsolable and tells Tony they had just gotten married and were planning to surprise him.

A public execution of someone is all the police needed to issue a warrant for his arrest and Tony barricades himself in his mansion filled with machine guns (straight line to the Pacino Scarface ending scene!) and has an extended shootout with the police (with Cesca who at first was going to shoot him in a rage then obviously had a psychotic break and is willing to go all in on the mob life) he’s holding out pretty well until Cesca takes a bullet to the gut and dies. With the house filling up with tear gas, Tony realizes the game is up and tries to escape but then it shot down in a hail of bullets (again, just like Pacino) and dies in a literal gutter.

Morality tale complete – literally EVERYONE who did a crime in the movie ended up dead. People who were involved with the mob died.. Pretty much used a large hammer to beat the message into the audience.

4/5

I really enjoyed this movie – it was dripping in old school mob speak (that Chicago/mob accent that you hear a lot in mobster movies of the time) and even with the heavy handed morality it really was a classic example of a mobster movie (even if a few scenes were pulled from life like the St. Valentine’s day massacre)  and had some great over the top performances and you can really see how Pacino’s Scarface is the spiritual successor to this version of Scarface.