Le nouveau boss de la mafia

Telly Savalas and the senior Antonio Sabato are the only folks we Americans might know from this continental cast of Crime Boss. Savalas is in the title role and Sabato is a contract killer looking to make his bones.

About the only thing this film has going for it are the location shooting in Rome, Milan, Palermo, and Hamburg. The whole thing though is unbearably dull and lacks any kind of pace.

Skip this one folks. Good thing Telly Savalas had Kojak in his near future.

Something about Antonio Sabato's lead vehicle always turn out to be dull. He a good action star, but films he stars in always turns out to be slow. Sabato joins Telly Savalas (who isn't dubbed) organization and havoc happens with predicatable ending. Savalas is always fun to watch. Good director and production people worked on this, but the film runs slow. I kind of wished Henry Silva popped up or even John saxon. Not recommended.

Strangely, this Alberto De Martino film starts with Antonio Sabato riding a motorbike while the credits run, exactly like De Martino's The Man with the Icy Eyes. This time though Antonio is on the other side of the law. He's a low level mafia foot soldier whose family name has been sullied by his Mafioso father double crossing someone and being killed for his troubles.

Antonio's out to make a name for himself so he heads for Milan and guns down a turncoat mafia Capo who was also responsible for his father's death. With the help of his brother, he heists some heroin from two soldiers working for Milan-based Mafia Don Telly Savalas, and Savalas is impressed enough to take him under his wing. It also helps that Savalas has a hot niece whom Antonio gets the hots for, but is Antonio playing it off legit or is he working the long con?

This film does have some action sequences but doesn't quite hit the mark mainly due (once again) to Antonio Sabato's lack of emotion and Alberto De Martino's laid back approach to story-telling. There's a lot of characters introduced throughout the story which leads to an awful lot of dialogue, meetings (who doesn't love a meeting in an action film!) and talk of loyalty, when instead we should have things exploding, car chases, and shouting.

I'll give the film credit for having someone turned into bars of soap years ahead of Fight Club, however. I'm not saying this is a particularly bad film, mind you, but it's lacking the frantic action of other films of this type. Maybe De Martino was aiming for a more serious take on the subject, but for a genre that generally has few clunkers, this is just so-so.

As if there weren't enough of those floating around at the time already, we have here another lame GODFATHER clone from the director of IL CONSIGLIORI (1973) which I had watched earlier this year. The marquee-value name roped in this time is Telly Savalas who belatedly enters the proceedings and is first seen from behind, rather campily tending to his flowers and wearing a beret in the style of French painters! Apart from not looking minimally Sicilian, he sports no accent of any kind other than his familiar drawl. Antonio Sabato, then, makes for an unlikely gangster - apart from being a resistible leading man; his relationship with Savalas, which becomes paternal at the flick of an eye, is also unconvincing (especially since he subsequently becomes romantically involved with the latter's spirited teenage niece)! Besides, for a gangster flick, there's precious little action to speak of and none of it is in any way memorable (though the finale set in a clinic is well enough handled); furthermore, the score by Francesco De Masi is serviceable but nothing else. Incidentally, the bargain-basement DVD I rented starts off midway through the credits so that none of the cast members - or even the film's title - is ever listed!

Kojak meets the mafia. Telly Savales is one of those guys from the past that seems pretty forgettable. I never thought that his show was all that great. This is his one dimensional characterization of a crime boss, with very predictable results. If you take the car chases and the general rambling out, there isn't much plot development or action. I find mafia movies to be dull because I have no respect or interest in common criminals and their actions. Hollywood, and in this case, the Italian cinema, treat these guys as heroes. I saw the film and in a few days I won't remember much about it. Lots of shooting, innocent bystanders dying, betrayal, and that sick loyalty. The film is photographed pretty well and the acting is decent. But the dubbing is so bad (due to voices that just couldn't come out of those bodies), that I almost started looking for Godzilla approaching the bay.